@SevenSidedDie if you're around, can I ask a question about a pair of actions you took on main a day or two ago? It was on a deleted post, which I can't find now. Nothing contentious, just curious abut the sequence....

@nitsua60 -- hey there!

in case you don't want to walk into an ambush, here's the situation: it was the post that "answered" some 5e question by illegibly referencing Dragonball Z. I made a comment that it was illegible, and if there were no 5e rules to cover the situation that should be explained before invoking an unrelated system.

You subsequently edited the post into sentences, then deleted it. I'm just curious about doing both things. Did you step in to edit and in doing so realize that it was worthless and prime for deletion? Or did you always intend to delete but felt it should be readable first?

(pure curiosity, thanks)

@Shalvenay hey

@nitsua60 how're things going?

@Shalvenay pretty well, thanks. I'm going to head over to general chat in a little bit--see you over there.

@nitsua60 Yeah, sure. Even if it was contentious, that might be useful; more eyes sometimes reveal a better way to handle something.

@SevenSidedDie so which was it: did you discover you thought it should be deleted while editing, or did you edit with deletion always in mind?

@nitsua60 I think I recall that one. It was an answer, right? If it's the one I think it was, I edited to make it comprehensible and then after doing that I better understood it was attempting to reply to another post and then deleted it.

Sometimes I find that the only way to really understand a difficult-to-grasp post is to try to revise it. That gets deeper into its meaning than just reading, somehow.

@SevenSidedDie yes, that sounds like it. If you understood it was really a comment/reply, you got much deeper in than I did.

(I did try revising it into readability, but couldn't end up making head nor tails of it.)

(That's why I happened to be there and notice you edit and delete in succession.)

Thanks.

@nitsua60 That's right, you'd left a comment on it.

So yeah, edited first, then decided it wasn't an answer.

Oh, the dragon polymorph question, that was it (10k to see deleted answer):

rpg.stackexchange.com/a/74046/321

@SevenSidedDie yup, that was it. Can see it, just couldn't remember enough to find it. (I guess I can't search on a deleted post, and I was doing "[dnd-5e] dragon 2016-01.." not remembering that the question was an old one.)

@Shalvenay some of the things I like about Traveller:

1. since character creation is a bit of a shot in the dark, I usually have players roll up a half-dozen and choose the one they'd like. Then the other ones are great NPC fodder, with back-stories and all.

Classic Traveller, then? Or a more recent iteration? I've always liked the idea of a Traveller game but I don't have the genre reflexes to run it and do it justice.

2. XP, levels, not a thing. You're whoever you are, with no (or very little) way to "advance" oneself. The conceit of character building is that after some number of terms in military service you've mustered and are on your own. You've got skills and experience, but like most mid-career folk they're not likely to change that much.

← 1 message moved from RPG General Chat

@SevenSidedDie Classic--the only one I've got. (The one I got as a kid but could never get my brothers to play with me... wah-wah.)

@SevenSidedDie it actually sounds like I'd have decent genre instincts from my EVE Online experience, of all things.

2. (cont.) So if you've a job/task/adventure need outside your skill set, it's down to finding talent, recruiting NPCs--you're not going to "dip a level of cleric" to get some healing.

3. Combat damage is taken directly to (physical) attribute scores. Zero one out, and you're down. (Two=critically injured, three=death.)

Combat feels a bit more realistic when you've only ever got a dozen or so "hp"

(not that I've ever been in combat.)

(unless you count one bar fight that I didn't notice developing around me)

@nitsua60 yeah -- it sounds like face-to-face combat is a high-risk thing. does the system handle ship-to-ship fighting?

@nitsua60 reminds me of some of the frantic batphoning I've done and overheard in EVE ;)

Yup--that's a definite thing. Not for the faint of heart (or of $$$), though.

batphoning?

pinging whoever you know who might be able to help you with a coming fight, hoping they can send reinforcements your way

surreptitiously sending up the bat signal, that is?

so in ingame chats, on comms channels, sometimes even texting or phone-calling people :O

@nitsua60 yah.

@Shalvenay Yeah, probably. The room-sized computers would probably be an annoyance, but you can chalk that up to genre convention.

@SevenSidedDie I've always assumed that no matter the computing technology we come up with, we'll keep trying to solve room-sized problems.

