TRPG General Chat - 2016-11-07

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12:00 AM

I sometimes wonder if we'll see the Korea question resolved in our lifetimes.

I suspect that N.Korea will either break down internally, or shoot at someone and get a nuclear dogpile tossed into their face for it

@Shalvenay The latter being what I'm afraid of. I don't think China would militarily defend them if they started a new hot war, but they would probably politically defend them and that would be still very messy. (Internal breakdown might possibly be equally messy, but unfold over a longer term.)

@SevenSidedDie my ideal scenario would be they try to shoot China and wind up firing a blank instead

but it's enough to make the Chinese go "alright, we've had it" and dispose of N.Korea

@Shalvenay That seems really unlikely though, China being their long-suffering but still best friend.

12:59 AM

@SevenSidedDie Thanks. I've started to take the long view of meta posts, that maybe solving the immediate problem is no more important than using it as an opportunity to create a resource for the future.

1:34 AM

@DuckTapeAl Vote early, vote often =)

1:52 AM

@nitsua60 There's a theory that Edgar Allen Poe died of voter fraud.

@BESW was trying to suss out if this is some weird play on words w.r.t. "Poe's Law," but, no, looks like it's a real thing!

@BESW wat

@trogdor There was a sadly common practice of kidnapping people, drugging them, and taking them to multiple different polling stations and forcing them to vote.

wtf?!!?

There's also evidence that Poe had health issues which could have turned the drugs from "keep him pliable" to "kill him."

Given that he turned up in the wrong city, in the wrong clothing, apparently suffering alcohol poisoning despite evidence that he rarely if ever drank to excess...

2:01 AM

sheesh

@BESW That's... approximately what I plan to do on Tuesday? I'm taking my kids from school (kidnapping, check), bribing them with sweets (drugging, check), to come watch me vote. Sure, I'm not forcing them to vote, but I'm sure they'll violate electioneering laws by asking strangers who they're going to vote for before walking in.... So at least there's potential for some voting irregularity, if not outright fraud.

Well, try not to dump them in the gutter afterward.

3

Lovely bit of wisdom from @ect - Do not describe your game as "Rules Light" when you actually mean "Streamlined"

Tweeted by rdonoghue on November 7, 2016 at 1:09 AM

@BESW That's actually my dad-motto. It looks great on a mug.

@nitsua60 I would have voted early, but my Friday was suddenly busy and I missed the deadline.

Has anyone else seen the open letter signed by a ton of game devs, asking people to vote for Hilary?

@DuckTapeAl no, actually

what's their argument, in a nutshell?

2:06 AM

Noooope. Nope nope nope.

We are not gonna have that talk here.

Oh, right.

Forgot for a sec, there.

@BESW No, it's fine. Al's talking about Hilary, not Hillary.

(She's running for Duff-Man, in Springfield.)

ah.

Yes. Skip Williams is a HUGE Hilary Duff fan.

Fun fact.

...for certain values of "fun" and "fact".

Fun fact: it looks like Hilary Duff's WP page is about the same length as Einstein's.
...for certain values of "fun" and "fact".

(Both significantly longer than the WP page for the photon, which is arguably oodles more-important than either of them. And much more interesting. And harder to really understand.)

2:12 AM

@BESW Would the Not-a-bar be a kosher place to post a link, so I can show it to @Shalvenay?

And now I'm reading about the photon belt.

@DuckTapeAl M'rr. Just the link, let's not get into conversations on this, there are plenty of other spaces for it.

@Shalvenay I just posted a link to it in the Not-a-bar, if you want to take a look.

@BESW yeah, but I doubt any of those places are "healthy communit[ies] full of knowledgeable, considerate people." (Hmm... coincidence?)

Could we talk about the Vermont gubernatorial race? Bill "Spaceman" Lee is polling well there, making him (I believe) the only prospective governor to have been a guest on CarTalk =)

CarTalk? You mean the only radio show to feature Unending Wheezy Laughter?

:P

@DuckTapeAl Oh, c'mon... the wheezy laughter was occasionally punctuated by Hootin' an' Hollerin' =)

2:24 AM

It was the funniest 6.5 seconds of my life, although as usual like 80% of it was just Tom and Ray's gasping, hacking laughter.

