TRPG General Chat

12:01 AM

I finally managed to wrangle the scheduling dragon so that one of my rpg groups actually could get together for the first time in a month!!!!!!!!!!

BESW

@BardicWizard Woo!

Bardic Wizard

And then instead of playing an rpg we discussed how to take over the school and destabilize the student government, as well as the outcome of a fight between an ooze-dragon, a snail-dragon covered in mushrooms, and a half-Wizard-half-Tank

Which is probably par for the course for two days after finals

trogdor

lol

viva la revolution XD

Bardic Wizard

12:23 AM

@trogdor the funny thing is that one player’s dad is a teacher at our school and heard our conversation. He said he’d totally support it as long as our history teacher (who’s got an interesting reputation) was the first under the guillotine when we take over

trogdor

Oof

Bardic Wizard

Or if we tell the history teacher after break that we spent our break plotting his downfall

trogdor

I liked my history teacher in high school

He was one of my favorites

Didn't hurt that I also just liked the subject a lot

It was mostly reading and I was proud of my reading abilities (guess I still am really) so I got almost perfect grades at it

Bardic Wizard

We’ve had this history teacher two years in a row, and he jokes about a lot of things, so we’re also probably going to tell him this just to bug him

The history teacher also has an actual (tiny) guillotine in his room, so we’re aiming to get the once-a-semester threat that we’ll get our hands chopped off over and done with early this semester

trogdor

12:50 AM

Wow

BESW

1:58 AM

Wandering Merchants Zine by theunburnedwitch. A system-neutral ttrpg zine of soulsborne-inspired wandering merchants.

AncientSwordRage

2:43 AM

Today I learned about Solarpunk

Hot RPG Questions

2

Q: Evasion and Vulnerability to Energy precedence?

A creature has Evasion: 'If she makes a successful Reflex saving throw against an attack that normally deals half damage on a successful save, she instead takes no damage.' And also has Vulnerability to Energy: 'Some creatures have vulnerability to a certain kind of energy effect (typically eithe...

BESW

Oct 14 at 23:31, by BESW

Viditya Voleti wrote a twitter thread about how A Land Once Magic is designed to create solarpunk fantasy worlds.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW nice

BESW

And I recommend Okorafor's Binti and Zarah the Windseeker books as excellent examples of Africanfuturism in a solarpunk-like vein.

AncientSwordRage

I'll add them to the list

6 hours ago, by AncientSwordRage

What would Alan Parrish's high concept be, as a fate character

BESW

2:55 AM

I like high concepts that define three truths about the character as broadly as possible. A good frame might be Attitude, Competency, and Context. Depressed Tarzan of Jumanji or Childish Jungle Survivor, for example.

(I'm going off wikia entries; pre-teen BESW left the theater during the giant mosquito scene and had nightmares for a week. Never finished the film.)

Shalvenay

@AncientSwordRage that actually reminds me of one of my headscratching questions: how small can you make a hydroelectric plant before you lose one of hydro's most valuable features, namely the ability to "black start" a dead electric grid?

AncientSwordRage

3:25 AM

@BESW I forget how far through that scene is, but it's a good movie

@Shalvenay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Shalvenay

@AncientSwordRage yeah, I might have to throw it on a suitable Stack sometime :)

AncientSwordRage

@BESW those are good takes, and I like that framing

However it's long past my bedtime, so I'm off

Ciao for niao

BESW

ttfn

Hot RPG Questions

6

Q: Can a Way of Astral Self Monk use wisdom related scores for jumping?

I have several questions on the interactions between the Arms of Astral Self and the Jumping mechanics. According to the 3rd level feature, Arms of the Astral Self: While the spectral arms are present, you gain the following benefits: You can use your Wisdom modifier in place of your Strength m...

dnd-5e movement monk archetype

BESW

4:53 AM

I'm watching The Ipcress File and thinking that Michael Cane would've made a better Albert Campion than Peter Davison did.

Davison's Campion was fun, but he was too sharp to be Allingham's Campion.

