Anyone have the 5e Monster Manual Handy? All I have is the SRD at the moment; it lacks the whole description. Trying to get a grip on specter incorporeal movement, and whether the specter wanders about in the border ethereal.

@KorvinStarmast Sure. Lemme go grab mine.

What page?

nm... derp. 279

It can move through objects and creatures as though it were difficult terrain

yeah.

And it takes 1d10 force damage if it ends its turn in something

Specifically an object.

@KorvinStarmast It's got incorporeal movement, but none of the ethereal stuff that, say, a ghost has.

Not sure if that would count ending its turn in another creature.

@AVeryLargeBear I would imagine that would be the common interpretation.

> Beyond Redemption. ...It is doomed to the Material Plane, its only end the oblivion that comes with the destruction of its soul.

@ColinGross That's probably how I would rule it, but it does specifically call out both creatures and objects in the previous line so that gives me some hesitation.

@AVeryLargeBear Yeah. We really need a formal ontology for the rule books to adhere to.

@ColinGross Agreed. It drives me a little crazy, since I used to play Magic, and it's really good at keeping all of the game terms straight.

@AVeryLargeBear I haven't played that since 3rd edition, but they did have a pretty comprehensive code book with term definitions and a specified hierarchy for their precedence.

I'd have liked more is_a relationships declared, but that's usually the case for me.

Yeah. I stopped playing a couple years ago, but I still sorta follow rules. I'm a little wishy-washy on the gameplay, but I really like the rules system. If that makes any sense.

@Tiggerous nice find on the crawford tweet about dominate animal and the druid. I think that also settles the disputes about polymorph into a shapchanger

@AVeryLargeBear Wizards has proved they can do it with D&D (4e is about as good as Magic in that regard), but it's not part of the franchise's traditional format so they backed away from it in 5e.

@BESW A formal ontology that has all the nouns and verbs you're going to use is a pretty big upfront cost, but makes the effects of subsequent work verifiable.

(3.5 tried, but in a half-hearted sort of way that failed to have good follow-through. They just kept adding new stuff for the sake of newness, and it quickly lost coherence in practical application in later works.)

@AVeryLargeBear Re: Apocalypse World, if you want a quicker introduction to stuff that can happen in the game you can just check this free pdf with stuff you ought to print for the game: char sheets and all that: apocalypse-world.com/ApocalypseWorldBasicRefbook2ndEd.pdf

Hmm... I wonder if anyone has done any RDF work with D&D

@BESW Huh. I missed 4e. I just really like always knowing how things would resolve. Or at least having a clear framework for resolving new interactions.

@ColinGross Thanks, though I can't say I deserve any credit for it - someone else had already employed it on a tangentially related question elsewhere.

@Tiggerous Still a good find

@AVeryLargeBear Then you probably would've found 4e pretty satisfying.

@kviiri Great. Thanks! Maybe during lunch ;)

You'll need some terminology, but basically "roll+X" means rolling 2d6 and adding whatever X is, "+1 forward" means +1 to the next roll, "+1 ongoing" means +1 to all future rolls until something changes, and "hold" means you sort of get points to spend on whatever the move tells you that you can use them for :)

Its ontology was strictly limited and they were careful to only introduce new terms rarely and as really needed (with the exception of monks. damnit, monks.), but the existing ontology was flexible enough to fill a surprising number of mechanical and narrative spaces.

Google thinks it's funny. My top result for, D&D RDF, is a link to roll20 owl. Which is funny because .owl is a format for RDF.

Today's lunch: TVP bolognese with lots of fresh basil, sauerkraut and rye bread. Trying to pump up my iron intake :)

@BESW I'll have to add it to the backlog of games to read. As if it wasn't already long enough :P

@Rubiksmoose That expression was probably unnecesserily flowerly - I'll edit to be clearer.

4e was definitely a welcome relief in comparison to 3.5 for my group.

@kviiri I'd take a dictionary of terms, but having formal structure about them would be very convenient.