@SevenSidedDie EVE fitting actually has CPU as a metric. the unit? teraflops.

@nitsua60 I was sorely tempted by the recent Bundle of Holding for all the Classic Traveller PDFs, even though I'm not impulse-buying games that I won't play in the immediately foreseeable future. One day though!

@nitsua60 That's how I figure it. Maybe multi-dimensional math needed for jump drives requires ridiculous computational volume. :)

@SevenSidedDie or you need that much space to conceal the fact that it's a handwavium-flubber dipole powering the whole thing =)

@nitsua60 Those things are really big.

@SevenSidedDie I'd figure it that way as well -- you need both extreme reliability and serviceability as well as intensive computational ability -- so the results wind up somewhat of a cross between a Cray and a zSeries

[echoes of @BESW in the distance: 'handwavium-flubber dipole' would be a great name for...]

@Shalvenay I've got about 10 minutes left tonight. Want to roll up a CT character, so you can see what's appealing about that side of things? (It's the RPG I've played where character creation really does feel like a game, not work-to-get-to-play-the-game.)

@nitsua60 I can try that :)

@Shalvenay to the back room, then!

(although some other time, you'll also have to show me the shipbuilding mechanics in CT because I'm eager to contrast them against how EVE's fitting system works)

Wouldn't Genesis be better?

@eimyr I played a Shadowrun character once, that the GM described as a sociopath. He did whatever he wanted, and didn't care much about anyone else other than his friends. He was a Wolf Shaman, so I basically played him as "These are my pack, who I am loyal to. Everyone else is a potential enemy."

@nitsua60 I had a Megatraveller computer game on the Amiga. Spent almost as much time creating characters that I thought were "good enough" as I did playing the actual game :P Soooo many dead before they even started!

from tv tropes:

> In all three games, it is possible to take actions that not only cause you to fail your mission, but make the world substantially worse off than it was before. Thus, your score displayed at the game over prompt, which normally would be some score taken out of a total (100 out of 400, say) and give you a rank dependent on your score (from "Charlatan" to "Enchanter" to "Sorcerer" to "Archmage"), would instead become a score of -100 and your rank would be "Menace to Society".

> In the original game, Enchanter, one earned this rank for releasing a powerful Lovecraftian demon upon the land; in the sequel, Sorcerer, one earned this rank for successfully tracking down your demon-possessed mentor and allowing the demon to transfer itself to your far more powerful body; and in the finale, Spellbreaker, it was revealed that the entire plot of the game was a cunning trap and that actually succeeding in your goal would grant you this rank if you didn't see the ruse in time.

You can't see it but I'm rubbing my temples in a vain effort to contain my amazed fury at this flare-up in Meta.

@waxeagle - I'm going to possibly-unfairly blame you but since you're the querent you win the prize: where in God's name do you get off with this?

Define 'the way it was'. No one but Mxy has been stirring up about it.

And as has been recently pointed out, again

And if I sound bitter, I am.

This shit, right here, is why I've been absent for so long.

Because I was done dealing with his abuse of power and childish temper tantrums.

I'll say it right now. Take 5 and calm down.

← 11 messages moved from RPG General Chat

So, y'know, go on.

Justify it to my face there buddy.

Here's the thing, in order for a tag to have merit, it has to be meaningful. It can't have the potential to be used on every question.

By normal tagging standards, many of our tags, are actually meta tags.

RAW is one of those tags. In that sense, it requires more justification than "this is an RPG concept" to merit it's existence.

At the outset of mxy's post, I was actually quite in favor of culling the tag. It's something that, without careful application, actually could apply to most of the questions we ask/answer.

@Lord_Gareth Not helpful, particularly not with the one-third of the team who isn't already predisposed against you

Because, our normal process for answering rules questions is "what does the book say, how does that work in a game, is this an adequate rule etc"

if that's all that RAW means, then it's not a good tag.

@waxeagle The issue here goes way, way beyond tagging theory

@KRyan ALL I care about is tagging theory

tagging is only secondary to the fact that the tag serves as the only shield this segment of the community has against mxyzplk's bigotry

petty disputes about playstyles can go to hell. this is about tagging.

so you want to have a serious discussion about tagging theory?

don't have a bigot who has actively persecuted this segment of the community for years as your most prominent, vocal team member

because that is the primary concern in my mind

^-

it is not about tagging

it is about trying to protect a segment of the community against a moderator who has for years tried to drive them out

very successfully, I might add!