On a serious note, do any chatizens live in places with more-nuanced balloting practices than the US? I think I've heard "preferential voting" and "rank-order voting" tossed about, but would be interested in the impressions of someone who lives with it.

@nitsua60 I've seen STV at work in the EVE CSM elections, but that's it

@nitsua60 Yes, Australia has preferential voting. Which some say is the cause of so many minor parties winning seats in the upper house (when the real cause is dissatisfaction with the major parties).

Greatest stump speech ever: "I'm not really concerned about my constituents, the people of this state." -Bill "Spaceman" Lee

@Adeptus heheheh. is having a bunch of minor parties really causing a problem? :P

2:28 AM

@Adeptus is the "so many minor parties" seen as a good thing, a bad thing, a mix?

Well, there's Baha'i election procedure--no candidates, anyone who can vote can be voted for, you put exactly nine non-repeating names on the ballot and the nine people with the most votes are the new members of the Local Spiritual Assembly. (And the secret ballot is taken very seriously; nobody's supposed to talk about who they'll vote for at all, just the sorts of qualities one might look for when deciding who to vote for.)

@BESW Hmm... I guess I was thinking more of elections for a single seat, but where more than two candidates might be in the running.

For national voting there's something like an electoral college.

@nitsua60 It's seen as a bad thing by the governing party... and fans of party politics in general

@nitsua60 Yeah, we just don't have any single-seat elected positions.

2:31 AM

Here, have too much information about our electoral systems

@Adeptus party politics shouldn't have fans :P

@Adeptus =)

@Adeptus But I think I'm more interested in your take on it. Better than single-vote, or worse? Mixed bag? What pros/cons do you see?

Pro's: You can give your "over my dead body" candidate last place, and your "okay, but not my favourite" candidates a middle placing. I often start at the bottom and work back.

That's... sobering.

3:07 AM

If you're in an electorate that is strongly one party or another, the vote system, much like your vote, really doesn't matter.

For example, the preferential system has no effect whatsoever on my electorate - it always votes for X party, and that wouldn't change if we switched to single vote or something else.

It's in the hotly contested areas that the preferential system makes independent candidates or minor parties more likely to get through.

3:39 AM

I was so, so disappointed when my province's referendum to adopt STV for provincial elections failed to pass by a whisker.

3:52 AM

hey there @daze413

Hey @Shalvenay. I'm reading politics. Fascinating. Don't have much of an opinion about it, though :D

@daze413 ah :p

2 hours later…

5:42 AM

@nitsua60 The big issue here right now is less "how to vote" and more "who can vote." There's a plebiscite on Guam's political status, and since it's about righting the old injustice when a whole group of people was forced into a particular country without anybody checking what they wanted, the people who can vote in the plebiscite are those directly affected by that injustice.

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6:01 AM

I just submitted an entry to the Lovecraftesque competition.

6:13 AM

Oooer?

I hope so.

4 hours later…

9:47 AM

@nitsua60 Single-seat elections are hard, mathematically speaking. You can show paradoxical voting results for all of them: Arrow's Theorem

I mean, it's more a "it works in practice, but does it work in theory?" statement.

Often, voters have reasonable preferences, which makes some paradoxes far less likely.

10:41 AM

@nitsua60 it is a good thing. So is preferential voting.

Let's consider there's parties ABCDE. A and B are my ideal parties but stand very low chance of being elected. C and D are the two major parties, and of the two I'd rather C wins. E is the party I don't ever want to see have any power at all, I oppose everything they stand for.

In preferential voting, I can order ABCDE in that order, ranked 12345.

If A and B don't get support, my vote still may count toward C. Meanwhile if a surprising number of people just happened to vote for A or B this time around, they gain some power to speak for us. Wow! But if they don't, my vote may get counted toward C instead, and thus I still get to help them find a majority against D.

In a system like the United States of America has, my understanding is if I vote for A or B, and they don't win, then I've effectively just reduced potential support for C, and D is one vote more likely to win. So I've got no good reason to vote for A or B. I should be voting for C.

The advantage of preferential voting is it allows small special interest parties to gain seats. They won't be equipped to run the government, and won't be able to, but they have a vote for two, and now parties may have to make deals with them to get policies past.