@Tiggerous I was actually just venting. I think your phrasing was fine (if not a little too kind).

And its careful ontology was helpful also in letting me see past the mechanics to identify the edition-transcending D&Disms which ultimately led me to seek out different systems with entirely different play paradigm expectations.

@BESW You didn't like the 3.5 calculate everything approach?

@Rubiksmoose I sensed the vent. :P

I disliked many things about D&D 3.5. The calculation was not high on the list.

The fact that the calculations produced manifestly different effects than the game told me they would... yeah.

@Tiggerous It is just really ridiculous how undefined the whole language and mechanics around targeting for spells is.

@BESW "system mastery"

:-)

howdy howdy

@kviiri That seems like a different way to present "sell a lot of splat books" as a business model. ;)

Afternoon NautArch.

> which IIRC was one of the things that got me a little sideways on 2e, though RL mostly moved me out of the games at that point ...

I"m debating about bountying that Intermdiate effects question to give @HellSaint some more rep fo rtheir answer. But I also don't want to feel like it's a pile on the OP for not talkign to their players.

I'm entertained. Looks like an academic has at least dipped their toes into doing an RDF description of RPG games profs.info.uaic.ro/~busaco/teach/courses/wade/demos/owl-dl/…

@ColinGross That looks quite interesting

@NautArch I'm not sure that a bounty would necessarily come across as a pileon to me honestly.

But maybe others would perceive it differently.

@Rubiksmoose Was thinking mor about drawing more attention to a question whose answers are all "Dood, did you talk with your players?"

I really hope OP got the message though. TALK TO YOUR PLAYERS. You need to be playing in somewhat the same game. And you can't change it on them without some sort of conversation happening.

@Rubiksmoose Someone had edited the caps out of that line in my answer. I put them back in.

@AVeryLargeBear It doesn't look like there is a follow up, but the game ontology project that it references looks like it got more work done, but kinda petered out a decade ago :(

@NautArch Oooh yeah that makes more sense. Though I'm not sure it'll get that many more answers honestly.

@Rubiksmoose It was more of a way to give Hellsaint more rep. I really liked their answer.

So it may just get attention in the form of upvotes. your call though it doesn't really matter to me.

@ColinGross It's never to late to start it up again :)

How many more people will find polymorph as the solution to all their magical problems?! My solution: If you kill a polymorph... you kill the original too. no way for shenaningans with "I make him a mouse and kill him to end this effect" unless you ALSO brought a way to raise the dead...

@Trish But then your players start using polymorph to easily deal with Tarrasques...

nope, since my tarrasque is immune to polymorph.

@AVeryLargeBear True. Putting it up on github would be pretty low cost, but the time investment in actually doing it... yeeesh

@Trish To be fair, they already have legendary resistance

@Rubiksmoose Same with dragons, but that's got limited uses

@Trish I'm not sure what your issue is?

@ColinGross Sure, but you only use legendary resistance if they would fail the save.

EVERY Hunz and Kunz seems to want to solve status effects by jus polymorphing or polymorphing and killing their party members...

And it should have a decently high save to begin with.

Apostrophes and hyphens are allowed in baby names in Alabama

That's nice.

@Rubiksmoose +9 WIS save and legendary resistance

@ColinGross You're not wrong

What about ʻokina?

@Trish If that is the issue, then just houserule that effects don't end with polymorph but they are just supressed. Seems way easier than rewriting how the spell works in a major way.

...nope, they don't allow ʻokina. That's not great.

@Rubiksmoose Usually you can get a GM to use those pretty early on with a sorcerer and some metamagic.

@Trish Plus your "kill the polymorph, kill the creature" rule would actually really really nerf the spell for its normal use as well.

@BESW But you can have a name like '''''''''''''

@SPavel All elves are from Alabama, then? Thats fun

@SirCinnamon Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, elves are from Alabama

the only other solution is: every villain knows baleful polymorph and turns heroes into pottet plants.

