But it's a lot easier if you engage the players in helping with this; it's the GM's responsibility to try to make it happen, not to do it all by himself.
So, we've been invited, by the powers that be, to celebrate a one year anniversary with a contest.
While other sites have had contests for "best user" and "unanswered question cleanup" ... we have 4 unanswered questions and a tightly knit community.
What kind of contest should we run for our Ap...
And if you're really really dirty, you can pretend that "the Wisdom modifier stacks with the Dexterity modifier for ranged attacks" means it stacks for attack rolls as well as damage.
Underappreciated System Uplift Contest
Title really needs work. Basically, a series of prises go to the users who best lift systems with less than 50 questions and a horrible tag wiki to fully participating tags in this site with graduated prizes as a function of how much effort we (the mods) an...
@BESW I'm not here. This is a figment of your imagination.
I didn't come into the office on a holiday to use the computer because my own at home isn't working. And I certainly didn't hang around till after midnight!
@BESW I've seen some good plays. Notably Waiting for Godot, by some top-class actors in a local theatre. (Actors from The Abbey were touring the country, playing in little local theatres up and down Ireland.)
@BESW I find myself in the strange position of wanting to accept an answer that doesn't actually help me, simply because it answers the question I asked more completely, but it doesn't actually address my problem
Which is of course what I get for asking a general question of a specific problem
A friend of mine has asked me to help him create an escort mission for his April Fool's game (actually held this weekend, because, you know, scheduling). The players will be escorting a tenth-level Wizard (indeterminate race) whose magic all revolves around water and fish. To up the challenge, he...
@BESW That could be interesting. I once (in school) saw a production of The Importance of Being Earnest with three actors. When Lane showed Lady Bracknell and Gwendolin into Algernon's room, it was one actress with a hat on each hand playing all three characters. And it worked!
@BESW The Tempest. Last summer there was a free production in the Iveagh Gardens in Dublin. The guy playing Ariel was wearing white jeans and a lot of blue paint, and I think I fell in love with him.
@BESW They are here too, of course, with the added complication that both "races" look exactly the same. Whether that makes things worse or better is an open question.
@Lord_Gareth, @KRyan Just watch The Reduced Shakespeare Company's Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) and you'll know most of what you might ever need to about the Bard.
@TRiG Heh. We're astonishingly complex given our tiny area; Guam's been occupied and colonized repeatedly for hundreds of years, and is now the only US territory in the area... which brings a lot of nearby islanders here for work and education.
@KRyan I haven't either, actually. I'm fairly familiar with it, though, through general cultural osmosis. And I picked up some of it when my brother was studying it. (I did King Lear.)
@BESW Right. An interesting history is a sign of a painful past, I suppose.
we did Romeo and Juliet (of course), Henry V, Julius Caesar, Merchant of Venice, and I've seen Hamlet, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, and Winter's Tale
@KRyan I studied The Merchant of Venice and King Lear in school. And I've seen a fair few of the comedies (mostly outdoors, at a nearby park which does productions every summer).
@TRiG ...this is an accurate description of how I have seen many of those plays, but in my case it's Central Park and they frequently get Broadway and Hollywood actors for the roles
@BESW Well, the one last summer (The Tempest) was even better: it was free. Also, it was easier to get to (further away, but public transport links to Dublin are better than to Belvedere).
What I came into the office for was to find tickets to Reims for the summer, but the SNCF site is having trouble with its booking form, so I wasted time mucking about instead. And now I'll hie me home to bed. Bye all.
@BESW eh, I know a lot of girls who don't like it either. And besides, for a "love story" it's got way more combat and bloodshed than it does love scenes
@BESW I don't believe it was intentional, just a silly anecdote of what happened when I saw it
@Lord_Gareth I'm not sure how much intent we can ascribe to a man whose very authorship of the plays is questionable, but yeah. It's not one of his best plays and it's been culturally mangled to the point that most productions of it miss the point entirely.
@KRyan - No, I haven't. I did read some interesting historical sources on it. While all the girls in my high school class were crying over R&J killing themselves I looked at the teacher and said, "So this is a play about how teenagers are stupid, right?"
@BESW - The sources I read (eight years ago now, so don't ask for titles >.<) had some compelling arguments suggesting that R&J was written for a quick buck and its popularity offended the Shakespeare quite a bit
ACP is affected only by the Masterwork property, which all magical armors have, and any special materials or enhancements that specifically mention it.
Okay, the instant you say that any of Shakespeare's work is consciously and deliberately anti-patriarchy, you lose a lot of my respect.
This guy is bringing a lot of modern context to the table and instead of saying "Isn't it interesting that we can read these modern ideas into Shakespeare's work?" he's trying to cram them into Shakespeare's mouth.
@BESW I'm... not certain that he is, in that some of them, at the very least, I feel like he's not attempting to claim were Shakespeare's intent or ideas
though I also have much less background knowledge on the subject
@BESW well, he's also got a video that has one of those "open letters" to authorial intent in which he basically says he doesn't really care much about authorial intent
he does try to give some historical basis for some of the things he's talking about, but eh
He runs into the problem all of this genre does, of trying to say too much too fast and losing context and complexity in the process.
If he didn't try to range so far afield he might be able to do justice to the topics he did choose to cover.
Authorial intent is important, if only to the extent that you have to be aware enough of it to make a choice about it.
When he runs around declaring that Shakespeare certainly read criticisms of the Poetics, and that Romeo and Juliet is anti-patriarchy, he'd durn well better care about authorial intent.
(One of the major arguments about who Shakespeare actually was is founded around the lack of evidence that the man we think wrote the plays had access to the level of education shown in them.)
He did great as far back as Gilbert Grape (I can't stand that film, but the acting was superb). But the Man in the Iron Mask was pretty awful because he was cast for cute (ditto Titanic).
When he's cast as an actor he does well. When he's cast as a hunk of manflesh, it's rarely good.
@BESW uhh... in what sense? it is certainly possible for a target to be invalid. Do you mean is it possible to choose someone that isn't a legal target (because you didn't know they were illegal, or they take some action to make it illegal)? yes, it is
Try Something New Month
Encourage members to widen their activities into elements of the site that they don't usually participate in. For example,
Answer questions with different tags than usual for you
Ask questions (if you're normally an answers-only kind of citizen)
Post in meta (if meta is...
@BrianBallsun-Stanton So @KRyan has been wanting to do that homebrew contest for awhile. There's precedent for it on another .stackexchange, but no one seems to know if it's permissable or not. How bad would it be if he or I just /did/ it and saw how it went?
The .stackexchange system - of a question and answers with upvotes - makes it ideal for hosting contests whose winners can be determined democratically. For some time @KRyan has wanted to host a homebrew contest of some kind or another. Knowing him I'd say 3.X or Legend, with the "winner" being the submission with the most upvotes after the voting period is done. The idea is that the host would post as the questioner, and the submissions would be answers.
Art.stackexchange does something similar for original artwork
Try Something New Month
Encourage members to widen their activities into elements of the site that they don't usually participate in. For example,
Answer questions with different tags than usual for you
Ask questions (if you're normally an answers-only kind of citizen)
Post in meta (if meta is...