For example, one of the parties frequently winning a few seats is the Greens, an environmental activism party. They won't run the country, but they can make or break divisive policies — so the party who wants the policy made or broken will make a deal with the Greens, get the Green's vote, and later push for environmental policies.

So the little parties have influence.

Sometimes this has bad effects! You may have heard of Australia's attempts to roll out a fibre cable internet network. It's going badly. The year it was being voted on, votes were split, and there were three independent senators who could decide whether it would happen or not happen. They were all from the outback and said country towns — especially their towns — had to receive the network first.

This is terrible, installations like this have to start in cities where there's a thousand times more people to start paying for it. But they were adamant. It was country fibre now, or no fibre ever. So, the ruling party committed to country fibre now, and that messed up things quite a lot.

Not to say there aren't a lot of other things going wrong with it. But that's one of them.

Other times though it means big parties push for policies the smaller parties want, in exchange for getting their votes on policies the big parties want. This means special interests get represented in the nation's law.

That's generally good!

11:06 AM

It's easier to have a modicum of moderation in Big Party's programme when there is a smaller party keeping a small but sweet amount of votes for such occasions.

It has a potential to backfire terribly though if the small party is outright evil and holds votes hostage to populism.

@doppelgreener The bounty you just placed is going to pull in an awful lot of dodgy answers - that was a playtest question.

@Miniman Oh. Well.

@Zachiel Assuming the game takes off I'd rather build my character myself. Can you let me know what sort of technicalities are involved? By technicalities I mean venue, medium, arrangement of plots, posting frequency/reaction time obligations, arrangements for times when the obligations are not met etc.

@doppelgreener Not sure what to suggest, just thought I should point it out.

@Miniman I flagged it for a bounty refund.

11:13 AM

@doppelgreener I didn't realise that was an option, but sounds like the best one.

11:24 AM

@SevenSidedDie I just got bitten by that lack of D&D 5e playtest distinguishment. Started a bounty here and have flagged the bounty for a refund. Posted a new answer to that "revisiting whether it needs its own tag" question:

0

A: Revisiting whether D&D Next needs its own separate tag

I just accidentally started an "authoritative reference needed" bounty for a question about a typo that appeared only in the D&D 5e playtest, because I thought it was a proper D&D 5e question: Spell DC Saving Throws. I was informed just afterwards it was playtest material. I was not familiar eno...

11:48 AM

I'm considering whether we might benefit from a close reason for playtest material that is no longer current, like how stack overflow has a close reason for issues that can't be reproduced anymore (such as a bug people were asking about last week, where one web service wouldn't let people log in for about an hour and a half). That SO close reason:

user image

Hmm.

Technically playtests don't become irreproducible, they just lose interest.

What about just a "playtest" tag?

With maybe an associated banner.

My concern with a "playtest" tag is it may also get interpreted to be for question about playtesting.

the administrative work on keeping that tidy may be negligible though.

(I had the same concern with a dnd-next-playtest tag, but it's the one least likely to be interpreted as being about playtesting D&D 5e.)

Alternately -beta but afaik it never got called a beta, so i don't know if calling it that will confuse people into thinking there's some brand new beta program.

12:05 PM

BTW, did you have any particular ideas about an SG-13 PC yet?

I don't really expect you to, but it sounded like maybe you were already percolating.

12:20 PM

@BESW I'm inclined to play some kind of Kowalski type. Hardened soldier dude, cigar-muncher. If he saw the goa'uld he'd go slack-jawed, but he wouldn't wonder whether the goa'uld are truly gods or not, he'd wonder about what level of firepower is necessary to neutralise them should they be dangerous.

Nice.

Potential aspect: Sufficient firepower solves most problems

(probably too 2d an aspect to take though. it frequently won't be a true attitude at all even for him)

No such thing as overkill, perhaps.

Applicable in social situations too!

@BESW lovely!

"There's no such thing as overkill, which is why" [brandishes fate point] "I brought all these grenades."

12:29 PM

that sounds fantastic and promising

12:50 PM

@doppelgreener I love how you use "Kowalski" as a nickname for "generic grizzled veteran".

