TRPG General Chat

Don't you love it when your computer has a spasm for no reason, and it takes an hour to sort out :o/

Metool

[yawn]

Yup.

@Metool You've actually made me start yawning too :p

12:16 AM

TV says that means you're not a sociopath.

Phew, I was worried for a minute

12:43 AM

@Phil As were we all.

[shifty] was it that obvious?

[back-pedalling] No, not at all!

Today, I have three songs competing to get stuck in my brain.

The Kolchak theme, Popcorn (video unrelated), and Night on Bald Mountain.

Q: The profile page is getting a makeover

1:15 AM

FYI, from Meta Stack Overflow, our profile pages are going to change a lot.

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The Big Idea Create a page on the network that summarizes who I am as a developer, and lets me show off the stuff I am most proud of. Some of this information is only available by creating a Careers profile, but we want to open it up to everybody, even if you don’t have one. Background: The Pro...

One thing of particular concern to me is that a project section is being added for Stack Overflow for github projects, but other sites won't receive the project section. Someone's suggested the project section be extended to every site, and preferably allow us to link to arbitrary pages, like blogs and whatnot.

This is particularly relevant to those of us who have ongoing projects - I'm working on a tabletop simulator, some of us are working on our own RPG systems!

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A: The profile page is getting a makeover

There won't be an Apps and Projects section [for other sites] What about other technical/programming sites, like Code Golf or Programmers? What if I want my projects to be there? A possible solution is a site-specific section there. It could be GitHub for programming-related sites, a recipe...

This is that request

Q: What do we do with answers made obsolete by a question change?

5:13 AM

@MC_Hambone for further reading on why it can be pretty bad to answer an unclear question...

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There's a current case of an infrequent problem: Why is Donjon offline? Dakeyras's answer was a response to a question that was once there. It was made in good faith, and is a helpful answer. The part of the question it was responding to no longer exists, and if the question were asked in this ...

support questions answers editing

good answer (to a question they might be asking), but if people start answering an unclear question before it gets clarified, messy situations happen

5:27 AM

Could someone with time and - importantly - a D&D 4e book handy take a look at our new enchantment property question?

I'm asking about the 'Property', some magical items have a bonus called Property, its generally a Passive bonus, I've always thought that these passives were active as long as you (in this case) wield the weapons, but according to the AV properties of two different weapon items isn't in effect at the same time, only the weapon your hitting with is. I'm wondering whether I've missed something or if I got it right. — Lucifer 14 mins ago

it's a little unclear, I think, or warrants a good answer

5:44 AM

Just occurred to me: What if, in a world where everyone has at least a little bit of magic, and spells can be invented, a wizard provides a charm spell for his name?

Every time someone says it or writes it, they're casting a tiny charm spell on themselves.

That makes some very interesting assumptions about the nature of magic in the setting.

Magician

This is very much related to gods (and other powerful entities) hearing whenever someone calls their name, resulting in titles being used instead.

6:11 AM

I imagine it could work if words in that setting were like fire. They say that if you light a candle with a match, the candle's fire is the same fire the match has, but now split. Light a second match fresh, and it's a different fire. (In reality, since it's all just fire, the question of which fire is which is meaningless, but I digress)

When the Wizard says his name is Peter, he says it with a particular meaning - the meaning of a spell. When someone uses his name, they say the same word, carrying the same meaning and same spell.

This is different to the Peter someone else may call themselves.

Thus, saying Peter to say the Wizard's name is different to saying Peter to say the Mayor's name.

But each person thus passes on the Wizard's name and its spell when talking about him.

In the Young Wizards series, language is magic: every promise made, every description spoken, is like programming code that re-defines reality.

@Magician (and so nobody refers to wizards by their name, for suspicion they've put a spell on it, haha!)

If you can fully describe a thing, you can control it and change it.

Wizards are people who have learned the language of pure and accurate description, the base code of the universe.

In that setting, a person's True Name is a constantly-changing description of them. Speaking it defines them, and if a wizard mis-speaks his own name when casting a spell... part of the spell's effect is to re-define the wizard according to his mistake.

@BESW Oh, wow. That sounds quite incredible.

I expect people for the most part cannot be changed, as it is difficult to fully describe someone.

You have to know someone very very well.

6:18 AM

Except, maybe, Hodor, whose True Name might just be Hodor.

Young wizards have insane raw power because they don't know what they can't do, so they just do it anyway, but older wizards have more control because they are more self-aware and can describe things (including themselves) more accurately.

I highly recommend the first four books in the series, starting with So You Want to Be a Wizard.

@BESW so you don't know what you can't do until you decide "I cannot do this thing" and then it is so?

I can't find my copy of the first book... argh.

Oh no!