@Rubiksmoose Yeah, the temp hp is the whole point of shape changing

@SPavel Are hyphens rare in English names? I haven't really put a lot of thought into it

@Trish That doesn't sound like much of a solution.

@kviiri In first names: extremely.

@kviiri bobby-jo!

Update for anyone interested - had my tattoo consult appt yesterday. Settled on my original choice of owlbear but i'm already considering getting another after that

Huh. Well then again English uses less hyphens in the first place than Finnish does

@Trish it would have to be true polymorph in 5e and I really think that you may be creating more issues than you had to begin with.

@Rubiksmoose I thought effects didn't end with polymorph?

@kviiri The problem, of course, is that using an English-only input system means all names have to be English.

@BESW WTF

@BESW Yup

@NautArch Spell effects that depend on humanoid (eg) theoretically would. I thought that was what we were talking about.

luckily, D&D has gods that actually care some small animal excrements... and that I have another reason to not tough the actual gaming of dnd5e with a tongue.

@SirCinnamon I'm telling you. Get the gelatinous cube around the owlbear for your next one

@BESW Well... Latin character alphabet

And conform to the traditional "first name middle name last name" format. Where's the room for patronymics and all that.

The ʻokina, for example, is a Hawaiʻian character.

@SPavel So, I can call my child "Yhm Draigh Goch'Drop Master"?

@Trish Out of curiosity is this something you've seen in game?

@AVeryLargeBear Gelatinous cube, beholder and mimic are all basically must haves

A lot of my peers in high school couldn't put their full names on the standardized test forms.

@SirCinnamon You laugh. The artist laughs. The tattoo laughs.... roll initiative

@Rubiksmoose ah, gotcha. Yeah I did ask that question :)

@NautArch Life size cloaker tattoo

@ColinGross In Clocktaur War, the tattoo bites.

peels off

@Derpy can and ought to

Here it's fairly common for one's first name or middle name to be two normal given names separated by hyphen.

@kviiri I choose to pronounce the hyphen.

@Rubiksmoose @Trish I'm not sure I see a problem with that, though. Someone else in the party is using their concentration in order to counter the spell effect. ALthough a Dispel Magic may be a better option in most cases.

@SPavel and forever shall he be know as Little Bobby Tables....

My second and third names (which are not hyphenated) form a fairly common hyphenated name and every now and then some official inserts a hyphen there as if they were a single name

@SirCinnamon huh?

@kviiri e.g. "Ste-" as a variant of Steven

@NautArch Replied to the wrong message, my bad

@kviiri Oh wow. My wife has a hyphenated last name and most of the time forms either ignore the colon and everything after or just mangle the name completely.

She has so many problems with it.

@kviiri Arbitrary hyphenation?

@kviiri Some people hyphenate last names, especially common with divorced/separated/not married parents

But clearly not all states allow that

Heck, my name's different on a lot of my documents just by virtue of having more separate words than most standard American name-entry programs like, and I have the minimum number of names most people around here have.

@ColinGross Well it's arbitrary to an extent. My parents decided that I'd have Veli and Matti as my second and third name respectively, and Veli-Matti happens to be a fairly common name itself. So there's a lot of confusion over two names that are essentially the same.

@SPavel Probably just the forms in the state don't accommodate it. Unlikely to be disallowed by statute.

@kviiri Naming things is hard.

@ColinGross According to the link, these are laws.

Laws regarding naming are not uncommon

See Portugal, where you have to pick from a list

Legally controlling what people are names is... difficult

btw, forget me the OT, but no discussion about names and hyphens should go without linking this...

related xkcd

@ColinGross Yup, that's why every man in my family is a Matti by their first or middle name

@Derpy Already been referenced

and if you give a lot of freedom, people are liable to abuse it just for... fun, i guess. Allow all punctuation? this is my son, his name is "?"

@SPavel Well, in the world, but what about the north american centric view of existence?!?! /s

Eh, there has to be sensible values for the amount of freedom.

