TRPG General Chat

12:02 AM

We also asked several times for more info workshopping, etc. and they didn't seem inclined.

@NautArch I didn't really think it was worth a mod reopen either, but I kinda wanted the outstanding issues to be clearer conveyed. Not sure what history you're seeing that I'm not though

@NautArch Yeah, I don't think fixing the answers will be an issue.

NautArch

Just reading through the question and trying to put myself in their shoes.

But I'm just one user - others seemed to agree and no one is voting to reopen.

Seems like this one is okay to let be.

Someone_Evil

@NautArch I think something went poorly with chat syncing on them. I found the mod option to force sync profile, so it should work now, and lets hope that wont be moot

Yeah, I'm not gonna make some big deal. It was more a natural extension of responding to the AiC and that couldn't really put my finger on why it was still closed

NautArch

It probably could be reopened, and honestly we could rewrite it to be a really good question.

I thought we had one on here about size and stat blocks for 5e, but we don't.

Less the first question about "what size is it", that's just a bad RTBTM question.

Excuse me while I go to try and find a shoe my puppy stole.

Someone_Evil

Roll to find shoes?

BESW

12:16 AM

@Adeptus lol

bobble

16

Q: How to handle "I investigate for <this particular thing>" checks

The characters enter a room, and get the general "what do you see" spiel. One player announces that he wants to "Investigate the room for ". (Let's say "investigate for odd books") or the rogue says he stops the group at the threshold and wants to "investigate the room for traps or other danger"....

Roll Investigate for shoes :)

BESW

I think Someone_Evil is referring to Roll To See If I Have Shoes On.

doppelgreener

I've got a Stack Exchange Data Explorer challenge for someone feeling up to it: for each year 2011 thru 2021, how many questions were asked, and what percentage were D&D-ish, where D&D-ish is measured as being tagged some variant of one of these tags?: [*dnd*] [dungeons-and-dragons] [pathfinder*] [starfinder*]

related to these comments —

Out of the 1,047 questions created so far this year, 94 of them did not have any tag for D&D, Pathfinder, or Starfinder, for 91% D&D-ish. — doppelgreener 12 hours ago

@doppelgreener Using that methodology: out of 4628 questions asked last year, 514 were not tagged with some D&D variant, for a rough guess of 89% D&D. Not counting the questions which were probably asked about D&D but never formally tagged with a system. — Glazius 55 mins ago

Out of 6248 questions asked in 2019, 741 weren't tagged with some variant, for 88%. Though the difference is less than 1%. In 2017 it was closer to 85%, so we're almost certainly slowly trending up. — Glazius 44 mins ago

it's probably going to be in the high 80% range every year, but i was surprised by Glazius noting a trend upwards

BESW

@doppelgreener Maybe give miniman a powerping?

doppelgreener

@BESW alas and alack, I cannot @Miniman!

i can give him a poke in other channels

no wait, he's not one of the people i can do that with. nooooo!!

BESW

12:26 AM

trogdor

uh

I talk to him on discord a bit

Glazius

Also while we're looking back at the year to date, can I get a quorum to reopen this question? rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/181169/… I think it was erroneously closed as a duplicate, and while it's not quite clear enough to give the best answer, I think I can still give it a good answer.

trogdor

ok I poked him about it

BESW

12:43 AM

Tech Jam hosted by will jobst & World Champ Game Co. Artists have art packs. Graphic designers have texture packs. Game designers? We have tech packs.

NautArch

@Glazius Are there more consequences besides failure?

BESW

Bonfire & Blade by Color Spray Games. A Souls-themed rules-lite RPG for 1 GM and 1+ players.

trogdor

@doppelgreener is this the parameter set you want?

BESW

[*finder*]

Picks up pathfinder-1e pathfinder-2e starfinder pathfinder-society pathfinder-beginner-box pathfinder-2e-playtest ponyfinder lorefinder with just one parameter.

Glazius

@NautArch The new question is about how to handle a run of bad luck, many failures and/or compromises in a row, while the old question is about how to handle a potentially dramatic single failure. Also the new question actually involves a specific Dungeon World monster, which provides more shared elements to talk about than the completely generic "a chain".

NautArch

12:56 AM

That makes sense. The other is clearly about a single failure and how to move the story vs a run of multiple failures and what that ultimately means.