Bardic Wizard

6:59 AM

I had a thought and a question, and I wanted to know if people here, especially people who are queer and/or work with teenagers, thought it might work.
The thought was that I wanted to help my school’s rpg club try to break from some problems it’s had with accepting non-cishet people, and maybe an rpg or something might help. The question was, is something like this likely to work, and does it already exist? To me I’m not sure whether it’d work cause I’m in the thick of the issues and not seeing outside perspective, and I’m not even sure what form it would take

5

And of course I come up with this thought when my phone is about to shut off for the night

I’m also not sure if an rpg is the right way to bring this stuff up or what goal I even want to accomplish

BESW

8:58 AM

Note to self: Primeval: New World's version of Project Magnet is a great concept, steal it shamelessly for future campaigns.

It's a dingy forgotten walk-in closet of a government department staffed by one young very bored lieutenant, the remnant of a 1950s UFO research project that's officially dead but unofficially is where all the reports of Weird Stuff get funneled to, where they always turn out to not be Weird at all. Faction aspects could include Nothing is new except the staff, The codes still work, and Desperate to justify existing.

It's perfect for any kind of contemporary Weird Stuff campaign, either as the players' own faction, and allied faction, or a faction that keeps getting in the players' way.

BESW

9:43 AM

(I've also just always felt that Primeval is a franchise with great TRPG potential. It's got a lot of juicy ideas and no particular interest in getting bogged down in its own lore, with great setpieces and a solid monster-of-the-week hook that lends itself to natural character arcs, but the writing never quite kept up on the interpersonal front.)

AncientSwordRage

11:25 AM

@BESW I didn't catch much of it, but it looked like a good premise

BESW

Execution is sketchy, and P:NW is even sketchier, but yeah, it's a really good setup for an episode ensemble-cast TRPG campaign.

And I gotta admire its concept as a Doctor Who rival show, too. Instead of traveling to distant times and nearly being killed by creatures from the past and future, creatures from the past and future travel to you and nearly kill you!

AncientSwordRage

not sure what if anything it has over Star gate, besides lacking some context/baggage?

BESW

Really cuts down on the price of setbuilding.

AncientSwordRage

true

BESW

A big advantage over Stargate, in my opinion, is that there's no inherent separation between "home" and "field."

AncientSwordRage

11:29 AM

thats true

BESW

A lot more opportunity for things to be personal and get messy.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW what you said about Alan Parrish made me realise I hadn't really fleshed out my character I had been thinking of, because I was drawing similarities to Him, but only one small aspect.

BESW

And also less pricey setbuilding! Which in a TRPG means that the GM doesn't have to invent strange alien things and then explain them to the players. It's all contemporary or historical unless you go to the future, and then it's still rooted in Earth-recognizable concepts.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW true, some of the best SG1 eps were set on earth

@BESW I was going to ask how it translated, but that makes logical sense

BESW

It's easier for the whole table to be on the same page if most of the elements on the page are drawn from shared experience.

@AncientSwordRage Oh?

AncientSwordRage

11:40 AM

@BESW very true, then it's just monster of the week, not monster/culture/planet/context of the week

@BESW so I had forgotten how Alan's past effected his character

BESW

Aye. Also makes it easier for people to miss sessions or come in partway through the adventure, as there's less lore to catch them up on.

@AncientSwordRage Ah, attitude.

AncientSwordRage

that he had family issues, that he had sabotaged someone's career

yes

15 hours ago, by AncientSwordRage

I'm thinking high concept: Fae trained warrior poet

doesn't have an attitude to it

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad ip for hostname in body, blacklisted website in body, potentially bad ns for domain in body (200): Is Gmail down message arising in light of interface issue? Use consultancy plans by Ella Mark on rpg.SE (@Rubiksmoose)

AncientSwordRage

@SmokeDetector 29 seconds.... nice

I don't think a lot of my past character (concepts) have an attitude, it's definitely a blind spot for me

which makes me feel like not specifying one and claiming amnesia is just too cheap a trick

BESW

You don't need an attitude in a high concept, but I find it's good to have it in some aspect.

I like to put it in the high concept, because my principle writing a high concept is that it should be invokeable for any action that's painfully in character.