@ColinGross Making stupid laws is an American tradition

@SPavel They inherited it from England though

@SPavel Like legislating a rational value of Pi?

@kviiri I thought the British tradition was basically the same but slightly more inebriated

@SirCinnamon Do you mean putting Zalgo in names isn't a good idea?

@kviiri No, there are lots of new stupid laws

@SPavel Sure, I mean the concept itself more than particular laws

@SirCinnamon Ah, so you're the parent of the rival in Pokemon Gold & Silver!

@kviiri Having stupid laws is not a concept monopolized by any one culture

@SPavel that's true too

In Commonwealth of England times, England had some rather strict moral laws to protect the virtue of the populace

The legend goes that as the punishments for vice were increased, people were acquitted by the jury more and more because the people didn't generally agree with the degree of punishment imposed for petty adultery or something like that.

That said, 🦄Unicorn is a valid name in the Hawaii... would be fun to see the chaos you could cause when someone has to insert your name in their own app that doesn't allow special characters.

Probably, it would also mean you couldn't use most online shops.

Don't think amazon would handle the emoji very well.

Nor probably would UPS

voting registration would be fun

@kviiri Jury nullification

I'm still lost on that spell-less caster.

@NautArch Isn't a spell-less druid just a ranger

@SPavel rangers have spells :)

@NautArch Maybe a barbarian then, they can't spell

I mean, I agree some spells can shut down an encounter, but that's about encounter design.

Or about spell design

I guess the acid test is: if your spell could shut down the party as easily as the enemies, it's probably too strong.

@NautArch and so, the strange guy wearing a white scarf you have just thrown a fireball at... was revealed to be Natsu.

@Derpy new chat, who dat? :P

googled, so immune to fire? But yeah, that's the idea. Always tossing big X spells? Give them some creatures resistant/immune to X. NOt all the time, but mix it up. Let htem shine, let them struggle.

Ops, that was a Fairy Tail reference, sorry. To put it simply, just someone used to eat fire. By which I actually mean eat. Long story, raised by a dragon and so on.

@NautArch I think their core concern was that this is a heist adventure and they assumed that spells would break it. So their solution was to just remove them all, but somehow still allow the players to play casters.

@Rubiksmoose Ah, I think that's an erroneous assumption. But it takes work in designing the security system :)

@NautArch For sure. I disagree on several levels with the premise of their problem in fact.

And then the solution they came up with is also poor IMO. Casters without spells are simply not casters.

In a world with magic, a bank would logically have some way of defeating things like invisibility and anti-magic field is an 8th-level spell.

Maybe detect magic alarm wards?

@Rubiksmoose Even a Thief Rogue may make a heist difficult.

@Yuuki lots and lots of things they could do.

Part of it seemed to be the fact that they were unfamiliar with 5e and had players that were explicit about trying to abuse magic to do creative things.

So that is a valid concern for sure.

@Rubiksmoose that's a legit problem, then. But the resolution is probably to play a game that's a bit more stricter in terms of ...RAW.

Something to think about that modern security systems are less concerned with keeping thieves out (not that they don't still try), but more that they try to keep thieves in.

@NautArch Or a bit looser.

So once they grab something, they can't escape until the cops show up.

The biggest problem with a heist in a magic setting is not "the party's spells obviate all defenses" but "magical defenses obviate most party members"

@SPavel Unless they do get clever, in which case, award the cleverness!

@Yuuki Straight from U7 book of weirdness: Kill the only employee in Britain local bank. Take Key. Open vault door. Take all Gold Ingots. Bring employee to Lord British and have him resurrected. Give employee ingots in exchange for Coins. Repeat.

Yep, that was a very open game... but it had some serious logical flaws... :P

For context, by the way, we are discussing a chat discussion starting here about this question: rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/123925/…

@NautArch It's fairly trivial to make a cleverness-proof magical defense.

Mundanes simply lack tools for dealing with certain spells.

