My boyfriend, my best friend, my best friend's boyfriend (who is my boyfriend's best friend)... say that 5 times fast... and I all play and GM RPGs, so we're usually doing something or other.
But schedules are a problem for us, too. Most of us have shift work going on, some of the players are in school as well, and my boyfriend and I have unpredictable fatigue that can sometimes prevent us from participating or participating fully. Adulting is not fair.
I'd like to do more, though. At one point we had Pathfinder, Exalted, and a series of various oneshots all going on simultaneously, and I super miss all the freeform I used to do.
user15026
All of that sounds like fun, minus the fatigue and scheduling stuff
@eimyr My wife likes "nerdy fantasy stuff". She's been playing D&D since high school (or earlier?). No interest in non-fantasy genres though, which is a shame cos I like Shadowrun too. (Remembering all the rules is a problem sometimes, partly because she's too used to the older editions of (A)D&D)
I've been thinking vaguely about trying to run some oneshots recently, maybe seeing if anyone around these parts wants to play, but I don't know what I'd want to do yet.
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I prefaced my most recent generator with "Results almost guaranteed to not make sense but (maybe) sound cool anyway. Depending on your definition of cool."
As sources of star-metal are depleted, a united society disintegrates into a series of holdings ruled by warlords who control the limited resources of their sectors.
In that case (with the first), I'd say that warlords come into power when star-metal, necessary for any number of things, becomes scarce. Whoever controls the star-metal supply amasses power. Or else, the sudden lack of star-metal allows other resources to become relevant again, meaning that those warlords who were not able to amass it can suddenly attain power through other means.
OR... As the warlords who suppressed high technology fall to squabbling amongst themselves, rebel scientists are left free to rediscover the secrets of star-metal.
I think the lesson here is, Everything's a plot if you're mad enough.
DRYH madness talent idea: Pathbending.
For a few dice you can make a path longer or shorter, or lead somewhere nearby that it wouldn't normally. For medium dice, paths take you anywhere you want to go in just a few steps, or you can change the path of a person's career. For all the dice, you can change the path of history itself.
How do nightmares work in this game? I'm imagining a labyrinth of confused paths looping over and into themselves, ultimately leading nowhere. But that's not knowing a nightmare's mechanical function. :P
A nightmare is the NPC monster that a PC becomes when they overuse their madness talent. They're reality-bending beings totally focused on a particular twisted obsession that defines them utterly.
Often their obsession is expressed by trying to control the lives of others to match the nightmare's particular twisted view of the world.
...and due to the nature of DRYH, they're also often horrible puns.
For example, a madness talent to pick up information and talents from objects based on what the objects have been used for before (pick up a guitar and play as well as the best musician to ever use it, pick up an assassin's gun and become a skilled sniper).
As you use the talent you slowly become obsessed with using objects as a way to understand people, and you steal and hoard them.
When you become a nightmare, you lose interest in the objects and become obsessed with the hands which touched the objects. Your own hands wither and fall off, but you can steal a person's hands to gain their insights and talents. You've become The Handyman.
That person slowly turned into a living hive, yes, but their nightmare obsession was focused on pain--bringing out the inner pain lurking under the skin of everyone else is the only thing which eases the pain of your own existence.
So you talk to people--and torture them when they won't talk--until they confess their foulest secrets and failings for you to mock and tell to others. You've become The Agony Ant.
I see. The obsession for the Pathbender could be change and uncertainty. Over time, they become more obsessed with the gap between expectations and reality and the cruel twists of fate. The nightmare could set out to prove to people that nothing is certain.
What starts out as "Things can always change for the better!" becomes "Things can always take a turn for the worse."
I was thinking of almost the opposite: you become obsessed with controlling the destiny of others, forcing them to make the most optimal choices according to your own twisted priorities. You've become... The Pathfinder.
Nothing specific. The word pathbreaker has a similar meaning to pathfinder or trailblazer and refers to "breaking in" a path where there wasn't one before. But in the case of the nightmare, they're not just breaking in new paths; they're flat out breaking existing ones.
I've been doing okay with online guides, but there are some fundamentals I feel like they tend to skip or assume are already clear/will become obvious. So far it's not really anything I haven't done, but sometimes I'm like, "Oh. So that's why that works that way."