AncientSwordRage

11:45 AM

the trouble was going to be "Man out of time" where everything had progressed some number of centuries, but that doesn't cover it too

@BESW Mhmmm

AncientSwordRage

11:56 AM

I feel a question brewing

@BESW where does "Attitude, Competency, and Context" come from?

BESW

Myself, but I'm sure it brewed up from collating a lot of different things I've read about aspects.

Hrm. I definitely learned a lot about it from Atomic Robo and how it uses broad scope of competency to define skill packages, and then has you write an aspect about how your character approaches each package.

But also, I think it was Masters of Umdaar which pointed out that you can often just take your highest-ranked Approach and make it part of your high concept.

And those together can make up Attitude and Competency in a pinch. If a character would be Flashy in an Accelerated game, and have the Science package in an Atomic Robo game, then they're a Flashy Scientist.

Then, what's the context? Are they a Flashy Scientist on the Run or a Flashy Black Ops Scientist or Flashy Scientist From Another World?

And then you can fiddle with it a bit if you like, or expand on details in other aspects. Maybe they're a Flirty Biologist on the Run or maybe they should get a whole aspect about how Flirting is second nature to me.

AncientSwordRage

12:11 PM

scribbles down notes

BESW

I definitely learned the principle of writing a high concept so that it can be invoked any time you do something that's very in-character from several different places.

Basically, any time your character's in their comfort zone, you should be able to spend a fate point on their high concept. Some overlap with other aspects is fine because that represents specialization: you can spend TWO points, one on the high concept and one on the more specific aspect.

AncientSwordRage

Ok, so bear with me, but how are flashy and flirty comparable? Are they the same category of things? Based on what you says they're attitudes, but they seem very unrelated. Whereas the competencies seem related

BESW

Flirty is a way you can be flashy. If the character's most common use of Flashy is to flirt with people, then it's a more evocative concept.

"Flashy" is one of the Approaches used by Fate Accelerated in place of skills, alongside Careful, Clever, Forceful, Quick, and Sneaky (or Dresden Files Accelerated's Flair, Focus, Force, Guile, Haste, and Intellect, which are the same things under different names).

> A Flashy action draws attention to you; it’s full of style and panache. Delivering an inspiring speech to your army. Embarrassing your opponent in a duel. Producing a magical fireworks display.

Rolling to flirt is almost always going to mean adding your Flashy modifier, because flirting is definitionally "drawing attention to you."

So, Flirty is a kind of Flashiness, like Biologist is a kind of Scientist. It narrows down the things your high concept can be invoked for, creating a character who is drawn with more defined lines.

I might instead have a Brash Geologist or an Fashionable Herpetologist.

I usually use approaches to get the skeleton of an aspect, then narrow in for the final one. A Flashy Scientist just isn't very evocative of a specific character, but it's a great prompt to start asking myself questions about them which WILL produce an engaging high concept.

And if I don't come up with anything, well, I'll just pencil in Flashy Scientist and re-write it as answers come during play.

AncientSwordRage

12:46 PM

@BESW that clicks

BESW

Nifty trick: If you're not getting anything from your highest approach, consider what the opposite of your lowest approach might be.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW that is nifty

looks like Dresden is using nouns and not adjectives

Focusful doesn't sounds quite right

Carcer

"Focused"

AncientSwordRage

@Carcer thats good

sounds of mental gears turning

BESW

1:02 PM

"His Mind Raced" by Ursula Vernon

AncientSwordRage

1:34 PM

I've got a bunch of adjectives now, thanks gang!

BESW

Woo!

One note of caution: never overload an aspect.

Three, maybe four distinct qualities go into a high concept; other character aspects should have one or two, maybe three qualities apiece. Otherwise it's just like having to keep track of too many aspects, but even more confusing.

AncientSwordRage

gotcha

going to pick the best adjective rather than go too crazy on it

doppelgreener

2:15 PM

My understanding is there's friction between lgbt and cishet members of the club stemming from a lack of understanding of the lgbt members' worldviews (or lack of willingness to understand). As a generality, out-of-game social problems do not get solved by RPG gameplay. You mention being uncertain what you want out of this. It's definitely important to work out your goals and the issues you're facing that obstruct you from meeting those goals. That will help clarify for yourself the actions available to you that will get you there.

