TRPG General Chat

@BardicWizard Gosh I love it when my friends do game art.

12:29 AM

I do too. My other group (where I gm) had a player draw her character and the pink dragon, and I made it the roll20 tokens for them

@ThomasMarkov this is a particular grievance of mine

For a while I had a costume designer in my group, that was amazing.

@AncientSwordRage about DnD or college football?

This GM, rightly, reminded me that the 7 foot tall half orc paladin should not look only a couple of inches taller than the 5’2” sorcerer. Also that the rogue only has 5 daggers now (one was in the blast range of explosive runes last week)

Those errors are also common in the animation for She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, so you're in good company.

@cwkx Hi!

12:52 AM

I scanned it (without corrections), and I’m actually proud of how the first draft turned out.

nice!

3 guesses on which one is my sorcerer. (And the first 2 don’t count)

My character is the furthest to the right (my mom: “you can tell that’s yours bc she wears glasses and has a hairclip”, to which I responded “it’s a backup set of spell components in a convenient and less likely to get seized place, not a mere hairclip”)

Q: Can a warlock with Repelling Blast use Eldritch Blast to push 10 feet a creature of any size?

4:12 AM

11

From the RAW ruling, unless I am missing official errata or clarifications documents from WotC I do not see any size limitations to the use of the Repelling Blast power of Eldritch Blast. So it means you could push back up to 10 feet a creature of any sizes regardless of any context, weight, mas...

8

Q: Can the Giant Owl language be learned with the Linguist feat?

The Giant Owl can speak the language Giant Owl: Languages Giant Owl, [...] Notably, this language does not appear on any of the tables of languages in any sourcebook (e.g. the Languages tables in the PHB/basic rules), but it does appear on the statblock of the Giant Owl and the Skeletal Giant O...

dnd-5e feats languages

5:36 AM

Welp I’m banned from theorycrafting now apparently

At least with regards to dealing piercing damage

1d8+7, four times a turn, every turn. Plus enchanter equipment...

This is OP for my group.

Would it make me a bad person if I went and downvoted every question or answer on the site which spouts "there is no fluff text in D&D 5e" as if it's a fundamental truth of the universe?

6:08 AM

I think it'd get you a red flag on your account if you did it fast enough.

@BESW Only if a lot of them were from the same person, right?

Or are you talking <1s fast?

(Because I'm not sure I can live up to your expectations.)

They're deliberately vague about the conditions for such things, but what are the chances that serial downvoting of an attitude isn't going to mean serial downvoting of specific people?

Fair point! It's not something I'm going to do, anyway, I'm just grumpy.

I've never seen any evidence that that was a design goal for 5e, and even if it had been, there's certainly plenty of evidence that they didn't live up to that goal.

I feel like it's a holdover from sloppy spellwriting in 3.x, which (everybody say it together with me) 4e fixed and then 5e reverted.

"Is fluff mechanical" was a big disc horse in 3.x, for sure.

Yeah. In fairness, I have seen evidence that sloppy writing was a design goal for 5e.

6:18 AM

Speaking of sloppy writing, I really should spend some time annotating Hounds of God for the Unearthed Jam.

@BESW My google-fu is failing me, what's the Unearthed Jam?

Aug 31 at 3:49, by BESW

Unearth Your Old Games Jam hosted by Natalie Libre.

@BESW Thanks!

10:31 AM

@ThomasMarkov I have no experience with College Football, but I do with D&D spells

Do we have a question about martial arts centaurs yet?

I don't think so, what would the question be?

10:55 AM

@Someone_Evil can they charge, hoof an still flurry of blows?

@AncientSwordRage Is there any reason to think they can't?

I've not double checked, but they may both use bonus action?

Also questions on whether the wording of charge means they need to use a weapon not an unarmed attack in the furst instance

Right, can't benefit from the charge feature as it is making a attack with the hooves as a BA, and flurry of blows as it too uses the BA

Needs to be a weapon attack, not an attack with a weapon

@Someone_Evil which is almost as stupid as 5E targetting

> you can immediately follow that attack with a bonus action

from charge in the centaur stat block

In this case this is a game term that is named with the assumption you'll be using a weapon, which is odd when the Monk is also a player option using those attacks

@AncientSwordRage fixed :)

11:01 AM

@Someone_Evil term term?

thumbs up

Apparently I can't write properly today

you're doing better than me normally

11:12 AM

What a non-bo though :(

Yeah, the main benefit you get is a ridiculous move speed (centaurs have base 40)