I don't know much about mxyzplk. Why do you say that he's been driving out RAW questions?

Look, I get that. I've had my issues with mxy on a bunch of things, we're in relative agreement on this one though. What we're asking is for people to look critically at the tag during this period and make a fair and open evaluation of it following the period.

well

On a just-tag-use thing, it should be notable that the RPG community often has a notable bias for or against RAW as a concept; tagging the question, as has been brought up before, communicates the sort of answers you're looking for. Looking for those answers can be valuable for a lot of reasons.

I have a question that still was not satisfactorily answered by the community because Mxy picked a fight in it

@waxeagle the issue here is that it cannot be fair and open as long as the man is involved in it

@Smurfton questions, answers, and members

@Lord_Gareth we get that, which is why we're taking a month to look at the tag and announcing it at week before we start to get comments

he has been slightly better lately, but has never been one to keep himself unbiased

@Forrestfire I disagree. Strongly.

this is an attitude he has strongly conveyed through his posts and comments for years

that

And I can't be the only person who remembers him snidely declaring that he's free to flame "munchkins" in chat all he wants.

@waxeagle How so? In what way does an avowed, passionate, and proud bigot add to this discussion? How can this segment of the community seriously consider the moderation team to be treating them fairly and honestly while he is on it?

Nor am I the only person still angry about this

@KRyan because he's not the only one on the moderation team. And frankly, if you don't trust us to perform this, why did you recently elect 2/3rds of us?

@waxeagle I fought tooth and nail against d7's election, for all I do have a lot of respect for his ability to largely lay aside his personal feelings

^-

There's gonna be a lot of me posting those two arrows.

I was deeply disturbed by his commitment to the idea that the moderation team can or should do what they think is best in contradiction of the community consensus

and I never voted for mxyzplk

almost no one on this site did

uh

@KRyan that's a standard SE policy.

How does that work?

@Smurfton he was voted in when the site first graduated, and few people are still around from back then

in any event, the site was vastly smaller

More importantly, mods are for-life in SE

for good reason, on larger stacks

So there's no meaningful way to remove him without a massive backlog of evidence we have no access to.

yes, that's relatively besides the point.

I mean, if I could give up my day job and devote four months just to digging up the dirt, cool.

But hey, I like eating and having a home

@Lord_Gareth Whut? Why is a mod a for life position?

well, you couldn't even if you had time, cuz comments are deleted

@Ahriman in large part because it's a volunteer position

@Lord_Gareth also probably not helping

I'll resume seething quietly.

Doesn't that clash with the principle of elections?

I would like to be able to come back here, in all honesty. I have a lot of folks that I like and respect. I have a great respect for the goal of the Stack format.

But in all honesty, I left because I felt unwelcome.

@Ahriman typically elections are additive or for replacement

I still feel unwelcome.

And I am bloody furious about it

I've felt unwelcome for the entirety of my time here

@KRyan Personally, I've always been impressed by SevenSided's commitment to cleaning up posts on this site. Even if he had loads of personal opinions that I strongly disagreed with and didn't like, I would still vote for him.

Is there a way to signal friction between a community & mods?

@Ahriman my understanding is to typically start with a meta, and then escalate to SE itself

@Ahriman meta is that way typically, after that contacting the SE community team

but SE doesn't like to get involved in community affairs they're unfamiliar with

so you need a lot of evidence

which, ya know

Basically the only way to actually have it work is to stalk their posts for months and get proof of their problematic behavior

Who would be the representative of the community?

Which, again, see: need to eat, sleep, and be employed

which would have to be grabbed as it happens, because comments get deleted

as a result, moderators on as small a community as this one have effectively zero oversight and are pretty much immune to criticism

Sometimes after a few hours

...

That's rather toxic

welcome to rpg.stackexchange

@Ahriman most of the time it's really not

leave your "caring about the rules" at the door, lest myx jump down your throat.

I thought he ignored the RAW tag?

because as he said on his blog, you are not welcome

@Forrestfire tbf, I'm a RAW enthusiast who's managed to do just fine here...

he has been leading an ongoing crusade against the concept for years.

