« first day (4151 days earlier)      last day (1110 days later) » 

Ben
Ben
01:00
Morning all
Yawp
Ben
Ben
How do
Had a load of homework dumped on my head, so wonderfully, thank you very much
Ben
Ben
...like, literally?
Cos that doesn't sound fun
Figuratively
Ben
Ben
01:04
Ok. Well that's still not fun, but not as bad
My classes run on weekly homework cycles, and two of them are aligned, so I get giant heaps of homework assigned on Wednesdays
Any amount of homework that would be very not-fun to have dumped on your head would be even more not-fun to have to do. Unless it involves research/reading in a specific book.
Ben
Ben
@bobble Blegh
I mean, in all honesty if given the opportunity, I would go back to school in a heartbeat... It's better than this thing we call "Work"
I spend money. You make it.
Ben
Ben
Ah but I make money because I need to spend it
01:45
@Ben Being in my 35th (approx., can't be bothered to actually reckon) year of school, I concur =D
Ben
Ben
The "aye's" have it, peeps and persons
02:00
@Ben I will have you know, people need to spend money while at school, especially university
Ben
Ben
02:28
Well, firstly by "School" I mean not Uni. Lol
Never did go, never will
03:14
5
Q: As an Artillerist Artificer, can I use my eldritch cannons while under an entanglement spell?

Dragonlord7466In Eberron: Rising from the Last War, the Artillerist subclass for the artificer gets a feature called Eldritch Cannon that you summon as a small or tiny object. If my character is under the effects of the entangle spell and my cannon is separate from me, can I still fire it?

03:27
Truths of Heart - Powered by Lesbians Bundle hosted by Darling Bat Games. A bundle of unofficial content for Thirsty Sword Lesbians. It includes 6 new playbooks for fans of TSL to enjoy along with 3 settings with adventures for even the most inexperienced GM to hop right into telling epic tales where swords cross and hearts race.
Sean Patrick Cain wrote a twitter thread postulating: "You are invited to introduce newcomers to the wide world of indie RPGs. You can select 10 games to play. What do you pick?"
Barkeep on the Borderlands by Prismatic Wasteland. A System-Neutral Pubcrawl Pointcrawl Adventure
Sherwood | Itchfunding on 2/15 by R. Rook Studio. A Tabletop Game of Outlaws.
AuldShaneGamer wrote a twitter thread "To all the people who say they don't need safety tools or session zero in #ttrpg spaces because they play with the same group and they "know" each other."
4
Q: Are outsiders stronger in their native planes?

Coffee On My FootThere is internal conflict in the upper planes and one of the lead instigators is a solar. We've killed it multiple times but it keeps coming back with reinforcements, the party plans to go to the upper planes to finish it once and for all. But the DM says that it'll be stronger in its native pla...

03:43
"Rethinking clerics and religion," part 1 and part 2 by Circas K on Sword of Mass Destruction
04:25
Thanks a lot! I like some of the ideas here, and I'm too lazy to enter the area of blogs that you frequent. Luckily, you're around to recommend a fifth of the top 10%; that's good enough for me. I want to incorporate maybe a fifth of the ideas here, mostly the ritual portions.
Currently fiddling with a Roman epithet-related god system - people near the sea worship Lord Octopus the Kraken, destroyer of ships and bringer of storms; and in that area, he mostly really acts as that. Elsewhere, people see him as Lord Octopus the Cunning, and he's the patron of the "Fisher's guild," who stick their tentacles in everything and run all sorts of things. Sometimes I'm disturbed by how many things I've found they control or... influence.
04:55
5
Q: What is the significance of the errata that removed the Artillerist artificer's Eldritch Cannon's immunity to conditions?

Thomas MarkovWhen Eberron: Rising from the Last War was published in November 2019, the version of the Artillerist artificer published in it originally contained this line (p. 59): It is immune to poison damage, psychic damage, and all conditions. However, the artificer class (including this subclass) was u...

05:45
6
Q: Is the necklace of fireballs underpriced in the Sane Magic Items pdf?

Dan BI gave my third-level party 900gp and told them they could buy start equipment from the Sane Magic Items pdf. One of my characters bought a two-bead Necklace of Fireballs and personally demolished two combats. (He rolled high in initiative and the monsters were grouped up.) I wasn't thrilled wi...

@HotRPGQuestions Gosh, I'm pretty sure even 3e mentioned the way consumables scale differently in short campaigns. (Also, 5e went back to the 3e model for Necklace of Fireballs? Hah! It was a gold-to-power nightmare back then too.)
06:10
6
Q: Do Spell Scrolls need to be identified first?

One EyeI'm a little confused by the rules. According to DMG p. 136, a character must use the spell identify or a short rest focusing on the item in order to discover its properties. Then on DMG p. 200, it says that if the spell on the scroll is on the reader's class spell list, they can read it. So my q...