It's a good start at least

at some point I should stat up a Goblin Monk/Barbarian (I'm expecting much more non-bos)

I bring it up as they're a small race with speed of 30, and squat nimbleness feat gves them + 5 speed

Barbarian requires you to make the attacks with Strength for the rage benefits (at least most of them), which means you aren't getting benefit of the Monk's ability to use Dex. You're mostly looking at making an unarmed Barb at that point and tavern brawler or a race with a natural weapon might be more efficient (all this depends of which things you're looking for)

I'm expecting that

I just like the feel of a monk/barbarian

Maybe I can get that feel from a different set up

I guess I could re-skin the drunken master

What feel are you looking for?

11:27 AM

Wild Fighter with lots of attacks, with a sort of Zen of the Wild rage

the rage comes from being in touch with the wild side of nature, so it's calming and rageful at the same time

I dunno if that makers sense

Totem Warrior?

thats on my mind

I was hoping maybe a Monk subclass that leant into that natural space though

@AncientSwordRage I'm trying out this system everyone's talking about, but am largely clueless. I'd like to be aware of the mechanical pitfalls. What is the targeting issue in it?

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica so my understanding is that sometimes D&D 5E uses english plainly and sometimes in a nuanced way (i.e. it has a mean in the rules that isn't just common use).

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica It uses targeting as though it is a defined game term, but never defines it. There are some developer statements which run contradictory to expectation (the worst offender is the interaction of Twinned Spell and dragon's breath IIRC)

11:33 AM

Say you target an 'object' with a spell, well does that include buildings?

or like @Someone_Evil says there's a restriction on the targetting

to give more detail 'Twinned Spell' says something like it targets a spell "with only one target", but that's not well defined

or a spell has it's range as 'self' but lets you make ranged attacks

81 questions right now on twinned spell in 5E

12:11 PM

@AncientSwordRage The question of what is an object ('anything smaller than a Yeddim!'), as well as the whole 'natural language controversy' (preference for writing using plain vs. using stricter, defined, technical terms) are giving me Exalted flashbacks.

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I'm going to assume that means flashbacks about Exalted, not flashbacks which are exalted*

(For context: Exalted 2e had an overengineered technicalness to it, including ten enumerated steps for resolving an attack in combat. 3e authors vowed to fix the problems of 2e, and their declared method was to use natural language instead. As far as I've been told by people who tried it, it didn't really fix problems so much as change them.)

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica sounds like how 5e tried to fix stuff

AFAIK 4E D&D fixed targeting, but one of the complaints was that it made it feel too much like a video game

so in 5e it was fixed to make it less technical and just moved the problems

@AncientSwordRage And now you gave me an image of a flashback somehow becoming anthropomorphised and ascending to exalthood. (But then again, I had a player claimed to contemplate 'playing a flashbacker'. He definitely meant 'swashbuckler' but he wasn't great with languages.)

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I can see it happening in Exalted

12:39 PM

I should play more exalted

another example of loose wording: rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/175286/…

none of the swords in the books will have a 'sword' tag

@RedRiderX Testing out Foundry tonight. No combat, but some rolls. So far I"m in love with it over Roll20.

@NautArch had an interesting puzzle for our DM last night, that I think will end up as two questions. 1) can you knock a flameskull prone with a bonus action from shield master (they can hover) and 2) how tall is evard's black tentacles. Some of us have an image if giant tentacles reaching up, as tall as a medium or large creature, but the spell text says that the tentacles are on the ground so he ruled that the flameskulls took no damage/attacks from the tentacles. It didn't seem right.

I'll ask that one first.

@KorvinStarmast i want to say we've got a question on the tentacles, but I may be mistaking it for another ground-sounding spell.

@NautArch my first search wasn't thorough enough, trying again.

@KorvinStarmast i'll take a look. And you can ask the prone question...but take a gander at the condition immunities for flameskulls :P

12:46 PM

sounds like we need a flameskull/floating creature question

A wild @BESW appears

Q: How high can 'Black Tentacles' reach?

5

The spell Black Tentacles does not say how high they can reach up. Could it grab some Stirges that fly over the area of effect for example?

pathfinder-1e spells

Q: Does Evards Black Tentacles affect the 5 foot cubes above its area?

7

So I'm playing in a tomb of annihilation game and there were some succubi that we were fighting. We had information ahead of time that a lot of them were grouped up together talking to someone and so I decided it would be a good time to whip out my new spell Evard's Black Tentacles. Now the probl...

dnd-5e spells 3d-space

Dupe?