@waxeagle you also, as I recall, don't play the same systems he does

and are you really telling me you haven't seen him attacking other members of this site?

@KRyan also true.

if so, go check the flags on him

I know I have flagged him dozens of times

I admit, I never had much trouble with him (being new). Mostly because of diffirent game systems

and they were usually accepted

@KRyan no, I'm not.

Isn't this mostly a DnD issue?

like I said, I'm much more interested in the tag side of this discussion. I understand it provides value to a community on this site, and we want to see what we can do to keep it from falling into uselessness.

@Ahriman RAW is typically a D&Dism, but it's not solely D&D

@waxeagle can't seriously have that discussion while mxyzplk is a moderator

@KRyan Wouldn't that be a good argument, in and of itself that Mxyzplk is not a good representative of the community?

that's just how it is

@Smurfton I don't really know

I haven't acted because I'm terrified that whatever I do won't be convincing enough

and it'll blow the opportunity to get rid of him

make his case stronger

@waxeagle - Our stance here is that any actual problems with the tag can neither be examined properly nor acted upon while Mxy is involved in the process. Here, lemme dig up the thing.

The whole point of SE is that the high rep users are role models for the low rep ones, especially the mods.

@Smurfton no kidding

@Lord_Gareth The tag is getting evaluated. You have the choice of whether to be part of that evaluation and defining the process thereof or not.

@waxeagle True, I have answered some RAW questions for not DnD systems

As long as mxy isn't removing posts on the subject, or overriding the community's decisions, I do not see what the problem is.

Again, this is an alternative to destroying the tag

@waxeagle - What'd I do wrong here: rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/31062/…

Yes he's more vocal, and his voice is very loud, but still.

destroying the tag would be better

And the community weighed well against destroying the tag, as it has every time it's come up

@Forrestfire don't agree there

At this point you're coming down against consensus for no discenible reason

destroying the tag would be better, because at the very least

it's an actual sign that the RAW community is no longer welcome

rather than deceptively continuing to house a bigot, and even putting him in charge of handling the people he's bigoted against

if rpg.stackexchange is to go down this road, they should be open and transparent about it

for reference, SE on moderation: A Theory of Moderation

> 1. As a moderator, your actions now represent the community, so you will be held to a higher standard of behavior. You are an ambassador of trust, with the same sorts of rights that the official development team and community coordinators have.

not only has mxyzplk gratuitously not been that

wow, Gareth's comment calling out myx got removed

he vigorously denied any higher standard for himself

@Forrestfire was that removed by mxyz?

I don't know

and then on the subject of suspensions: A Day in the Penalty Box, wherein it's quite clear that even if mods did not have higher standards, he does not meet the regular ones

If you do want to do this, but don't feel willing to spend all of the time required, we can trade off.

Wax, Mxy has picked this fight in Meta for two years running now, by his own admission in the last question. Every time he has, the community has chosen to preserve the tag.

Look guys, at the end of the day, the moderators still have a job to do. If you don't trust us to do it, you know the channels to go through, contact the community team. This is a tag that needs a cleanup, you guys are the principals in the tag, it's going to happen y'all can help define how it's going to happen.

...

And we're telling you that we have absolutely no faith that it's going to happen.

And you're ignoring that lack of faith.

@waxeagle True. I don't disagree that it has problems right now.

So basically

"We get that you have no faith in us. However, we're not going to look into it."

^-

"Go above us, which won't work for reasons listed"

@waxeagle you have no evidence that there is anything wrong with the tag

my god, man

@KRyan which is why the first thing we're doing is collecting evidence

there is a problem sensed, now we're trying to observe why is this an issue?

except that that's not what's being proposed here

>Aggressively police answers on RAW posts to remove answers that rely primarily on house rules or common sense interpretations.

Collecting evidence to support the crusade of a power-mad bigot who's been grinding an axe for two years

(more than that)

(not helpful)

Do you really think we see that as a gesture of good freaking faith, Eagle?

At the very least, the tag wiki and the meta decision should agree.

Which, as Nitsua kindly pointed out, they don't

There is no problem sensed, there's one man offended at the idea that the world has fun a way he doesn't.