I almost bought a Humble eBook Bundle of programming-for-kids books. Partly to teach my daughter, partly to learn new languages myself. But I put off deciding, and then the deal ended...
Aww. The one I'm using is JavaScript for Kids. It's kinda pricy, but they seem to run coupon codes frequently (the current one is DAFFODEALS for 30% off). They have a bunch of other languages too, but this is the only book I can vouch for personally.
@Pixie That's an unfortunately common thing. A programmer wants to teach his skills but can't remember what it was like to not understand how programming works. Takes a lot of peer review and educating in person to know what they need to learn.
Alternately they're assuming you already know programming, which is reasonable because once you learn programming, you're over a major hurdle - the same principles apply to every other language in the same programming paradigm.
Even Codecademy, which is pretty widely praised, didn't really illuminate a lot of this stuff for me (though it was valuable in its own way -- learning through doing is good).
@doppelgreener @Pixie I'd assume the most important parts to learn are the units of programming. Logic like IF and WHILE, FOR TO NEXT, variables and eventually functions
I'm watching a really good Stanford university lecture course on youtube at the moment which only assumes you know how to turn on a computer. I want to know how to explain the concepts to other people and see if there's anything I missed in my self-taught education
@Polyducks There's the rub: what do you teach when? When do you introduce someone to the concept of reference vs value? When do you teach them about arrays? Classes, instantiation, inheritance, if it's an OO language?
I don't know anything about teaching programming, but I do know that many of our assumptions about what logically follows from what in learning (like addition -> subtraction -> multiplication -> division) are based more on how we learnt them, than on any objective qualities.
(Some studies have shown that addition -> multiplication -> subtraction -> division is more "natural," and many educational systems now use that progression.)
@Doppelgreener @polyducks things is, studies shown that there are people, otherwise very smart, who cannot learn programming regardless of their and their teacher's effort
I think as @Sejanus said, it depends on what your end goal is
@eimyr that's more of a case of unlearning bad habits and basic assumptions
often people get tangled up in learning a language when programming is separate from that. You can speak great English but not be a very good essay writer. You can learn to be a very good essay writer and then apply that in any language you learn
While you can pretty much use a given set of essay skills in any language, different cultures use different persuasive structures, so if you're writing to persuade a Chinese audience using American persuasive skills, there's going to be a disconnect.
@Polyducks thats actually incredibly hard. I speak English pretty well, and I can write essays in Lithuanian even better, but I can't write for sh** in English
@polyducks There is a test I've read about, that some universities use to admit people to programming classes, which is basically guessing what various pseudocode expressions mean. The catch: it's not about guessing right. It's about guessing consistently.
@Sejanus That's probably because of the exposure to literary works in that language. I have a similar problem.
I can write decently in Polish and handle any amount of English technical writing. I fail to write a nursery rhyme.
In Chamorro when there's a concept which doesn't have a historical word in the language, some people modify an English word, some people modify a Spanish word, and some people create a Chamorro cognate.
sometimes it's just easier and faster to express yourself in English
especially when you use it every day anyway. Songs in English, films in English, internet in English, rulebooks in English, books in English, youtube videos... you're getting the idea
Sometimes your intention is untranslatable without distorting the meaning.
@BESW Is it common to create lots of cognates? I know Irish language is problematic to Irish people, because it uses lots of loanwords, despite having native names (which no one knows)
Then, there are concepts in many languages for which most other languages have no equivalent. Some of the core Chamorro values can only be translated into English in a very rough way.
@eimyr No, Lithuanian belong to a whole different language group than Polish. Well Polish is more similar to Lithuanian than i.e. English is and I am not even starting on Korean... but still a very different language
Poles don't bother learning Slovakian - almost 100% mutual intelligibility. It's more tricky with Czechs, but with lots of gesticulation and universal words you can go to Croatia and talk in Polish with a degree of success.
Like, one of the words for "airplane" is eroplånu, which is just a phonetic translation from English. But another word for it is actually a phrase that translates literally to "air boat."
(And I once ran into a bizarre argument over if it was legit to use the word "boat" for an airplane, which hinged on whether or not the first airplanes a Chamorro would have seen were seaplanes or if they would have landed on a runway.)
@Sejanus I've a friend who studied Japanese whilst in high school. Whenever he asked his teacher for the Japanese equivalent of an English word, his teacher would always say: "well, it's not quite the same, but you could say ____". It used to frustrate him a lot! Like, just have out with it! Just tell me what it is! It's the same thing, right? Why say that all the time?