Since we're talking about a Stargate campaign, it's not generic.

oh

context strikes again

Oh, is it Kawalsky?

I love how movie makers use "Kowalski" as a nickname for "generic grizzled veteran"

huh, now that i check the wikipedia page for that name, there are a few recent (last decade or two) entries for military characters.

1:02 PM

And then there's Kitty Kowalski.

Kowalski is a very common (2nd most common) Polish name and military parlance requires addressing a soldier by his surname. The name also survives translation/mispronunciations in English well, so it's rarely meaning-translated (Smith).

I'm not surprised by this connection.

1:23 PM

@BESW <— btw @trogdor, here's the kind of character I'm considering.

Let me know if there's anything you'd like in this character to help things work for you and your own character!

I am open to alternately playing a more sciencey type, the dude who will be trying to figure things out, but my character percolation isn't yet along those lines.

Archetypes that come to mind are soldier, action scientist (like Samantha Carter), diolomatic nerd type (like Daniel).

Is Stargate worth getting into?

1:43 PM

@eimyr I found the early seasons of the series quite fun (the only parts I've seen), but I also had some childhood love for it. I hear the last seasons go a little bit off the rails.

The movie that started it all is ... not amazing. Apparently it was set up to embody a particular formala reminiscent of certain earlier films. BESW knows more about that.

I think I saw some SG movie, if there was more than one then I don't know which.

First, there was a movie by Roland Emmerich (Godzilla, Independence Day, 2012) called Stargate. It's remarkable mostly as an early precursor to his signature style of using conspiracy theories to justify blowing up major landmarks, but it's also a clunky but sincere homage to pulp adventure and has some interesting visuals.

That got loosely adapted into a TV series called Stargate SG-1, about a team of humanity's best and brightest facing overwhelming odds and triumphing through making good moral choices in tough situations. I'm a big fan of the early/middle seasons.

Then there was a spinoff, Stargate: Atlantis, about a bunch of dysfunctional geniuses scraping by on the skin of their teeth establishing a foothold in a distant galaxy while being their own worst enemies. It's popular, but not quite my thing.

That was followed by Stargate: Universe, which is about a bunch of incompetent jerks infighting while stuck on a spaceship they can't operate. I'm not a fan, and it got cancelled relatively quickly given the franchise's prior records.

There's two or three direct-to-TV SG-1 movies made after that show finished (one's just wrapping up loose threads from being cancelled, one's a pretty great story on its own), a failed MMO, a TTRPG using d20 Spycraft to very poor effect, and Emmerich keeps talking about making sequels to his movie that ignore all the TV stuff.

2:04 PM

was the Emmerich movie an ancient Egypt IN SPAAAAACE with human slaves, godlike aliens who shot plasma from their staves and had weird foldable Iron-Man-like masks that made them awesome-ish?

Yes.

So that's the one I saw and I didn't like it, even as a kid.

I just though it's a bit silly.

do the series have a similar tone?

It's very different, to the point that Emmerich has basically disowned the whole franchise.

The first season struggles to find its footing, with lots of clumsy moralising in the vein of TNG and a good helping of tonal whiplash, but once they find their groove they stick with it very nicely for five or six more seasons--until some of the central cast starts leaving to do other things.

It's definitely silly, in the way every "government coverup of interplanetary travel to fight aliens" story is going to have to be silly. But they treat their premise seriously even while reveling in its ridiculousness, and expanded/changed the movie's lore to fit a much larger scope for a multi-season TV show (SG-1 wound up running 10 seasons).

Basically: the galaxy is terrorised by brain-controlling snakes with massive ego problems who pretend to be gods by using the tech left behind by an even older alien race now vanished. Humanity's figured out how to tap into the Ancient network of planetary gates and has established a military command to explore, make allies, find tech, and generally figure out how to fit into the galactic political stage without getting stepped on.

Our main characters are the first-contact team.

I think I saw one of my roomies at uni watch a season of something that looks similar. Does any of the series feature Weird Forehead Aliens?

They leave the melodrama of the film behind, focusing more on a character-driven adventure about hyper-competent people being pushed to their limits.

Yes. The slaves and shock-troops of the brain-controlling aliens are tattooed/branded with the mark of their owner, on their forehead.