This is bad and should not be the case; newer editions have generally been better about it

Additionally, for traps and hazards and other noncombat abilities, the DM can simply make up magical effects

@SPavel Possibly, but never underestimate the power of players to circumvent your plans

For example: The entrance to the vault does not exist, it is normally accessed through teleport

In Room A, you can't teleport in or out. In Room B, the walls are made of an unbreakable material. Etc. Not actual spells, just made-up abilities.

@NautArch But also that is part of the fun in some respects.

How are you, a thief, going to break into that?

This may be a main sight question, but is there a way to get a Scry effect across planes?

@Rubiksmoose You may have to add another comment to the original question stating we discussed in chat, again.

@SPavel Tunnel through the floor :P

@Rubiksmoose It's not just a box with no door.

For the sake of argument, it's carved out of an arbitrary section inside a mountain.

How do you even find it?

@SPavel Locate Object?

@Tiggerous Maybe, but it is less relevant now because OP is not here talking about it with us. The main thing it added before was clarity about the issue.

@MikeQ A spell :)

@ColinGross Both of my browsers find your link unreachable

@KorvinStarmast They don't like pdfs ?

FWIW, doesn't one of the (discarded) iterations of the Revised Ranger remove spellcasting? Or did I dream that...

Also - locate object has many limitations such as 1000ft range, must know the object, blocked by thin sheet of lead

@KorvinStarmast Do you have wget or curl available on your OS?

@SPavel Ok, then Dominate a bank employee and have them escort you in

@Tiggerous this perhaps

@MikeQ Another spell.

Plus now your plan is just use the services of a wizard

Which is the same as be a wizard but one removed.

It includes an example of removing spells from ranger

@Sdjz Not sure if that is what I was thinking of or not - but it looks interesting - so thanks!

@ColinGross I may try later on a different machine.

Related thought: Since locate object can be used to ping the nearest instance of a kind of object, surround your true chamber with false chambers containing (for example) a single coin and 1,000,000 undead killer bees

@SPavel But what if the goal of the heist is to get all the bees

@MikeQ Decoy bees.

@SPavel Option 3 - Try to disguise yourself as a mountain, wait for an employee to show up, and see what they do

@MikeQ The ol' mountain disguise. Oldest trick in the magical banking industry.

@MikeQ Just watch out for sherpas, they might try and climb you.

@MikeQ Why dominate a bank employee when you can run a Bavarian fire drill?

Lead lined vaults tend to mitigate a lot of the magical ways to rob a bank .. but not all of them.

A lot of data breaches occur not because someone was really good at hacking and got through all the firewalls but because someone planted a USB drive in a parking lot and people will put those drives in their work computers to see what's on them.

Or someone pretended to be an inspector.

Or a client.

Social Engineering - the human element is always a weak point

@Yuuki "Greetings, herr inspektor. Please insert your serial bus tentacle into the port to confirm your identity."

all the gold in the room has to be taken out soon or later. I'll wait.

@Derpy Why?

In a world with elves, liches, and dragons, the owner of the commodity may very well be happy to keep it there forever.

@HellSaint What you call stupid, with polymorph, a lot of other players call cool. (And at 8th level, how many times can you do that?)

Perhaps the owner shuttles the gold from one impermeable vault to another when making a purchase; perhaps he simply trades arcane marks with others that indicate who owns the gold, and the physical location of it is irrelevant within the owner's social system.

@BESW not sure if you got all of what you needed for the detective, but "need to pay the debt/rent" as a motivation can conflict with a lot of other ones ...

@SPavel you may be right... which remind me that it is also probably faster to just go and kill those liches&dragons and take the gold :P

@SPavel Congratulation: you just invented magic-assisted block chains

@Derpy No, the idea has been around for muuuuuuch longer than blockchain

@Derpy Was trying to work towards that as well lol

Blockchain replaces trust.