06:39
@BESW fun things, doll clothes! Thanks. It was very cheering (long day, hate everything, wish the project im working on would freaking be done already. Preferably without having to do more on it.)
I'm glad to send a little joy your way!
 
2 hours later…
08:15
1
Q: Can I use divine smite with fists but not improved divine smite?

Richard ChesterOkay so reading the players handbook it says that I can use divine smite with when I make a melee weapon attack which means I can use my fists (I think from stuff I've read on a few other forums ?). But improved divine smite says when I hit a creature with a melee weapon. Does this difference in ...

 
4 hours later…
12:21
> Now, the most surprising thing to come out of religious studies in the past decade or so is the discovery that "religion" actually doesn't exist. It cannot be defined.
I like it already
12:38
I don't totally agree with all of the essay's positions and conclusions, but that'd be a terrible reason not to share it.
It's got a lot of chewy stuff I'm gonna be thinking about for some time to come.
12:53
@AncientSwordRage "cannot be defined" != "does not exist" is my gut reaction....
 
1 hour later…
13:59
@nitsua60 I think that's made clear in the first few paragraphs
@BESW same
it's stuff I've seen discussed but it's good to see a lot of it written down in one place
> people do these things because they work either actually or because they are effective in addressing those worries.
💯
14:28
7
Q: What spells can damage objects?

Ayden sWe also know that only specific spells can damage objects (firebolt, fireball, shatter, etc...). Is there a list of possible spells that could target an object? I found this list of spells that can target objects on a person however there should be more that can target some that are not held or c...

15:20
slow stack this morning
15:59
> I believe there might be some beers in the fridge. I believe I'm gonna wake up again tomorrow. But those aren't the kind of beliefs we're talking about. Religious faith is belief that is strongly and proudly affirmed.
Then you underestimate the strength of my belief in beer in my fridge.
I had a teacher in high school who argued football (soccer) fandom was religion, or at least display all/most of the characteristics
2
Having a religious relationship with beer doesn't sound like it's necessarily healthy
It sounds disturbingly plausible though.
I think that "...that "religion" actually doesn't exist. It cannot be defined." is supposed to mean "the concept of "religion" isn't a unified concept with a unified meaning, since there are religions that break each rule you can make. "Religion" isn't a usable concept since it's meaningless."
16:29
I wouldn't put an equivalence between "can't be defined" and "meaningless" either
Unless I'm misunderstanding, there's an equivalent issue with the term "fish" (which doesn't define well within biology/taxonomy). But that doesn't mean I can't point to one and agree it's a fish
(And since I've mentioned it, the podcast named for that factoid- No such thing as a fish- is quite good)
Heh. That's an excellent name.
That is fair; I was imprecise. I'm not sure what I was saying was very far off from what was being said there, though; the author wanted to shock people slightly with the idea that religion isn't defined and can't be used as an all-encompassing umbrella, to push people out of the "fake-Christian and/or fake-Roman gods" mindset.
The author then uses it as an idea in the rest of the article, though. This amuses me because it's actually setting out a framework for pagan religion in D&D games, which is pretty much a specific type of religion which doesn't even enc
17:26
5
Q: What does the clause about seeing into the Ethereal Plane in True Seeing accomplish?

Groody the HobgoblinTrue Seeing's text states: For the duration, the creature has truesight, notices secret doors hidden by magic, and can see into the Ethereal Plane, all out to a range of 120 feet. Here is the definition of truesight: A monster with truesight can, out to a specific range, see in normal and magi...

