TRPG General Chat

12:33 AM

@BESW This just became one of my all-time favourite facts.

2:12 AM

@Adeptus Much shilling. Very self-promotion. Wow.

2:24 AM

is there any way to search your own comments? I've had an answer accepted after 4 minutes, and need to re-post a friendly reminder that it's not insane to wait, say, hours to accept. (If not days.) But I find that comment gets a little less friendly each time I have to re-craft it, and I should probably be copy-pasting....

@nitsua60 rpg.stackexchange.com/users/23970/nitsua60?tab=activity

Q: AutoReviewComments - Pro-forma comments for SE

@nitsua60 You can view your comment history from your profile, here's a magic link to your own: rpg.stackexchange.com/users/… However, you may like to pick up the pro-forma comments addon:

311

No more re-typing the same comments over and over! This script adds a little 'auto' link next to all comments boxes. When you click the link, you see a popup with 6 configurable auto-comments (canned responses), which you can easily click to insert. This script was inspired by answers to thi...

@Miniman You can replace the user ID and username slug with "current" to make a magic profile link for whoever it is that clicks it. :)

thanks @Miniman @doppelgreener

@nitsua60 Note that that allows you to browse your comments, not search them. To search them, you need to use data.se.

@Miniman right--not too heinous to CTRL-F them this time, and I'm poking around on the AutoScript @doppelgreener linked next. That'll be a lifesaver!

2:49 AM

@nitsua60 If you know SQL at all, it's worth checking out data.se when you've got some spare time. It's pretty amazing.

Adeptus

@Miniman I blame that Miniman guy :P

@Adeptus Yeah, he's the worst. We should go flag all his posts as spam.

@Miniman we'll have to enlist a lot of sock-puppets, though: isn't each user limited to 25 flags per day? With over four hundred posts that'll be [counts on fingers...] lots of users!

@nitsua60 i see this scheme as akin to an army running with war trumpets head-first into a brick wall, which then collapses on top of them.

@doppelgreener Were you in the US on Friday night? 'Cause that sounds exactly like how my high-schoolers play D&D!

3:04 AM

@nitsua60 I may have been ~~making them dance like puppets~~ providing advice to them secretly via teleconference.

(A few weeks back there was a party split when, faced with a city in full-scale riot and a colliseum collapsing on top of them, half decided to stay and loot the bodies of the commoners who'd been killed by falling masonry....

"Those who stayed in the arena found the following when looting 17 deceased common people: torn, bloodied clothing; scraps of food amounting to two meals; eight small belt knives; an enormous scale, perhaps from a dragon; a tiny silver icon of a raven; a small, curiously-light stone block; two toy soldiers, one missing a head; a copper badge in the shape of a five-pointed star; an iron holy symbol devoted to an unknown god; and a glob of very sticky, bad-smelling incense.")

Wow, you were way more generous than I would have been.

@nitsua60 I will always be concerned by finding "scraps of food" where a whole lot of people have been killed messily, due to potential uncertainty over what would've been classifiable as food before the whole ordeal.

This is the same party--containing a druid, a forest/beast ranger, and a green paladin--that only aimed at horses during Friday night's chase scene.

that would be one area where D&D alignments might portray it as not-good, but fantasy heroes on the good side of things have done plenty of that.

3:12 AM

Spike Growth, cast directly in front of a four-in-harness at full gallop, can be devastating.

@doppelgreener sure. But the glee with which they did it....

Random bit of advice-seeking: I've been advised at my FLGS that a standing mid-campaign party is newly in need of a DM, and they've asked me if I might consider it. Crazy idea? Great idea? Obvious red flags to watch out for? Good/bad experiences in this sort of situation?

Adeptus

@nitsua60 Their DM left mid-campaign? Could be a red flag...

(could also be unrelated issues)

@Adeptus good point. My vague impression from the store employee was that it was RL concerns, but worth asking about directly.

[making list]

@nitsua60 Get in touch with the former DM if you can. Learn about the players and the story they were running from them. Find out if they left for red-flag reasons ("this group is terrible!") or good reasons ("I'm not a good fit but they're a good bunch" or "I'm moving to another state" or etc).

Understand you'll be meeting total strangers who have a story they want to experience. There will be an adjustment period wherein they may expect you to behave like your GM did, and run the game like your GM was. Alternately, the things you do may be a breath of fresh air and a noticeable improvement. Just take care to not generalise and look at the specifics: different players will feel differently about different things.

all my DM exp. has been either close, personal groups (already friends, family, co-workers) or AL Expeditions where the expectations are explicitly scoped to a four-hour window. This feels like some different middle-ground. As in, if things go badly in any way we don't have the moderating effect of many other interactions nor the easy out of "I'll just wait an hour and it's over."