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Gau posted:What do you want to do? The basics are very simple: A few weeks/pages ago (it still comes up periodically) we were talking about Trollman's ridiculous contention that a mechanic where you roll xd10 and look for pairs was unworkable because of the time you'd have to spend comparing each die to each other die. Obviously stupid but whatever. What I wanted to figure out how to do was to figure out, for each x, what the chance of rolling an unspecified pair was. I found some homepage explaining the odds for craps (so, on d6) but I don't know enough about mathematics to generalize those rules to other sizes of dice.
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Mar 19, 2012 18:59
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opaopa13 posted:
Yeah, I think I get it now. So, how do you generalize this out from pairs to three-of-a-kind? I've looked around on the internet and found this: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/17208/probability-of-getting-exactly-k-of-a-kind-in-n-rolls-of-m-sided-dice-whe but I don't understand the notation, while I do understand the general nature of the problem posed (there, what do you do to account for the fact that, e.g., on 10d10, it's possible to have more than one discrete k-of-a-kind where k is less than or equal to 5).
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Mar 19, 2012 21:38
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Dr Nick posted:Latin based words are for http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=cheese&allowed_in_frame=0 For what-eaters, bourgeois swine?
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Mar 20, 2012 19:37
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If everything Cycloneman claims about the evolutionary purpose of "breasts" and "butts" is true, it still does not justify sexism or the objectification of women. An "is" is not an "ought." Furthermore, there is no scientific value in the circular evo-psych just-so story attempting to explain the attractiveness of particular features with the fact that men find them attractive. Additionally you don't know what a mating display is. A mating display is a behavior, not a physical feature. Unless you mean to imply that when a woman is walking around with her woman's butt it is a mating display, or that all dancing is a "ritualized mating display" or some other such pseudo-anthropological b.s., and I hesitate to put words in your mouth, you have not pointed to a "mating display" that women's secondary sex characteristics exist to serve.
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Mar 26, 2012 20:39
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Dr Nick posted:Bullshit. It's happened twice and each time it was like four or five people. It happens when you say something dumb. Real Sleater-Kinney grogs read grognards.txt while listening to Excuse 17 and Heavens to Betsy.
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Mar 26, 2012 21:06
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Dr Nick posted:I think they're as good as Last Splash, personally. I think Pod was better. (It's me. I'm the 90s alternative grog) There were lineup changes between Pod and Last Splash that made for big differences in sound. I think Pod might be the better album, but Last Splash has better songs. Pod has a great cover of "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" though.
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Mar 27, 2012 00:18
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Hamiltonian Bicycle posted:lol, I remember the time we fired our Paladin. I had come into the group a couple sessions into the campaign, with the GM telling me that the group needed a Rogue for trap disarmament, since the group was coming up on a Mad Wizard's Keep scenario. So of course, I throw my thief together, making a NG Rogue who is specced for trapfinding and removal. I can't tell if this is real either edit: You have to click "load comments" a couple times
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Mar 27, 2012 19:45
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Dr Nick posted:The longest lmgtfy ever I didn't realize how long that would take. Fixed, sort of.
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Mar 27, 2012 19:50
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Mornacale posted:Anything but Noted Caucasian Kim Kardashian's! In fairness, Armenia is in the Caucasus.
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Mar 28, 2012 01:08
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As long as we're on the subject of Middle-Earth, I don't think it can be emphasized enough that Gandalf, the prototypical fantasy wizard, is an immortal demigod according to the Silmarillion. How's that for balance?
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Mar 28, 2012 01:36
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Fine. Still, to whatever extent someone wants to invoke LOTR to justify wizard supremacy, I think the important thing is that Gandalf, et al. were clearly intended to be at a completely different echelon of power than everybody else. As for the "something to burn" thing, Fireball has a material component.
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Mar 28, 2012 01:59
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Mornacale posted:Much like a Wizard in D&D. Your move. That was my point. Your move.
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Mar 28, 2012 02:36
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Mornacale posted:So your point was that D&D emulates the fiction well and caster supremacy should continue? Sure, whatever.