2:18 PM

Specifically a broad black dude with a sort of a burned-in brand that also looks a bit like an oval stamp?

That's one of the main characters, who was a high-up slave warrior before he defected to the humans in the first episode.

Because if so I might have tried watching a couple episodes and therefore have some established opinions

right

Thanks!

Yup!

@nitsua60 Yo!

I wrote an SG-1 campaign years ago and failed to get it off the ground due to Wrong System problems.

Talking with Greener and Troggy about maybe making it a thing we do on Geek Nights that just the three of us are there, since we're the ones in the group who are actually interested in the franchise.

Anyway, sleep now.

3:29 PM

Some thoughts of mine around usage of [system-agnostic], and systemless questions, has clicked into place today -- namely why I am discontent about how these get used sometimes.

I read a graphic design question earlier where someone was explaining "I want to print #dd0017 but it comes out looking different my monitor." The respond started off with pointing out that "#dd0017" on its own is meaningless -- it doesn't correspond to any colour at all unless you first designate a color space, like RGB, and if it's RGB, which variety of RGB? (sRGB is quite common.)

We get a lot of questions asking for mechanical advice without specifying any system at all. Almost universally, those are posted by newbies asking about the latest D&D edition, who don't yet understand that different RPGs exist, or different D&D editions exist, or if they are aware, think they're all the same.

@doppelgreener also: Colors depend on the sceen used - especially older screens often have a considerable green shift...

@Trish Yes that too! The same colour in sRGB will look different depending on how the screen's calibrated.

@doppelgreener the solution would be VTC: Too broad, right? or do we need a category "System needed" for locking/on hold?

@Trish Too broad / unclear is the usual approach to this.

My discontent with questions like How can I take loot away from my players without frustrating them?, however, is that they talk about a problem faced in a game then do not explain what that game is. We know a bit about this problem from what they've described and a little bit about their game.

so while RGB #dd0017 is some... Red with a light blueshift, it might be indistinguishable from #dd0000 or cc0017

3:35 PM

But asking "please solve it" without specifying the problem space to solve it in feels like it is like asking how to print a colour without specifying a colour space. Which game is this? Is it Dungeon World, or D&D, or World of Darkness, or Fate, or none at all and freeform? Different games typically have significantly different psychological frameworks to work within (in some, players losing stuff is fun! in others, it's no fun at all) and different mechanics to leverage.

@doppelgreener read the GM handbook? there is a topic on that (at least in the Pathfinder one)

I retracted my VTC as I posted a system-agnostic answer. Now, I'm beginning to raggert

If in doubt, people tend to assume every game is like the one and only game they've played --- which usually means people assume it's just like D&D, and all of D&D's frameworks and expectations, like "GM can do whatever they want" and "players losing stuff is bad but they can suck it up" and so on are what the asker is operating with. Which may be true! But they haven't specified it's like that, so that leaves us guessing as to what solves the problem most effectively.

#I put it back up...

@Trish sure! if there's a GM handbook that actually describes what to do in this situation. (if it's freeform, there's no GM handbook.)

3:39 PM

in PF they say "tell your players that you now see that item as overpowered/unbalancing and if they would want either a nerf or a replacement"

While the Vampire GM guide just says "bring out the big guns)

I am quite annoyed at those idea generation questions, though. I did start to VTC the earlier ones but apprently they're fine? Is there something wrong if a question attracts so many answers that end up just being a list of "hey, here's an idea", or is it just me?

@daze413 the distinguishing factor is that the bad kind of idea generation questions tend to be bad subjective. both of these get ticked off: every answer is equally valid; your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers (in other words: social fun).

the distinguishing feature of a good subjective question that requires people to come up with an idea is there can actually be "better" and "worse" answers, and a "best" answer. often we can answer from solid expertise on what kind of way things should be done to best achieve the result asked for, within the constraints the question provides.

for example:

24

Q: What's a good item or spell for creating a magical surveillance state?