I think I understand enough to vote to reopen :)

trogdor

ok he sent me this

@doppelgreener ^

Glazius

Oh dang. I didn't think we'd be flat 2018-2020.

doppelgreener

That's surprising to see such a huge change in %!

nitsua60

If I were a calculatin' man I'd surmise that ~94% of the variance of the fraction of questions categorized (by miniman) as dnd would be explained by a model that assumed that fraction was increasing linearly with time.

doppelgreener

Something I'm concerned by more than %: non-D&D-ish questions were at 500 in 2010-2011, and went up to peak in 2014. They've since declined again to 500 in 2020 like a bell curve. In 2021 we're a quarter through the year and we've got less than 100, meaning we're not on track to match last year's quantity.

BESW

1:04 AM

Anybody remember system-agnostic? we used to have large swathes of questions that probably should've had a D&D tag but didn't. And popular tags that are now dead and their associated topic banned.

doppelgreener

This means the non-D&D activity on this site is measurably in decline.

BESW

product-identification roleplaying new-players gm-techniques problem-players history-of-gaming game-recommendation

doppelgreener

@BESW That might account for quite a lot

Game recs definitely would

nitsua60

@BESW I have occasionally recurring stress-dreams about sys-ag

Glazius

Wait, [gm-techniques] is dead and banned?

BESW

1:07 AM

@Glazius No, I'm including it in tags that often should get a D&D tag also, but don't--especially historically when the attitude which allowed sys-ag to flourish also led to systemless questions about systems.

Check out the very oldest questions we ever asked.

My list of tags above is just tags that, in the past, have contributed a lot to non-D&D-tagged questions without indicating a significant increase in questions that really aren't about D&D.

It took five years for this question to get closed for reasons that likely would've been avoided with a system tag.

(And I would happily have taken bets on the system being a D&D-like.)

doppelgreener

The pattern of saying "oh yes so system's not important here" for questions that were obviously about D&D and for which the author had decided system wasn't important on the belief that D&D was universal was easily the first serious problem pattern I began seriously tackling on the site with comments to the effect of "please tell us your system, yes it's actually probably relevant to informing the solution"

BESW

I'd also like to point out that a contest with prizes was held in 2013 to increase use of rare system tags, and its effect was... that the percentage of D&D questions went up by 1%, compared to the previous year's 6% and the following year's 9%.

doppelgreener

especially since in lieu of system people would assume D&D universality applies anyway

BESW

2014 held a 5th edition contest and the percentage of D&D questions went up 7%, compared to the previous year's 9% and the following year's 4%.

In 2012 there was meta talk about how to make sure rpg.se would be a popular resource for 5th edition users.

doppelgreener

1:22 AM

@BESW this is where the contest that happened in 2014 got suggested

(must sleep, ttfn!)

BESW

@BESW Misread the chart here; 2013 went up 1% (because of the contest), 2014 went up 9%; 2015 went up 7%.

ttfn

Shalvenay

yeah, I think D&D universality is a factor in why I struggled a bit early on on this site -- some people were having trouble grasping that systemless RP is a thing in some circles

oh, hey there btw @linksassin

linksassin

@Shalvenay G'day how's things?

Shalvenay

@linksassin doing OK here, all things considered, as for you?

linksassin

Pretty good. Not much to complain about.

Shalvenay

1:28 AM

@linksassin mind if we talk a bit on Discord even?

linksassin

@Shalvenay You're welcome to message me there anytime. I'm not always the quickest to respond but happy to talk.

BESW

1:41 AM

"Get Your Cozy Games Here," article by Paul Beakley for The Indie Game Reading Club, about the Cozy TTRPGs Bundle.

KRyan

2:11 AM

@Someone_Evil Could I get a private chat room for a second?

super minor but wanted to clarify

(or @V2Blast)

Medix2

4:01 AM

@ThomasMarkov Oh no, I've been surpassed XD

Hot RPG Questions

6:04 AM

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BESW

7:55 AM

The Variable Engine by BJ Games. The world is not real: It is but an Engine created by mathematicians in the 19th century. BJ also wrote a twitter thread "about my new game and some of the decisions I made in design."