Wait, you mean that is the reason it is called Ethereum ? :P

@Derpy If it was easy, they'd already be dead

@Derpy Sorta not really. I think magical blockchain would be if multiple mages created a single arcane mark that contains a ledger of all gold and who it belongs to.

Then again, I only have a passing understanding of blockchain so I'm probably wrong.

And everyone has a copy of that particular arcane mark.

@Derpy Not even. More like magic assisted... paper money, like when there was a gold standard

@Yuuki give them enough time and they will. It is a know fact that mages tends to gravitate towards creating magic councils.

@SPavel Made me think of Rai stones.

@Anaphory Rules as Intended stones?

@Anaphory I was trying to remember the name of those, yeah

So was I. “Rock money” was good enough as a search term.

tl;dr - the money is enormous and heavy and does not move, but the village social discourse keeps track of who owns it

@NautArch Hah! I need to get me some of them.

@NautArch Twist. They are just a magic 8 ball that displays out of context Crawford tweets.

@Rubiksmoose Out of context Crawford tweets are the post-apocalyptic currency of the wasteland

@Rubiksmoose IIRC they became a lot cheaper after the introduction of metal tools? Or I may confuse that with Maori carvings.

Here's a thought: wizards create gold golems that follow them around, and shift mass into other wizards' gold golems when transactions need to be made.

The golems would be able to split in case the wizard had to pay a non-wizard, but that never happens, because non-wizards have nothing that wizards want.

if you try to steal it, it will punch you

@SPavel "Here's a golem testicle for your services."

@SPavel And it if stands on a bridge, the bridge breaks. Gold is heavy.

@KorvinStarmast What is "standing"?

All gold golems hover as a matter of principle

@SPavel Floating exchange rate

Wouldn't it be far simpler for a mage to just store the money using the Demiplane spell and laugh at any attempt to steal the money stored in a pocket dimension?

@Derpy Wizards are not interested in simple

High level wizards are like Musk, Bezos, etc: they have vastly outsized power compared to their needs.

@SPavel but they are far interested in the "I can. You can't" and this seems a pretty example of this.

@Derpy Yeah but nobody can see that

The mightiest wizards probably walk around with their souls partially infused with the anthropomorphic personification of wealth, or would if they walked around, which they don't.

@SPavel bring along a fake coin purse that when opened will summon a band of imps that will dance while singing "Trollollollo my gold is in another dimension because I can"?

@Derpy That gets old after a few levels

Plus, your rival just created a selectively permeable portal to the Plane of Earth that makes it rain gems and gold nuggets

You need more pizzaz

(and more pizzas)

@SPavel which only means that I can focus on the pizzas now that he finally solved the "what will my dragon eat today" problem

@Derpy Your rival has enchanted his dragon to eat itself, because his dragon is the mythical Ouroboros

@SPavel then I'll just wait until he get stuck in a logical deadlock due to the bane of mages, also known as koans

> Said the God of the Silence Between Words: “The absence of a zero implies a presence. The presence of a zero implies an absence. When the serpent devours its tail up to the tip of its tongue, then what remains?"

@Derpy Wizards are basically engineers with better fashion sense, they don't understand hypotheticals

They'd just go "let's find out" and start dominate animaling snakes

@SPavel If I had supreme cosmic powers and a tenuous grasp of ethics, I would too.

@KorvinStarmast I meant stupid as broken - I am the player doing it everytime I play Wizard lol

@GreySage Be the change you want to see in the world

and I almost always play Wizard.

I don't really like playing wizards, but as a GM I love doing NPC wizards who have as much magic as IRL wizards did. That is, they're more obsessed with magic squares, distilling gold from urine and stuff like that.

@HellSaint The whole point of doing magic is to do cool things. Turning into a TRex is a cool thing. For an adventure day with 4-6 encounters, you only get to do it a time or two at level 8. For a 15 minute adventure day ... more powerful.

They also tend to be good with lore of magic, just not very good at using it.