@BardicWizard @nitsua60 might have some relevant experience; he's spoken about running a school RPG club but I don't know whether he's run into any friction between lgbt and cishet members.

Bardic Wizard

@doppelgreener (funnily enough it’s a different group but several people still don’t understand bc my school in general sucks; this was provoked cause one kid went “hah you play a girl character when you’re actually a boy you must be [transphobic slur] or [homophobic slur]” and I couldn’t stand it)

doppelgreener

Hmm.

Bardic Wizard

I think the goals you list there are pretty good, and I would also add “lgbtq players don’t feel that they are the butt of the joke all the time” cause that’s one specific thing that bugs me

doppelgreener

I'll write something out that I was writing, but also add something for what you've just described

Personally I'd work on basically two bases:
- In the long term, focus on an environment in which people can support and be comfortable around each other and communicate effectively. Support and understanding often tend to come from developing normal human relationships with each other.
- To meet the long term goal, the short term goals: identify the specific flare-up issues and work out ways to resolve them. For example, when a queer person is not treated as authoritative, have a way to talk this over: let the queer person use queer traits, and have a way to navigate others needing to under…

Now for the added bit

NautArch

I very much lean to getting some admin help on this. Having a teacher support all this in a school environment is likely necessary.

but it also seems like having one do that would just mask a problem

doppelgreener

2:25 PM

The group should generally be on the same page that slurs are not okay, and that making fun of LGBT people is not okay. What I described above assumes that this is already the case. If you're dealing with slurs, you need to resolve that issue first.

Bardic Wizard

The problems you list are probably most of the problems, and I’d also add “it’s not exactly a lgbtq-friendly school as a whole” and “we’re high schoolers” (which on its own is a bit of a problem)

@NautArch The school doesn’t even acknowledge that lgbtq stuff exists beyond letting us have a gsa that doesn’t do anything, so getting an admin or a teacher is sometimes not the best option

doppelgreener

This is not good

NautArch

@BardicWizard Yeah :( I was typing that I was remembering what you were telling us.

but this really makes mean start thinking "is this really worth it?" But that's easy to say as an outsider.

doppelgreener

GSAs being ineffectual is something I've heard from a number of people

Bardic Wizard

@doppelgreener I think that might be the crux of the issue: nobody but the lgbtq kids actually care about making it a safe space for lgbtq students

doppelgreener

2:28 PM

@MikeQ o/

AncientSwordRage

@doppelgreener are double quotes preferred?

MikeQ

Ahoy. Some very impressive hats and masks all around.

AncientSwordRage

@MikeQ \oo//

I just got Samovar from self answering

but I don't know what that is

NautArch

@AncientSwordRage a russian tea pot

Someone_Evil

Answer within a very short timeframe (and score 1+)

doppelgreener

2:30 PM

@AncientSwordRage i changed the quotation marks in the title just because the site automatically turns "double quotes" in titles into “smart quotes”, but it doesn't do the same for 'single quotes'.

Thomas Markov

I got the carnival hat this morning.

No idea how.

NautArch

@ThomasMarkov great answer to that dragon question

Someone_Evil

Correction, self answer and q and a has score 2+

doppelgreener

@BardicWizard I don't know what to do in such an environment. There needs to be willingness, or at least someone above to provide enforcement.

NautArch

^^

Bardic Wizard

2:32 PM

@doppelgreener The GSA tries, but posters reminding people of basic tolerance got torn down (we don’t know by whom), any time we go to the administration it makes things worse, and last year our pride week got canceled because “it wasn’t a safe space to have a pride week” which, hello, is the point of a pride week, to make a safe space and to show that lgbtq people exist

AncientSwordRage

@doppelgreener oh... are smart quotes preferred? I like single quotes, but I'm not too fussed

@BardicWizard sounds awful :/

@NautArch ahhh thanks

NautArch

@BardicWizard no cameras in the school?