@NautArch That's the PF-1e version

@NautArch Oh, yeah, I do need to check that.

Q: Are stationary flying creatures considered "hovering" so that they do not fall when prone or incapacitated, etc?

12:51 PM

1

As the title suggests, I'm wondering if a PC race (for example, the Variant Tiefling with the winged option) would have the ability to hover in regards to the Prone condition. The Basic Rules state If a flying creature is knocked prone, has its speed reduced to 0, or is otherwise deprived of...

dnd-5e movement flight prone

@Someone_Evil Hmm, not satisfying as an answer. The tentacles reach up, so maybe advantage on the save? We were in a standard 10 ' wide 10' high, roughly, underground passageway. (My nephew thought the ruling was rubbish, and my gut is to agree with him).

@Someone_Evil d'oh!

@KorvinStarmast "on the ground" seems clear that you need to touch the screen. Or at least, clear enough.

for me

/shrug

@KorvinStarmast I'll get back to you on the other thing today, too

@NautArch yeah, Ryan's answer goes into the "DM needs to make a ruling" so in that respect, my brother called it as he saw it.

On the other hand, I like the idea that it's anything in the 5' square.

ground up

> If a flying creature is knocked prone, has its speed reduced to 0, or is otherwise deprived of the ability to move, the creature falls, unless it has the ability to hover or it is being held aloft by magic, such as by the fly spell.

1:08 PM

@AncientSwordRage Yawp!

@BESW BESW used Yawp, it was super effective

how is everyone today anywhoo?

1:24 PM

It's Friday night so my mom made whole wheat pizza with mustard greens, onions, mushrooms, and eggplant, and we watched two episodes of The Librarians and then talked about pronouns, Indigenous scholarship, and online learning platforms while we did the washing up.

So, pretty typical Friday night for me.

@BESW sounds epic

if that counts as pretty typical, then I envy you :D

[grin] I'm one of those people who people say they understand much better after they've met my mother.

Also she makes great pizza.

@BESW awesome

@BESW My daughter has begun making her own pizza dough (sourdough base) - she made us home made piazza Margerita when we last visited her. Yum. Man, I am getting all hungry all of a sudden ...

@KorvinStarmast Yeah, well my daughter makes soup. She gets a bowl of water and puts toilet paper in it and tries to feed it to me.

MikeQ

1:38 PM

How very fibrous

See, you guys are all doing great things. I’m just eating breakfast, and prepping for the 2 tests I have today (first period chem and third period history)

Now I'm winding down toward sleep with a Dead Space 3 playthrough video.

@BardicWizard best wishes on the tests! .🤞

@ThomasMarkov We get a lot of bath time treats. Ice cream, soup, etc.

@ThomasMarkov Do you call this "that-wasn't-an-egg-dropped-in-my" soup?

1:42 PM

@NautArch We had spaghetti for dinner, so it was straight from dinner table to tub for the girls.

For some reason my youngest always rubs spaghetti in her hair.

@KorvinStarmast thanks

RedRiderX

@NautArch Oh one plugin that I think really improves the dice log is the dice tray foundryvtt.com/packages/dice-calculator

Assuming you're using a D&D dice array.

@ThomasMarkov My kids, when little, rubbed chunky peanut butter in to their hair. No, I can't explain why.

@BardicWizard I hope the tests are good to you!

@RedRiderX installed :)

also installed simple fog

RedRiderX

1:53 PM

Ah yeah I might install that

Though I've also gotten pretty good with the wall system

@RedRiderX OK, now I have to go and look into that ...

@RedRiderX I'm currently importing maps, so not having to build walls and light sources is better.

but if i custom make a map, i'm doing it in there for that.

RedRiderX

Oh and if you want to add just a little pizzazz FX Master is nice. foundryvtt.com/packages/fxmaster

I have like embers and a little bloom on my cover scene, for example.

I had clouds on my overworld map, but they were a little too thick.

@RedRiderX we're starting the pre-adventures to icewind and i've got the snow on :)

3:58 PM

I just discovered my plot for next week’s gaming session was accidentally lifted from the book we’re reading in English class so now I have to change it all before Sunday

4:20 PM

You're reading a D&D module for English class?

3

I mean, you read enough stories and you eventually pick up on the common tropes. It's not like any of my players are surprised when mcguffins show up to drive a plot lines. They know it's a mcguffin. Sometimes the question is what kind, but it doesn't detract from the story.