@kviiri "I've studied magic for 20 years." "You must be really good at it!" "No, but I know a lot about people who were!"

@HellSaint The trick as a DM is "OK, you are a TREX with a 2 Int" (to whomever is the TRex now) ... please behave accordingly. :)

@SPavel Basically they're to PC wizards what town guards are to PC fighters :-)

@kviiri PC fighters are not that good

@SPavel Then, I fear that I should also add I am an engineer. And a developer. Which is worse. I go around while "let's see how my users will like it when they find out now the delete all button has switched place with the save one"

@NautArch I was going to suggest a modest reskin of "amulet of the planes" (Very Rare Item) which moves people to planes with a chance to fail; call it the "crystal ball of the planes" reskin, and it sees a place, rather than moves to it, with a chance to fail. (DC 15).

On a failure you seen somewhere else on a different plane.

But that appears to be outside of what you are looking for

@NautArch I'm not sure you can bounty a closed question for now - but honestly, I feel like the Talk to your players part is obviously important - to a point I start the answer with that. Changing the game style from "nothing happens" to "now you lose a limb" from nowhere can make many players feel sad.

@Derpy How charitable of you to add a button for Delete All, rather than just executing the function on page load

@HellSaint Yeah, I tried to steer clear of that in my answer (mostly because they hadn't yet stated this was not discussed with the players)

I wouldn't say it's a pile on the OP, rather a reinforcement on the fact that communication is important :P

I had wanted to address that, but it could be a good Q&A for a table looking for that type of game.

I'm just uncertain that table is looking for it.

(like the guy that set up his garage door to toggle on a GET to his server, so when he opened Safari and it loaded his 8 top bookmarks, the door would open regardless of where he was)

@SPavel Depends on the edition of course, but I guess people typically consider them to be roughly on par with wizards in terms of raw combat power in 5e. I just wish they had as much interesting choice as the wizards do :-)

@kviiri Combat? You mean that thing you do between downtime?

@SPavel The thing I wish we were doing between downtime, yep

Never heard of it.

@SPavel that would be deterministic, which is bad. And no one said that a) the icon for save and delete are any different in the first place and b) the function isn't still called at random times to add confusion

@KorvinStarmast Yeah, but take care for that to not be misunderstood as "You're now a brainless T-rex, eat your own party", as the creature "retains alignment and personality", whatever personality should mean - but I tend to use it as my reason for believe he's still friendly to friends.

DM is giving us our first really complex puzzle. A grid of symbols, gears, pointer arrows. They actually have to be cut out and assembled.

@Derpy Plot twist: Users now save all their files directly to the recycle bin since that's where they end up anyway.

Ugh, I have a serious hankering for some AW now that we discussed it.

@kviiri Yeah, 5e apparently has remarkable balance, which is neat. Still prefer Pathfinder's choice, and hopefully pathfinder 2e helps with the "Exponential Wizard" issue (reworked action economy makes me hope, level 10 spells makes me worry)

First rule of user annoyance: no application given the same initial conditions and inputs shall produce the same results two times.

I'm optimistic about PF2E.

@Derpy Yeah, it's a different crash-to-desktop error code every time

@HellSaint I didn't say eat the party, just play with a 2 Int. Animal intelligence. It's a bit of a role playing challenge/reach ...

If Starfinder is ruleset 1.5, I'm liking how they're shaving out some of the excess d20 rules cruft.

@Maximillian Have they committed to anything they didn't promise for 1e?

@Delioth Yea, I haven't really noticed any balance issues (although my experience is limited) except ones caused by our poorly built adventuring days

@SPavel I didn't enroll for the playtest, so I have no clue.

Paizo talked big game for Pathfinder 1, and produced basically 3.5 but worse

I felt they did alright with it. It worked for my table.

@Maximillian I mean: in their public statements, are they promising the same things that they promised the first go-round, or new things

@KorvinStarmast Yeah, I know you didn't. I meant just to take care for your players not understand that way. :P

I know some of mine would, if I said that exact phrase.