It's only later that he realised that Japanese was truly a totally different language, with a totally different set of ideas, with a totally different root - there were no equivalences. But certain Japanese ideas got encoded into words, and those roughly overlapped with the other ideas English speakers had also encoded into other words.
Chamorro's word for shame is a direct phonetic adoption of "dishonour." The word which is most often translated from Chamorro into English as "shame" covers a MUCH deeper and wider concept enmeshed with the culture's collectivist ethos: it's a concept that English has never really even wanted to talk about, so it gets reduced to "shame."
In Polish there is a famous verb "załatwić" [zaw-atv-itch'] which means... erm... to deal with some formal issue by pulling strings and relying on luck and social skill, but without overstepping the boundaries of law, and reach a conclusion that's favourable to yourself.
@BESW Same with my multilingual code-switching. We conjugate English verbs so that they fit Polish flexion. Curiously, we don't do it the other way around. I'd posit that it's because infinitive form of Polish verbs sound WEIRD when in context or without a modal verb around them.
@BESW Does Chamorro have words for other vehicles? While I was in NZ, I noticed that the Māori for most means of transport of any mode is “waka”, originally “canoo”
@Anaphory More noticeably vocabulary. The language is enough like Spanish to trip up people who go in confident that their Spanish will make learning it easier.
@Golokopitenko … and contact linguistics in general.
When code switching, how do you change phonology? I sometimes notice that when I code-switch in a surprising situation, the sounds stay too similar to the other language.
Also, sometimes I code switch to the wrong language in response to an unexpected code switch to a language I'm less familiar with. [English Conversation] – Someone else: “Merci” – Me: “De Nada” [Confused look].
But the bad thing is not that gh can be pronounced “f” in certain circumstances. It's that even when in nearly the same circumstances in a different word, it's not /f/ any more.
English is more of a creole than a coherent language of its own, so it borrows other languages' rules along with the words it's adopting, then applies them to other words from other languages haphazardly as it goes.
@Anaphory It's pretty fascinating, and gives the thing a certain fluidity of implementation which is actually quite useful, but it's also horribly frustrating for anyone who wants to "get it right," because English has never had a "right" to get.
In fact, I read the AW rulebook because it sounded awesome, and then I looked for a game of it some time later when it made post-apocalypse palatable to me. And DW is my go-to book to recommend to people interested in GMing, because it makes assumptions explicit.
I like explicit assumptions, even when they don't apply, because then you can sort out the difference between what the reference says and what should be the case.
> SHUTTLETATO Function: Spaceworthy techno-organic shuttlecraft Flaw: Handles like a potato - Psychic Interface: You can use Will or Vehicles to pilot the shuttletato. - Metal Potatoskin: Has mild and moderate consequence slots. - Crumple Zones: Characters inside the shuttletato can use its consequence slots to absorb physical stress directed at them.
@BESW I'd also recommend the Shuttletatoes to be prone to catching fire and be bothersome to service and upkeep, so people often want to get rid of them. Literal hot potatoes.
as an Australian I have been conditioned to tolerate the salt & vinegar flavour, though it doesn't rank very high for me. i'd take it before chips that use non-foods to imitate non-flavours (e.g. barbecue and chicken), though.
@doppelgreener The Brits have very curious ideas what should and shouldn't be a potato chip flavour. I get Salt, I understand Onion, but Prawn Cocktail? Come on! In Poland (and mainland Europe) we eat mostly Paprika and Spring Onion.
It just sunk in, it's not going to be the big things I'll have trouble adjusting to once I move to another country. It's going to be the little things, like all the chip flavours being slightly different.
@doppelgreener Folks who come to Guam from the mainland usually take weeks to months before culture shock sets in, because it's enough like the mainland that they don't go looking for all the differences and the changes creep up on them.
Then suddenly WHAM it hits them that they're in a very different sort of place than they'd been acting like.
@eimyr That brand seems to exist in Australia (under the name Lay's) but they don't have those flavours and tend to be unremarkable here. As in: Lay's chips are more commonly kinda a little bit soggy with oil, Red Rock Deli chips are just perfectly crisp and dry enough and crunch so satisfyingly.