The mayor of Generic Fantasytown wants a means to monitor his town (population 4,000, perhaps 1 mi. (1.64 km) square). The townsfolk are cowed and submissive, fearing their mayor but fearing even more another horrible attack like the most recent one. The mayor has convinced the townsfolk that suc...

dnd-3.5e spells magic-items civilisation city-design

extremely detailed solutoin of what to use to create a surveillance state, and how that surveillance state should operate.

the bad sort of idea generation is usually "hey guys i wanna play a mage whats the coolest spell do u think", which is just surveying peoples' opinions (every answer equally valid, there's no "correctness" or "best answer" available here), and needs to be closed they should ask a forum or a chat room.

the good idea-generation-y questions tend to invite and receive answers which *may* provide ideas, but they also tend to explain the thought process behind arriving at that idea, how to come up with one's own ideas, share expertise on handling situations like this, etc. they focus on teaching you how to fish, rather than just handing you one fish. the good questions also tend to tick all of these boxes:
• inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”
• tend to have long, not short, answers
• have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone

those are the bullet points at the end of that "questions to avoid asking" help page.

2 hours later…

6:13 PM

@Miniman btw, thanks for pointing this out earlier. Didn't spare the thought to thank you at the time.

7:10 PM

@doppelgreener I was going to suggest that, since there seems to be significant support, just start tagging with [dnd-next-playtest] and see how it pans out, but the synonym prevents that. Not sure how you should proceed from there… (If the consensus was overwhelming I'd just go break the synonym now, but there's enough mixed voting that I'm not sure I have that mandate yet.)

7:26 PM

Oh there was SG-1 commentary back there.

Race of space snakes. Masters space travel, beam weapons. But plate armor. Plate armor.

Then again, later in the series the Asgard comment, "It would have never occured to us to construct a weapon around the concept of chemical explosive propulsion..."

@MadMAxJr Snazzy plate armour. The snazz is important in intergalactic politics.

Admittedly it was useful for intimidation purposes and is why the Egyptians thought they were animal gods.

Also the FN-P90 is an all purpose weapon, including an improvised anti-glider gun in one case.

8:08 PM

In military news today: the USA built a ship with revolutionary new guns, then cancelled all orders for the projectiles because they're too expensive. (They'll retrofit the cannons for different affordable ammo.)

In actuality they decided to build less ships than originally planned, which meant fewer projectiles would be built, which meant less economy-of-scale benefits so each projectile would cost an order of magnitude more than first promised.

9:07 PM

as of today, the doppelgreener ceases to be a king of all cosmos and commences being a captain haddock!

9:17 PM

note to self: create a character who speaks in third person about themselves one day.

Assuming the game takes off, I think we will use roll20 for the map and for drawing random cards from decks (the treasure deck and the rumors deck that are integral to the gameplay). I need to identify a forum or a place for the actual game to take place (a SE chat would be ideal in my mind, but I don't really want to leave spoilers of this adventure to be found easily through google indexes).
I think offgame/ongame mixed chat can do fine, since this is not a full immersion narration experience. I think that looking for posts once per day and replying as soon as deemed possible is courtesy,…

@doppelgreener ok, duly noted, also nice new avatar change there :)

@doppelgreener Blistering barnacles!

@BESW A hundred of them!

@KorvinStarmast The "What's wrong?" experience was a good example of what I describe in my answer: based on reflection and study, a plan was devised and enacted that seemed like a reasonable response to the reality of the situation. Now that we're several cycles past, we've learned from it and probably wouldn't do it again.

But so long as we learned from it and moved forward, it wasn't a fiasco.

9:35 PM

@BESW Thanks for your kind words, my 8^D was intended to show that I was commenting with a light heart. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions ..." Not sure what we learned, but I learned a few things about a few people, and got a new level of respect for both you and doppelgreener during that whole thing.

We also learned that open polling for complaints isn't productive.

@BESW yeah, I still recall asking that we not get into a comment scrum, which of course is what promptly happened. heh, joke's on me on that one.

@BESW I've still got some unhealed trust-scars, alas.

so I've been unable to move forward in one regard

but that may change sometime.

@doppelgreener My advantage with being a salty old fart (retired Navy and such) is that being grumpy brings a few extra points of AC to any such scrum. 8^D And I am teachable, so I learned a thing or two which is a Good Thing.