 
2 hours later…
19:44
@Someone_Evil only because of our shared experience with fish... It's the same with religion
If somebody comes along and says a whale is a fish or that an eel isn't, what are you using to make that judgement?
20:16
@AncientSwordRage I'd point out that factoid and ask them for what purpose they're using the term. That should be getting towards the more interesting discussion
20:41
@Someone_Evil and if they just say "well I use that term so I can talk about all the things I consider fish..."
20:53
But then it doesn't actually mean anything
And if they're just using it with assumed arbitrary includes and excludes it's just an obstruction to clear communication
And we don't need to go actively looking for more of those
21:22
@Someone_Evil I think that is the same arguement the author uses against how 'religion' is used in roleplaying games
I'm not sure it puts the focus on communication, but I agree there are parallels which hold
21:42
I think that's implied...?
It's about how roleplaying games communicate these concepts... How would it not be about communication?
I found the focus in the article more towards worldbuilding than directly communication itself
The communication aspect becomes... implied instead of the focus
22:05
My favourite comment there is the one about druids being monsters.
@Someone_Evil The folks at the Saint Arnold brewery likely disagree.
@Someone_Evil I think they are challenging how we talk about religion and then after that, they discuss world building implications. But it stems from this definition challenge
@AncientSwordRage I think we might be trying to do a distinction between talk and think which is probably not big enough to bother much with. We aren't really disagreeing on anything substantive I can see
But definition and communication go hand in hand
Is bringing up animism-and-animism-adjacent concepts and mentioning how they tend to predate polytheism really a challenge?
22:17
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I must haves missed that bit
@AncientSwordRage I'm referring to the part about bringing up how back before Apollo & co. had names, they were vaguer concepts, how there are altars of bad luck and sickness where these phenomena are being warded off by gift-bribes &c.
> But I kind of suspect D&D doesn't really understand what Roman and Greek polytheism was really about.
If we look at how religion is treated in D&D we see again a very Christian focus on *belief*, on intellectual things.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica ahh that's not a distinction the article makes
@AncientSwordRage As an agnostic coming out of a predominately atheistic culture which took a rapid turn towards re-normalising Abrahamicism with a Christian angle over the course of my lifetime, I don't think the D&Desque gods look particularly Christian. There does seem to be a suggestion to try to replace whatever simplification of polytheism with something more leaning towards animism-adjacent sorts, and I'm . . . not sure why that would be better than what people play.
I think I get a similar impression to Phoenices: 'okay, it's a worldbuilding idea bundle; it focuses on ideas different from Forgotten Realms-esque ones; but it also tries to present itself as shocking or something?'.
22:42
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I think it's the whole calling 'worshipping a single diety in a pantheon' polytheism when that doesn't even resemble modern polytheist belief systems let alone the ones it claims to imitate
As they're doing s master's in this I'm inclined to listen to what they say and not claim it's just for shock value
@AncientSwordRage Ah, that probably doesn't fit some pantheons and is fine with some others. 'Priest of X' is perhaps overrepresented, but not an entirely fictional idea, as far as I understand.
@AncientSwordRage I'm not disputing the content existing, exactly because my knowledge in theology amounts to the general course all students are supposed to take. But the presentation seems to be . . . well, what Phoenices wrote.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica that's not how it seemed to me at all... It's almost like I've been reading a different article
Maybe I phrased things clumsy, but my surprise was exactly because 'oh, this describes some other, familiar, subsets of the category, sure, I recognise some of them and others look adjacent, but is doing so as if this is supposed to be more significant to the readers than it is'.
@AncientSwordRage The longer I live, the more I keep getting impression that this happens a lot, with different readers/watchers/&c. latching onto different aspects of a work, to the point that it's very hard to be confident in what the signal really is and what is noise and misinterpretation.
I probably tend to veer further from whatever is the statistical norm of interpretation than others though. Sorry about that.
I think it's saying "what you think/D&D says is X is actually Y" and people here are saying "But X and Y are different! You must be getting X and Y confused."
23:04
@AncientSwordRage When I read something that seems to be surprised (or expect me to be surprised) by things I thought everybody knew, like that some Catholics don't eat red meat on Fridays all year (I once saw an essay on McDonald's fish burgers which felt like it had to explain that very slowly and carefully), I try to assume that the author or the target audience have a very different experience and background than I do.
@BESW must be
McDonald's fishburgers are cooked with the meat, at least in the UK
The essay was about their origin; they were invented by a franchise owner who lost a massive amount of business every Friday because his store was in a mostly-Catholic neighborhood. Ray Kroc didn't like the idea and tried to force the guy to stop selling them because he was worried they'd make the whole restaurant smell like fish, and offered a slice of pineapple between two buns as an alternative.
The franchise owner talked Kroc into having a competition between the two, and the fish burger won easily.
mmm. Fruit salad sandwich sounds like it could be excellent, but only if done right. The bread would have to be the right kind, I guess.
@BESW that was clever
@Phoenices And the fruit salad more than just pineapple, probably
23:15
@Phoenices A breaded, fried slice of pineapple and a slice of cheese, in a regular McD's bun.
I was imagining just a plain, tinned slice so that's a bit more reasonable
Cheese? Why? Whyyy? Wait, is that American cheese? That's even worse!
@BESW I'd eat it
Breaded, fried pineapple, a very thin layer of apple on the top and bottom, maybe some peach? Hmm. Maybe that grape glop you get when you press twenty grapes between two large plates by sitting on them? That stuff is amazing.
23:21
It was called the Hula Burger, because of course it was.
I'd tentatively try it while proclaiming my horror, and then quietly eat it when I thought nobody would notice.
@BESW ....yup
Or! It would be even better if there was no bread, only thick apple slices! Maybe the top one is rounded and the lower one is smoothly sliced like a normal bun!
I think we're no longer talking about the same things....
23:24
I'll eat pineapple by itself, pineapple is good
why put it with weak bread and horrible cheese though?
@trogdor To make it a burger?
to destroy all good things
That seems generally to be the objective of pineapple macdonalds
Hey! Pineapple is awesome until you eat too much and realize it's giving you negative happiness because AAH IT BURNS.
I'm perfectly happy to leave more pineapple for the rest of you

« first day (4151 days earlier)      last day (1110 days later) »