@HellSaint That's up to them. ;) Player Agency is a thing.

It's not really clear what direction they're going in yet. There's some vague indicators they're going to file down some of the excess choices and complexity.

Eh, I think PF was a definite improvement (I wasn't around for the marketing); keeping up with the blog-post info, pf2e seems solid

IMO Pathfinder has a lot less latitude for change because unlike D&D, they don't have a brand name. A major part of the player base are defectors from 4e hankering for a return to d20 mechanics.

So PF2 may not be very different in that regard

Think of D&D 3.5e as a big block of marble. PF team tried to carve a nice lion out of the big block of marble. It looks like a lion, but some people think it's a liger. So they are doing another carving, trying to get the lion.

> PF2e.

Eh, it definitely still looks like a d20 system, but they're re-do-ing action economy, which should be good... plus they seem like they're standardizing a bunch of things; instead of nearly every class defining how they get some choices every few levels, there are Class Feats. Instead of conditions which have varying penalties and such, they're looking to move to conditions that put the number right on top of them

Its a new day, but it all feels old.

(so instead of Frightened->Scared->Terrified or whatever it is, with varying numbers for each, it's just like Fear 1->Fear 2->Fear 3; where the number is the penalty, and possible thresholds of "at Fear 4, target flees from any threatening presences)

@OneCritWonder Jethro Tull song comes to mind "it was a new day yesterday, but it's an old day now"

So instead of needing charts to know what penalties go with what statuses and tenuous connections (some sources of fear can't raise fear to other fear statuses), you just need a couple lines: Fear imposes penalties to X, Y, and Z. When a target is at Fear 4 or higher, they flee any combat. When a target is at Fear 6 or higher, they cower in fear or anything

I dunno, I'm eager for the public playtest in August. I'll probably have to find a group to run a game of it (because god knows I won't be able to find a group to play it, somehow)

@KorvinStarmast azlyrics.com/lyrics/goodcharlotte/theanthem.html

@KorvinStarmast you're again showing your age, Korvin :P

just kidding, as a fanboy of progressive rock and metal I can see new people knowing and enjoying jethro tull

Just an FYI @NautArch but putting rules-as-written on your question isn't going to (and isn't intended to) prevent homebrew and modifications and the like from being used in answers. If you really don't want that stuff you have to edit that into your question.

@HellSaint Yeah, Jethro Tull's catalogue is slowly drifting off of various playlists. I still have quite a few albums still on vinyl. An acquired taste, I suppose.

@HellSaint Where else are you going to get awesome rock 'n roll flutin'?

Clearly we need to distill RPGs down to their core and just call classes DPS, Tank, Healer, and Jerry.

Narrows Eyes

Jerry....

@Maximillian Isn't that what 4e does?

A little bit, but everything has 12 keywords on it.

@Rubiksmoose you mean other than JT or other than prog? Other than JT, there are some places hahaha

welp, gotta work. Damn.

@Rubiksmoose added that detail

@KorvinStarmast love me some TUll. Spotify used to have some excellent live albums that are now gone.

@NautArch Since my answer no longer meets your criteria, should I just delete it, or put in a disclaimer that it only meets part of your requirements?

@Derpy Given that snakes tend to keep their tongues inside of their mouths while eating, I guess the tip of its snout?

@AVeryLargeBear I say keep it, if you start getting downvotes it'sup to you :)

@NautArch Gotcha. I put in a disclaimer about humanoids being in danger.

As a humanoid, I'm always in danger.

@NautArch I once ran an adventure based on the song "On a Cold Wind to Valhalla" ... Minstrel in the Gallery was the first Tull album I acquired, followed of course by Aqualung.

TIL Windows 10 has an emoji keyboard I can open with start+;

how to answer a question when the querent has already supplied the answer and logic.

@doppelgreener Interesting

@NautArch "Yep, that's it you got it" -> free 40 upvotes

yyep

i suggested they post a self-answer