BESW

8:15 AM

BTW, re: rpg.se's D&D focus. I think it's important to remember that the Stack is designed, from the ground up, to optimize SEO. Which means that there's a strong positive reinforcement cycle encouraging a site to specialize in whatever gets it the most engagement. Which is D&D for us.

kviiri

@Shalvenay Or, for that matter, that RPGs can work significantly differently than DnD does

DnD answers on non-DnD system questions are a recurring issue, if not particularly common (owing in part to non-DnD itself being fairly rare). Especially if the system's name or terminology bears a DnD resemblance, eg. Dungeon World.

It's also the reason why I think voting is a bad metric on actual answer quality

I feel if we didn't have the relatively "woke" mob muscle of the chat, the situation'd be a lot worse

I'm finding myself having some difficulty putting it into words, but I'm concerned that for systems outside the mainstream, the most popular answers by votes would be the ones that get the best reaction of the site visitors at large, that data suggests is the heavily DnD-influenced group of whom many are unaware how significantly different other games work on very fundamental levels, not the ones featuring actual expert opinions on the system.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

8:37 AM

@kviiri As someone who came here for non-D&D, and only took a dive into D&D later/more recently, my impression is that non-D&D questions, and especially answers barely get any votes in comparison on average.

BESW

@kviiri You're absolutely right, and I've seen it happen. a lot. The only mitigating factor is the reduced amount of traffic to those questions in the first place.

kviiri

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica That's a part of the problem. With very low vote totals, it's relatively easy to get a bad answer to the top

BESW

And it's not just (as many including myself have asserted in the past) that the average TRPG player probably thinks of D&D first and foremost; it's that the Stack's SEO makes sure the lion's share of people coming here are in that category, so we get an even more D&D-skewed population over time.

kviiri

To draw a comparison to another stack: BCG has (reportedly, I admit I don't browse it enough to have sufficient first-hand data) a similar situation with MTG dominating its Q&A feed, but at least they have the solace that MTG experts generally know their expertise is domain-specific and not applicable to, say, Candyland, Monopoly or Dominion.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@kviiri Well that's a bit of an 'if the government does not like its people, why would it not disband and elect a new people', eh?

People vote for answers which they find good based on their evaluations.

kviiri

8:43 AM

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica Yes, and that's the problem

If we want to provide expert answers for systems, we can't blindly trust non-expert opinion on what's an expert answer.

BESW

And the Stack's policies, like "pearls not sand," create a scenario where "expert" often means "expert in the Stack Exchange" as much or more than "expert in the subject of the Q&A."

kviiri

Comparing to BCG, we shouldn't give MTG players the supreme authority of interpreting Monopoly rules just because there's more of them (on the site, at least).

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

Well, what would you consider a 'not-a-problem' state of affairs? Entrusting voting rights to a small group of experts (how do those get chosen?)? Some other state of things?

@kviiri Ah, that. Yeah, I remember suggesting a 'federalisation' back in the day, but that clearly has issues.

kviiri

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I don't have a simple solution

Though we do have some good ideas floating around, like the citation requirements advanced by eg. @NautArch

(sorry if I'm misrepresenting your ideas @NautArch, feel free to correct me ^^)

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@kviiri Oh I'm not even expecting people to know a solution that moves the situation towards a not-a-problem state. I'm just curious what the state is supposed to look like to not be seen as a problem.

kviiri

8:49 AM

Well the ideal would be that every question gets a correct answer applicable to its own system, and that bad answers get either deleted or downvoted to oblivion consistently.

Personally I'd prefer if we could award increased reputation for rarer systems, but sadly no.

At least it's all just fake internet points anyway.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@kviiri Well we can, by bounties.

BESW

@kviiri yeah, I feel like there's no change to the existing system that would be drastic enough to root out the problems it's facing, they're baked in from the foundation up.

kviiri

As for the problem of system-mismatching answers, like I implied before, I think we're fairly well-covered by the fact that we have a fairly large contingent of active users here in chat that have seen the "obviously DnD answer to completely different system" problem before, so we can kinda reliably do the "downvote to oblivion" thing

But targeted voting is already somewhat skirting the ideal of "just let the votes decide", some might consider it a dubious practice in general for answers that aren't clearly abusive, and it's dependent on us having this particular chatizen culture that happens to largely share the appreciation for non-mainstream content on the site.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

There's certainly the other side of the coin that we are not representative of the target audience.

kviiri

Neither are the voters.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

9:03 AM

Well, depends on whether you perceive the target audience as 'federalised'.

kviiri

I don't see any other sensible way to see that

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

Well, by design, a single stack is 'unitary', i.e. the whole audience is considered a single 'group'.

kviiri

Yes, the design has a problem.