Bardic Wizard

@doppelgreener yeah. The teacher does his best to try to stop the slurs but he doesn’t really listen to our meetings anymore, he just works through them

doppelgreener

@AncientSwordRage smart quotes are more legible overall, because they're directional and clearly indicate a start/end as a result. whether they're single or double smart quotes isn't so important.

as long as they won't be confused with a possessive apostrophe

Bardic Wizard

@NautArch all club meetings are virtual now, but only teachers can record the meetings and the teachers only do that for actual classes and not clubs

Oh I just realized you meant the posters

NautArch

2:34 PM

@BardicWizard i meant the public spaces where posters are torn down

ha!

Ultimately, I guess the question is are you looking to play games and have fun, or are you trying to elicit change amongst your peers through RPGs? I don't think you can do both simultaneously at this school. I'm not even sure you can do the latter.

doppelgreener

@BardicWizard Can you ask that teacher what you should do when someone's just said a slur to get them to stop happening? Alternately, is there an LGBT-friendly teacher you could talk with about administrating a new supportive RPG club?

Bardic Wizard

@NautArch as far as I know there’s a couple but not in any of the places clubs/student govt are supposed to hang posters (the stairwells, between blocks of lockers, off the second story hallway)

NautArch

you should ask to hang one up where there is a camera

AncientSwordRage

@doppelgreener I hadn't thought of that. I always disliked how they're not identical, but if it helps readability I'm all for it

BESW

I tend to use undifferentiated quotes, but that's because I turn off smart quotes so that I don't have to wrestle with them every time I need to type a glotta.

NautArch

2:40 PM

@BESW do you type a lotta glottas?

BESW

Aye, it's a common letter in CHamoru.

AncientSwordRage

Looks like it's analogous to an okina?

doppelgreener

On the mac keyboard there's a native way to type out “” and ‘’ separately from " and ', and i have my autohotkey set up to give me the same setup on windows

Bardic Wizard

@doppelgreener I could try that. If I talk to him, I worry that he’ll say something derogatory or that he’ll say that he can’t do anything, but I think if I phrase it less as “this hurts me because I’m queer” and more “this is concerning in general” I can probably protect myself.

There’s only a handful of teachers that have said they’re a safe space for lgbtq students, and all of them run clubs already, but I’m not sure I’d want to try to start another club because it requires me to say that this club doesn’t work for me and others because of the attitude, and even though I personally would be safe physically because I’m all-online for the year, I don’t think others would be safe physically and none of us would be emotionally safe, and stepping up makes us big targets

@NautArch that’s the question. I’d like mostly, until the end of high school, to play games, but without feeling like an outsider that is always the target of teasing even when it’s not directed at me (every time I hear someone use a slur, it feels dehumanizing and affects me emotionally)

I think change has to wait until after I graduate

Or at least until I’m not worried about the administration so much

doppelgreener

2:59 PM

@BardicWizard Standing up to change things can do that and not everyone is in a position they're able to do so, and that is okay. Evaluating that is important too. It sounds like you may be unable to make effective change, which sucks. Would you all have the option or preference of creating a club outside the school to do this?

It's clear the priority is for you all to feel safe at school, so an overall net loss in that area would be bad.

nitsua60

@BardicWizard I'm not sure my experience helps much. I *think* we're a pretty welcoming group: we have a queer table, for years the head of the club was a trans girl who was also head of our school's student council, my co-advisor has a trans child, we have a couple of out, gay teachers.... I know that trans- and homophobia exist on campus--we dismissed a couple of kids this fall for an utterly loathsome incident--but I think our rpg club is pretty well to one side of that conflict.
Then again, I might just be oblivious =\

Our GSA advisor has a board game, "Consentacle," that's got roleplay elements and which is explicitly about understanding oneself in unfamiliar contexts. I haven't played it myself, but he says it's great for getting straight kids to think about being gay, cis kids to think about being nonbinary, &c.

Bardic Wizard

@doppelgreener we kinda did that accidentally; me and two other students took our rpg group to video call on our own last year when everything was up in the air and online learning was strange, bc the club as a whole wasn’t doing anything, but we kept it going when the club actually got back to meeting as a whole group; it’s only the three of us though it is a safe space

@nitsua60 I haven’t heard of that before; I’ll look it up

nitsua60

It might be a little risque for some crowds. Like, it works for us here in a private school, but I'd never have mentioned it to a student when I was a public school teacher.

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