Compare this situation vs. the difficulties had awhile back in Fate questions, where they weren't being answered for, honestly, bad reasons.

The latter was an actual problem, which was addressed and resolved once, and has never had to come up again.

This is crocodile tears. It's abuse of power.

@waxeagle The problem, at this point, is that a not-insignificant portion of the community has lost faith in the moderation team for reasons that the mod team seems to feel are irrational. This will poison any interaction that the community feels strongly about until either reconciliation is made or everyone involved leaves.

Even honest attempts to be even-handed about a specific topic are gonna be met with reasonable suspicion if the people overseeing it are visible indifferent to fairness in other areas. By now it's fruit of the poisoned tree until the underlying conflict is at least acknowledged as more than a flight of paranoid delusion.

@Smurfton in general the site does not do enough to maintain tag wikis

(Heya @BESW how's life been?)

@KRyan I personally would, except that tag wikis have always seemed like something I really shouldn't be touching.

There's also a LOT of tags.

I wouldn't, as I remain allergic to power and still wish I didn't have the stuff the site's already given me.

@Smurfton if you have the rep, you have the privilege and by definition it means you can and should; if you don't, it will be reviewed

obviously, only touch tags you're familiar with

@Lord_Gareth Outside of this trash, busy but pretty good. I've got an awesome RPG group. In the last few sessions we imploded a robot Elon Musk and fought giant termites that threw Force lightning.

@BESW awesome

@KRyan Problem: I don't actually play rpgs. I've played every once in a while, but never really had regular sessions.

...I feel like I should know that name

But it eludes me

@Smurfton ah, a shame

@Lord_Gareth Tesla, hyperloop?

@Lord_Gareth Elon Musk was one of the founders of PayPal, and rolled that money into Tesla Motors and SpaceX

Thank you.

@Lord_Gareth PayPal, electric cars, privatised space rockets, a strong fear of artificial intelligence.

@KRyan My rep is all from finding questions that can be answered with research.

also! Elon Musk was Robert Downey Jr's primary inspiration for Tony Stark.

:/

In any event @waxeagle BESW's expressed our thoughts here pretty well and/or diplomatically.

who?

In our setting Weird stuff (mad science, magic) is getting to be a massive problem on Earth, and Elon Musk has set out to fix it.

And as a personal addition, it's difficult for me to accept the idea that I have to be the grown-up, to shut up and be good while the other person in the conflict continues to be abusive, hostile, and abrasive. There's being the bigger person and then there's accepting victimization.

yeah, he said it far more eloquently than I could have.

@Smurfton Musk has already been answered, see above if you meant him. RDJ is an actor who portrayed Tony Stark in recent movies. Tony Stark is a comic-book character, also known as Iron Man.

And I feel like I'm being asked, consistently, to be quiet and remain a victim.

^

While our PCs work for a group with the motto Using Weird stuff so Weird stuff doesn't use you, Musk is Destroying Weird stuff so Weird stuff doesn't Destroy you.

@BESW this is so cool

I want to play with you guys

same here.

he showed me one of his enemies and I'm like "this is awesome"

He has a squadron of telepresence androids (not AI, because he's afraid of AI) that he calls Musketeers, which he uses for dangerous missions.

didn't realize Elon Musk was one of the people afraid of AI; there's quite a few of them at this point, and they're serious people worth paying attention to

And for the record this isn't my idea. One of my players came to me with Musk and his Musketeers all statted up already and said, "I was going to play this guy, but I think he's an antagonist. Here."

ahahaha

that's awesome

@Lord_Gareth he tends to :).

@KRyan and @Lord_Gareth I was hoping our collective history would allow for some measure of trust on this subject.

>Musketeers

that's amazing

Did he completely replace your original plans, or are your original plans still out there, biding their time, or whatever evil bad guys do while they wait for heroes?

Our first encounter with him, we were trying to save an Atlantean colony ship from falling into the Sun. I added Musk as an unexpected complication: Musk blames the ship for the Weird Stuff escalation on Earth and showed up trying to implode with it Downvote-class black hole missiles fired from his interplanetary warship Negative Feedback.