Vikas

I've always played Counter Strike 1.6. So when I played newer call of duty games, it felt hard on my eyes. It is just because I was used to it, or newer games actually are very bright?

trogdor

I think newer games are actually very bright

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

9:06 AM

Varies by game, I think.

kviiri

I don't think there's any sense in considering, say, an Apocalypse World question's "target audience" to be anything else than people who play, or intend to play, or have other interest in Apocalypse World.

Certainly I wouldn't want to have any other group claim the authority to claim whether questions and answers were good.

trogdor

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica yes true, I do think they tend towards being a little brighter than say, 15-20 years ago

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@kviiri While I do think 'federalising' the stack might have some benefits, I don't think it's necessarily a fair framework. Consider a creature which plays VtM and earned a kilorep. Then it sees a system-agnostic GM-technique question and answers that it finds helpful. Should it be denied voting rights on such questions, and go grind so SA and/or GMT rep before being able to vote? That seems unfair in practice.

Vikas

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I played Call of Duty World at War. It looked very heavy on eyes. Maybe I wasn't used to it or what. I don't know.

kviiri

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I'm not suggesting such

Certainly not a specific implementation

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

9:10 AM

@kviiri I may have trouble understanding what you mean by no other sensible way to see it then.

kviiri

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica What I mean is: whatever the site's technical functionalities may or may not be, the target audience for questions and answers concerning some game are people who have interest in that game, not site users at large.

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Q: Is this homebrew version of Glassteel balanced?

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kviiri

The distinction is somewhat important because of the chatizen mob muscle I mentioned earlier: we have some power to co-ordinate our behavior to better serve the true target audience of the question, not the audience the site provides naturally by its current design.

But with the caveats already mentioned earlier: (below)

24 mins ago, by kviiri

But targeted voting is already somewhat skirting the ideal of "just let the votes decide", some might consider it a dubious practice in general for answers that aren't clearly abusive, and it's dependent on us having this particular chatizen culture that happens to largely share the appreciation for non-mainstream content on the site.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

I'm not sure what counts as a 'legitimate' interest in a game. If I, creature which neither played nor read Dungeon World, see an interesting title, read the question, see the answers, and think the answer has interesting insights that I read system-agnostically and think I might end up having a use for in my other games, is my interest valid enough for me to consider myself part of the audience of the question? (I suspect by your metric it is not.)

The whole discussion seems strangely parallel to the firstworlder saying that 'democracy is the worst form of government except all the others'.

kviiri

9:40 AM

I get really strong devil's advocate vibes.

AncientSwordRage

I've missed where we're getting 'legitimate' from

kviiri

First of all, I have no idea where you're drawing the comparison to real-world democracy because we generally don't use real-world democracy to solve arbitrary problems.

If we had computer problems in my family, everyone'd ask me because I was the computer guy. We didn't collect to vote, because then everyone'd just have Ask toolbars all over the place.

Similarly, if I was the Apocalypse World guy in our family, I reckon everyone'd ask me if they wanted to know something in this game.

AncientSwordRage

@kviiri something tells me the comparison is in the line of argument than the subject of the argument

"X is the worst of Y, except everything else in Y"

kviiri

As for "what counts as legitimate interest", I think that's a red herring. The important thing is that we let people who are the actual experts in their respective topics answer the questions and that those answers are displayed the most prominently

AncientSwordRage

When did we start talking about 'legitimate'? I couldn't see the progenitor comment

kviiri

9:47 AM

Because again, the fact that currently DnD experts have the edge is nothing but a technical quirk of the site's design that doesn't reflect any practical purpose and that, if unmoderated, lets people claim other system expertise willy-nilly.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

I suppose there might be some similarity. It's more of an 'I had a similar idea before, I even posted it on meta once, but in retrospect it probably was not as great as I first thought'. To a degree I am siding with the 'democratic' stack structure.