ACuriousMind

I don't think I've ever run any plot that you couldn't argue was lifted from somewhere. I aim for fun, not originality :P

I concur

ACuriousMind

usually mashing two different inspirations together is enough to not make players go "oh, I recognize that", and even if they do it's not necessarily bad - being genre-savvy isn't forbidden

4:40 PM

@GcL I concur

@GcL no, The Book Thief

Okay. Here's a thing I just came across while tailing a stupid log waiting for an apache to barf: imgur.com/gallery/n9PHUbo. This will absolutely be an upcoming adventure for my table. I wonder how long until the players catch on. Probably not long since one of them loves Goonies.

5:03 PM

@GcL that's fantastic

MikeQ

@BardicWizard Just because you borrow a premise from somewhere doesn't mean that player-driven events will play out the same way as in the reference material

5:19 PM

@MikeQ Especially if they've got a lot of gold and frequently suggest such out of the box ideas as, "can we just hire goblin sappers?" They're not only thinking outside the box, they're thinking about tunneling under the box and collapsing half of it.

That was from a very serious discussion of how to mitigate Lair Actions. No Lair; No Lair Actions.

hi

i am a new member

MikeQ

Ahoy! Welcome to the site.

where you are from?

@bilal The intertubes. I was originally from the spot next to all the calico cat videos but have since moved towards the back end. Lots of stacks and pipes, but at least there are warm isles.

Heelo @bilal

5:31 PM

is here any Physicist here?

Im a mathematician

where did you study mathmatics?

Georgia Southern University

and you sill there?

Ive graduated.

5:47 PM

@bilal welcome! It’s pretty nice around here, especially in chat. Hope you’re doing ok!

@BardicWizard you take those tests yet?

@ThomasMarkov I’m through one, but the other’s in like 3 hours

... no, wait, less than 2 hours

@BardicWizard Better get that straight, I think :P

When I was in college I was an hour late to one of my finals

Wow. I couldn’t get the block day lunch schedule straight at all last year because you end up with a different lunch based on each class location for every day

but I think I know when my test is

i originally was going off the class end time instead of the start time

One time I was an hour late to my Calc II final on purpose. I had two finals scheduled at the same time, and rescheduling would set me back 3 days. I knew I could finish the Calc II exam in like 20 minutes, so I just didnt tell anyone and showed up late to the Calc II exam after finishing my economic final.

6:02 PM

Wow. I had to miss two finals last year to get a sports injury checked out, and thats my funniest finals story (except that in middle school we took standardized tests at the end of the year and that was our finals, so one year my best friend decided to start singing songs about rebellion, changing the wording to be about the tests)

@NautArch pre-adventures?

@BardicWizard What sports you play?

Hi @bilal I've studied physics at university, but I've since graduated

I studied physics for one year before I noped out of that degree and into the comp sci department

@ThomasMarkov I quit basketball at the end of last year’s season because I wasn’t any good. Many, many injuries. The school nurse knew me by name at the end of the year.

6:07 PM

@Carcer I almost did the opposite

Had a split degree between physics and computing, and noped out of it when we got to Java

Sep 1 at 13:14, by AncientSwordRage

Physics is just maths and lying

well, takes all sorts, dunnit

@AncientSwordRage no, you forgot the “stabbing the fabric of the universe until it answers you” part

@ThomasMarkov I finished an exam before they could give us corrections on one of the questions and still aced the exam. But that was only first year

@AncientSwordRage I only needed a 20/100 on my Calc II exam to get an A in the class, so I did 4/10 questions and bounced.

to be honest I think my problem was that I'd never had the opportunity to do a proper computing course before, the physics course involved a C programming lab (for simulations) and that came way easier to me and was more interesting than anything else I did that year

6:12 PM

@ThomasMarkov fair

@BardicWizard I need a gif of Alexi stabbing the paper bag from Stranger things

@AncientSwordRage I also set a record for most absences in any class while receiving an A

It was a 5 hour course that met 5 times a week. I had 45 absences.

@ThomasMarkov how does that work?

@Carcer ahh ok

Class met a total of 75 times. I only showed up 30 times.

@ThomasMarkov my brain must be fried as I was doing 5×5= 25

5 credit hours mean 5 hours a week hahaha

6:21 PM

@Carcer I later went back to do Fortran so I'm not sure what that says about me, besides being a glutton for punishment

@AncientSwordRage well, someone has to know Fortran and I'm glad it's not me

though admittedly I sysadmin these days so the closest my job gets to programming any more is shell scripts

6:35 PM

@NautArch I made an attempt to give a better answer to one of your favorite question types.