@doppelgreener I just reviewed the back and forth between Jeff and mxy back in 2011 about site approachability, and it gave me some food for thought. The latest complaint about what I termed hostility to new users a while back was unfortunately not followed up -- the participant in question has decided that further effort isn't warranted.

@doppelgreener they and we and all pronouns inclusive. :-)

@KorvinStarmast You seem to feel whatever the problem is, and I'm certainly interested to learn about it.

@KorvinStarmast I enjoyed your response to that.

9:58 PM

@doppelgreener By the "problem" do you mean the received aura of hostility? I want to make sure I am clear on what you are referring to.

@KorvinStarmast Whatever it is that was going on for that guy and which you and Zachiel seemed to feel was going on.

Though y'all could be experiencing different things, which is part of why I wanted to clarify. "I feel like something's going on, I won't say what it is, say here how we can improve" invites five people to talk about five different issues past each other while all thinking they're talking about solving the same thing and being baffled by each others' nonsolutions.

@doppelgreener I am not sure if all of my comments and answers are still up on meta, but I think one answer is somewhere. I've been dealing with text based internet based communication since before the endless September of 1993. That said, I got addicted to forums, and so got very used to forum style communication.

@doppelgreener Having not been involved in SE/SO at all in any way shape or form, RPG.SE was a bit of a culture shock in terms of received style. I responded to a comment beneath one of my answers or one of my questions early on, since deleted, with a terse version of "thanks for your condescending shot at me" when it may have been a neutral remark.

@doppelgreener Uhm? I don't remember anymore. Which guy was it?

@doppelgreener And that's the fun with the "receive" end of communication. There is a particular style (ever been held hostage to a style guide in formal correspondence? grrr) to discourse at RPG.SE, and as I discovered, a different one at SciFi, and a different one at Christianity, and a different one at History, and a different one at Aviation. All similar, but slightly different.

I still have some problems parsing your question, even after the clarifying edit. Please tell me if I'm correct: you have seen how questions get judged and voted on this stack and the fear of not being up to these standards (whatever they might be) is scaring you and making it hard for you to create questions where we (as a community) won't have any negative reaction. You don't like this and you would like the community to discuss some solutions here (maybe a guide?). Right? — Zachiel 2 days ago

10:04 PM

@doppelgreener Oh, the new meta question?

@doppelgreener So if one is used to a given style, when one confronts a different style with the expectation that it will be similar to what one is used to it is easy to receive an air of hostility when one is not intended by the sender.

I have some connection problems and all your replies are coming to me late.

@doppelgreener I completely get where @REactionFaye is coming from. I am disappointed that they is not as crusty of an old fart as I am, and followed up with a few more specific things or examples to flesh out the dark cloud feeling.

@doppelgreener It took me a while to learn the "RPG.SE" style for a question, and for an answer, to include being subject to aggressive comments twice by KRyan over alignment = leper unclean. A year later I finally went in and edited the answer, and was surprised that a couple of upvotes appeared/downvotes disappeared.

I suspect the Stack's willingness to shift votes based on substantial edits is one of the most surprising cultural elements for new citizens.

@doppelgreener A lot of experienced people who write well (to include me) still have to adapt to the RPG.SE style guide. Who will put in the effort? For free? Some will, and some won't. Time is something we do have a choice about spending.

@BESW Yes, it's a good feature.

10:11 PM

(see also: voting to re-open seems like an alien concept to a lot of new citizens, like they can't even believe it exists.)

@Zachiel When I saw the comment under the meta question "There is a very general lack of safety" I curbed an impulse to respond. One thing I have tried to do is be less prickly. (not doing great at it, but working on it).

I wish the user had been able/willing to express their concerns more specifically, so we could maybe identity a new course of action to continue improving the site.

But I kinda suspect the only substantial change we could make would be in working to be more friendly about the comments we make, rather than in changing our policies about edits, suggestions, close votes, etc. And we've already got multiple campaigns to do that.

@BESW It's a received communication thing, and it's a style thing. My first few months I got the impression that mxy was, despite argument with Jeff back in the beginning about "not being dicks" a brusque and obnoxious (something). It took me a while to grok the mxy thing. We each have a personal style.

Oh, absolutely.