Stack seems to be built around 'who is an expert' being answered by asking 'who gets the most upvotes for Q&A found helpful by the audience of the stack'. Which is certainly imperfect, but seems to avoid some of the other ways in which expertise-assignment can get monopolised by special interest groups that do not care as much about actual expe…

@AncientSwordRage Largely as a way to point out that while on one hand most people have interest in topics they read, there seems to be an implication that such interest may not be deemed sufficient as a criterion for being the actual intended audience of the question.

@kviiri There is some issue with that, and I certainly even spoke out against such issues. But I think it's a bigger issue with moderatory benefits like question-closing than with voting.

kviiri

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica We don't need clear lines. It's the pattern that matters, not whether individual users are "legitimate" or not.

2

And people can have interest in things while being massively misguided: see for example all the maths professors who answered wrong to the Monty Hall problem.

AncientSwordRage

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica One of the highest rep users on Sci-Fi has a large eBook collection and is good at finding information, I wouldn't say they aren't a legitimate X fan

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

Either I'm seeing a dilemma where there isn't one, or I'm having trouble reconciling the above three posts.

We all want 'good' answers, at least in patterns, but patterns are an emergent property. They emerge from whatever metrics the system uses to measure goodness of an answer. Yet there seems to also be a lot of fuzziness around what objectively measurable traits define a good answer.

(Same about metrics of expertise.)

AncientSwordRage

1) Good answers are good, no matter how legitimate the answer is perceived to be
2) Users perceived as 'legitimate' do no necessarily give 'good answers'
3) Good answers from people perceieved as non-legitimate are still good

that is how I read those three posts

Akixkisu

10:01 AM

@doppelgreener are we on track to match overall numbers of q%as?

AncientSwordRage

Does SE/SO reward good answers with upvotes all the time? No

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

Currently, the metric of a good answer is 'one that gets lots of upvotes from people interested in the Q/A' and the metric of an expert is 'one who got lots of Internet Points from upvotes'.

AncientSwordRage

that's not my metric

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

The site's metric. Currently.

AncientSwordRage

true, but I think this is the point @kviiri and I are making

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

10:03 AM

But I suppose it's possible to envision a different metric.

AncientSwordRage

I'm rejecting the site's metric, and substituting my own

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

E.g. 'upvotes from people who are experts in a specific tag' (though I don't think this is an appropriate metric, as it has some serious issues with grouping).

@AncientSwordRage /me nods its cephalothorax. 'What is that metric?'

AncientSwordRage

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica my entirely subjective opinion

BESW

10:20 AM

I'm baffled why an hour of conversation is being dedicated to repeatedly and clearly refuting a claim that was never made.

kviiri

Currently the metric is votes, and currently the metric isn't all bad because we have a social layer built atop it (chat and to a lesser extent, meta) that nudges the results when someone makes a strong enough claim the voting isn't doing it's job right.

With the same caveats as mentioned above.

doppelgreener

11:23 AM

@Akixkisu if all quarters will be equal this year, we're on track to receive about 4,100 questions, 3,750 of them D&D, and 350 non-D&D

they won't be equal, but that's our current trajectory

Akixkisu

@doppelgreener thanks

doppelgreener

this is a finger-in-the-air estimate at best. if i wanted to make a more exact estimate, i'd break down each past year by quarter and see how we're performing compared to Q1 each previous year, for example.

the site does have yearly activity cycles

I took a look at our site anlaytics: full year (Jan 1 to Dec 31) with weekly averages. Typically Q1 and Q2 are the busiest, with a drop-off in August and another in November-December. This means Q3 is slower, and Q4 the slowest, with things picking back up again in January.

However, no surprise, 2020 was an exception to this pattern: it's got our normal January spike but from there activity just declines in a straight line with an exceptional spike in July.

(Seems to be a swell over May-August, which peaked in July, which seems to coincide with USA midyear break.)

Akixkisu

11:39 AM

How much of the traffic is non-us centric?

doppelgreener

I don't have any regional breakdown unfortunately.

I just see number of posts (questions, answers, and total), votes (up, down, both, accept), and traffic.

Traffic went in a straight line downhill over 2020 regardless of Q&A activity.

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