Just did my first dupe hammer.

Is this what real power feels like?

RevenantBacon

I'm excited, I just ordered a viking costume to go with my giant foam axe

6:51 PM

@Carcer I never claimed to know it

I almost took down a server when I nohupped someone's code

Code should exit when it errors, not print out "error!" Every 5ms

@ThomasMarkov wait until you become a mod

Vote Markov/SwordRage 2022

I live in a world made of Cardboard

►

@AncientSwordRage Was it logging and filling up /var? I would expect calls to print aren't that expensive when stderr and stdout are redirected to /dev/null.

Makes me think of that

@GcL I nohupped it and it just went to nohup.out

In the working directory

This is also the same code that got someone a PhD, but had an integer division rounding error in

Gotcha 1>/dev/null 2>&1 is my goto.

7:00 PM

My supervisor famously said "C doesn't like pointers, so just make everything global"

@AncientSwordRage Academics rarely write good code.

@AncientSwordRage oof.

7:15 PM

I wish i did not have a test next set

At least tests have known good answers. You could have questions that need to be answered an you don't know if they're right or not until it blows up in your face.... or sneakily doesn't and is waiting to bite you in the ass later.

It’s that my English teacher spent half the class talking about 9/11 and I can’t take more emotional stuff right now

thats sort of the bigger problem

7:41 PM

And here goes my attempt at not failing history, wish me luck!

Roll 20

Mark Wells

7:55 PM

On this question my irresponsible untested answer is to build the dungeon without any doors, so that they have to burn their Teleport spell slots to get in :)

@MarkWells I have done that one. It was not particularly well received. In my case it was a combination of dimension door to get in, but the players were less than happy with the experience.

Thinking quickly, I added a method to make a permanent portal out that they "totally by chance discovered"

8:28 PM

@ThomasMarkov yup

@ThomasMarkov I spent a week tidying the code, and two weeks on the assignment itself, when confronted with the fact the code was a mess, she said to me that it was helpful to learn how to work with messy code...

@AncientSwordRage hey, at least that's printing errors. PHP's approach to errors is usually just to do something nonsensical instead and continue as if that was intended

Welp I’m back and probably haven’t failed

@BardicWizard 🎊🎊🎊🎊

@AncientSwordRage There are 7 encounters in icewind dale that are to introduce/lead up to Rime.

@Carcer well it should have exited really... The whole thing was in a big while true loop

@NautArch where does one find these?

8:43 PM

@AncientSwordRage dndbeyond.com/posts/…

@NautArch thanks

@AncientSwordRage I'll let you know how icewind mail goes :) But it seems like a nice slow entrance to the world and mechanics.

@Carcer Bad memories. One a-hole had a handle block for SIGSEGV! Just kept chugging along not caring that it was barfing on input now and again... like... we'll just ignore that and the core dump.... la dee dah.

Q: What does "(any sword)" mean in terms of Magic Items?

4

In the Dungeon Master's Guide section for Magic Items (Chapter 7), a lot of items have a requirement that says (any ___), specifically weapons and maybe armor if I remember correctly. For example, Flame Tongue says: “Weapon (any sword)”. Is this just to classify what the Item can be, or can you u...

dnd-5e magic-items

9:03 PM

@NautArch cool thanks!

I keep fantasizing about finding an RPG group/having a spare minute in the day, but until then I shall continue to live like a vicar.

@GcL sounds painful

illustro

10:07 PM

@GcL Have you run any players through Undermountain?

Q: Does Slashing Flourish work with Fancy Footwork?

11:18 PM

6

The Fancy Footwork feature of the swashbuckler rogue says: At 3rd level, during your turn, if you make a melee attack against a creature, that creature can't make opportunity attacks against you for the rest of your turn. The bardic College of Swords slashing flourish feature says: You can exp...

dnd-5e class-feature attack rogue bard

11:28 PM

@HotRPGQuestions same as with the sweeping maneuver

Q: Would a Minimus Imprisoned Paladin still provide aura benefits to nearby allies?

11:42 PM

5

If you cast imprisonment with the option Minimus Containment on a high-level paladin, can you wear the gem as a necklace and continue to gain paladin buffs? This is assuming that the paladin continues to view you as an ally. I assume that the paladin is considered to be conscious since the spell ...

dnd-5e spells paladin