But there are techniques we can use regardless of style, like sharing relephant links to the help and meta for further context.

There's a big difference between one user telling another user what to do, and one user sharing a site policy with another user.

@KorvinStarmast I don't know if this is an artifact of ESL or just today learning about the "singular they" or a deliberate grammar error, but with singular they, we still use plural terms -- "they are" rather than "they is" -- even referring to a singular target. English! What a wild ride it is!

10:19 PM

mmm, the grammatical gymnastics to achieve a respectful neuter in English are a little ridiculous.

yeah

I agree there for sure

in fact, a lot of the things in the language are a little ridiculous

Apr 7 at 10:43, by BESW

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.

oh yeah. there's actually a thing called:

Middle English creole hypothesis

The Middle English creole hypothesis is the concept that the English language is a creole, i.e. a language that developed from a pidgin. The vast differences between Old and Middle English have led some historical linguists to claim that the language underwent creolisation at around the time of the Norman Conquest. The theory was first proposed in 1977 by C. Bailey and K. Maroldt and has since found both supporters and detractors in the academic world. Different versions of the hypothesis refer to creolisation through contact between Old English and Norman French, between Old English and Old Norse...

Short version of the Middle English creole hypothesis: At international port cities, many people of many languages have to communicate, but can't spare the time to learn everyone else's languages. So the port cities develop a trade language called a "pidgin" which is all the most important bits of the various languages smashed together haphazardly. If a pidgin becomes used widely by a community as their standard language, it becomes a creole. The theory is this happened to English at some point.

Not all scholars think we need to go back to Middle English to justify English's status as a creole--that's only necessary if you want to rigidly define creole as a stable first language emerging from a pidgin, which is... not a universally shared definition, shall we say.

@doppelgreener I was making a joke. 8^D

10:30 PM

@KorvinStarmast gotcha

@BESW Fair! And it totally works to just presume it's become a creole or has been one all along, just adopting bits of other languages as works.

@doppelgreener I also got dumped and had to reboot. The Internet is still a strange and dangerous country, from whose borne no traveler returns

@BESW what I was going to say before I got dumped is that "Be Nice" is an imperative, but "be friendly" is an option. that is the nature of the SE beast. I've met some folks (Brits in particular) who can be oh so polite without being friendly. (I have in mind one particular Captain in the RN who's "thank you for that" was code for "what a load of bollocks, I wish you'd shut up.")

@KorvinStarmast Indeed.

Which means that if I want folks to pick up on my sincere friendliness, I need to work on distinguishing it from politeness.

And it is work.

@BESW yeah, it is work for me (as I am a card carrying smart ass from way back), though for some folks (like nitsua60) it seems a natural talent.

@BESW I have not seen much of wax eagle lately, is wax still among the quick?

Rumour has it he's been stolen by a dragon.

I think Shalvenay is mounting a rescue party.

@BESW Well that explains it. I was hoping to offer to wax a big thanks for some of his help years ago in the formative years of Christianity.SE. That site also has some unique boundaries that it took me a while to grok. Going back on CSE meta, I also note that mxy was around for that stand up as well.

10:41 PM

Yeah, Wax's shared insights from CSE were very helpful to me in wrapping my head around the needs and context of RPG.SE discourse.

@BESW I made a recent post on the meta there about an SE not being all things to all people, nor trying to be. As it was not burninated, I think it shows that I am teachable.

Yey!

That old chestnut needs to die in a fire. It comes from a good place, but it never stays there.

@KorvinStarmast I agree with you on that. I've had my days of finding ways to be very un-kind while saying not a single bad word. I used to do that all the time; I used to be grumpy at people a lot. I feel I've matured by miles since then.

Gotta check a form where I moderate, it appears a flame war is in progress.

(my earliest comments on meta.se are a view into grumpy young teenage-or-just-barely-not me)

10:56 PM

@doppelgreener I'll have to go on a finger-walk sometime.

@doppelgreener When I grump, "be nice" tends to go out the window...

(or, uh, not meta.se, but just, any stack exchange site)

11:16 PM

hey there @KorvinStarmast

11:33 PM

@Shalvenay Hello, and sadly, I must log off as I am summoned. (By she who must be obeyed ...) Cheers.

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