@waxeagle you're not the whole team, sad to say. And while d7 does an admirable job of keeping his opinions on rules-as-written out of his interactions with the site, he's not perfect either—and here he is being directly asked for his opinion on them, so he cannot avoid interacting with them

Should the conversation about BESW's table be moved back to RPG general chat, or is nobody still interested in discussing mods and RAW?

@Smurfton I really need to head back to work

We Skyped him to ask him to stop, but he hung up on us and kept firing, so we hacked his ship (which used open-source software) and set off all the missiles in his weapons bay.

@waxeagle I like you well enough. My irritation at the situation aside, I still like you. But you're 1/3rd of the team and the vocal face of that team is still, you guessed it, the problem child. You're bringing up questions of site policy and asking me to trust a majority out of three composed of folks I don't trust at all. Even if I had absolute trust in you personally, that's not a fair expectation.

Why should I have any faith that you can keep things fair on your own?

(And let me tell you, setting up a Skype call between a 4,000-year-old Atlantean colony ship and a modern warship is not easy. One of the PCs had to use her plant powers to grow a modern antenna array out of the metal trees on the ship.)

XD

(Luckily, another PC had just spent the last adventure lost in time and space, and it turned out he'd spent some time in Atlantis and added a Linux emulator to the colony ship's programming. We used that to hook up the array to someone's tablet.)

@BESW - On my end of things DSP is about to be kickstarting my first novel

I am massively hype.

@BESW this just keeps getting so much cooler

@Lord_Gareth Sweet.

@KRyan Again, this is almost all my players.

@BESW lucky you

I mean, we have a pretty sweet group

I'm very happy to have such an awesome group.

Pic related, @BESW

And Fate is the perfect system for us to enable everyone to bring ideas to the table.

indeed

Nice.

I really love Fate

need more opportunity to play it

If time zones weren't such an issue, I'd be more able to do more gaming online with RPG.SE folks.

@BESW yeah, I get that

I am not available at any times reasonable for you

But the next time you're on Guam, come on by. Geek Night is every Saturday, we usually start around 1930.

@BESW hah, that'd be sweet

I'm getting much closer this summer, but will be busy (honeymoon in Tahiti)

Grats!

thanks

Greener and one of his friends Skype into our games, but they're in the same time zone.

mm

huh, ironically if you ran a game at like noon... in the middle of the week... it would actually fit my schedule perfectly

:P

Some weeks that's workable.

you're so far away that it wraps back around to being conceivable

That feel when your players are debating whether or not they want to bring someone back to life with cancer as a potential side effect.

Being freelance means I'm busy, but I often get to choose when to be busy.

we actually game with a girl from Australia, but she's crazy and doesn't sleep

...that sounds like a Lines & Veils moment might be in order.

@BESW his players are playing his "quest" on 4chan

lines and veils, uh.

don't come up much there

@KRyan ...oh. 4chan is a lines & veils moment.

...Lines & veils?

My group has lines and veils on suicide, spiders, cannibalism...

I see

Nifty

I've attempted to remain classy and respectful about a variety of subjects here but the consequences of violence and medical care have often been...well, up-front.

The PoV character's a necromancer, it's kinda relevant to the themes.

@BESW to be fair, the people in his quest have so far been pretty chill

at least for that subset of 4chan, I'm getting a much more favorable impression than their reputation lead me to expect

(also, his writing is pretty sweet)

anyway, heading home

later folks

I gotta go teach Power Authority folks how to use MS Word.

@BESW Spiders?

Always nice to chat games with you guys. ttfn

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJaywalking

@Smurfton By me. A comment whose content can be summarised as “-1 plus also some taunts and ad hominems” is just throwing gasoline on a fire.

@SevenSidedDie Good. I was only concerned that he was removing his own criticism. I don't disagree with your decision that it was not appropriate.

I don't like having to delete comments on meta. I've done it twice in two days, once for someone saying the concept of RAW should be purged from the whole hobby, and this one. I am… not amused by current events.

@SevenSidedDie I want to respond to this with something encouraging, except that's not actually what I feel that I should be going for here :/ . Deleting meta comments is serious business. FWIW, I do have a lot of respect for what you've done for this site.

@Smurfton I don't think I've avoided all errors, but I do try. I appreciate the sentiment, both parts. :)

Oh ffs, I'm only a few lines into the backlog on this room and there's already delete-on-sight content.

Thank you.