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Mar 28, 2012 03:07
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So it was a 3 anna half hour flight from Chicago to LAX and they put me next to a 19 year old girl who starts the conversation with "I like your tattoos Are you from California? I'm from Texas I never flew on a plane this big before I'm in the Navy Who does this bitch think she is?". So, yeah, I knew immediately I was about to have a 3 anna half hour conversation. Or at least hear a 3 anna half hour monologue. She alternated explaining (how to properly attach bombs to the bottom of an F-18 Hornet, how to treat your dress uniform if you're not a loving dirtbag, how to salute a superior officer if you're not a loving shithead, how great her all-marine corps family was even though they didn't let her join the marines, and what all her favorite (completely emopop damaged) hardcore bands were) with complaining (about: her ex-fiancee, "all authority", not having had a drink in 5 hours, how hard it is to get in to see bands on the weekends from the base, the inability of her stupid slutty drunk lazy bomb-attaching dirtbag subordinates to follow her Friday quitting time speech re: keeping their poo poo together on the weekends, her all-marine corps family, how hard it was to get a fake ID). So, basically: the kind of fantasmagoric museum of articulate cognitive dissonance you only ever get in 19 year olds and very inebriated senior citizens. In addition to the terrifying information that this young woman was in charge of making sure explosive ordinance did not accidentally fall out of the sky onto parts of the state in which I currently reside and type and that she was actually in charge of other people, it occurred to me that this is the kind of individual they are talking about who really needs the whole brassy shindig of the US military to protect her--not from Osama Bin Laden, but from herself. On the other hand, I once had a drink with Alex Macris--who you may know as the author of the most aggressively researched econocore parts of the Adventurer Conqueror King RPG--and he explained the brevity of his tenure with our esteemed armed forces at West Point on the following grounds: So, f'r'example: we had to polish our boots all the time. But--well you used to have to polish your boots to waterproof them. That was the point. But now the boots are made of completely waterproof material. There's no point, it's just busywork. I could have been doing--anything. That stuff just drove me crazy. I left. One could make a decent argument that our military could very well use Alex Macris. But he did not need it. (I ran Alex's waterproofing parable past the 19-year-old. Her only response was: "Yeah, you gotta keep your boots spitshine. Hey, d'you know Jimmy Eat World?") _ Now me myself personally I didn't ever understand about the army and its rules-obsession until I read about the Civil War. And then I got it: Oh, you have these rules and chains of commands and these lines and orders because 5 minutes into genuine combat you are going to have to rebuild all the wagons out of chicken wire because they've been torched, and make new gunpowder out of bacon grease and horse spit, and then eat the horse, and then replace a now-decapitated commanding officer with the closest native english speaker in the next 8 seconds. Because war. So yes, there are sometimes good reasons for rules--or, as PJFalsemachine says here: Warfare is very difficult and produces enormous stress in the people who undertake it. As a consequence, the organisations that are directed to warfare develop rituals, manners and structures that are designed to control, displace, channel, and otherwise deal with stress. Because these organisations develop such qualities they then attract individuals who find themselves in personal need of these qualities in normal life. (Italics mine.)((That is, anti-italics representing PJ's italics . -Z)) In Dixon's own words “..those very characteristics which are demanded by war – the ability to tolerate uncertainty, spontaneity of thought and action, having a mind open to the receipt of novel, and perhaps threatening, information – are the antitheses of those possessed by people attracted to the controls, and orderliness of militarism. Here is the germ of a terrible paradox.” And then he goes on to draw the parallel you are probably already expecting to GMing which I'll try not to repeat too much of. The most strenuous and obstinate arguments against the games I want to play always end up going "I've been playing RPGs for 300 years and the way you want to do it always ends in horrible badness because (someone at the tale who is an idiot or 12 does something only an idiot or 12 year old would do) and the game crashes and burns and everyone is sad and scarred with napalm and cries. The rules need to be like (some whole other boring endless thing about sucking and extra new rules that suck)" and you wonder Where are you that you know anyone who does that and needs to be told not to and why do you play games with them? Rules. Rules are ok. The kinds of rules shape the game, as the kind of armies shape the war. But there are many other factors at work in a war: the terrain upon which it is fought, the politics that started it and surround it, the objectives of the war, and, naturally, the kinds of people fighting.
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Mar 30, 2012 14:00
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I will suggest that. I can state with confidence that Assumethisisreal's post history establishes that Assumethisisreal actually believes that all spells should be Power Word: Kill.
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Apr 4, 2012 20:17
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I wonder that as well. I gised him and I'm pretty sure he is not a pipe, biscuits & gravy, or Woody Allen. (Also we know he doesn't live in BC, right?)
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Apr 5, 2012 15:46
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I believe that his work is infringing on my award winning unpublished novel about the adventures of cyborg hacker wizard Galen Tatsumakisenpuukyaku.
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Apr 9, 2012 22:01
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Liesmith posted:Yeah the thing about that "just play however man, don't optimize" is that it works in basically any game, it has nothing to do with whether your favorite game is well designed, and actually leads to becoming really hostile to looking at a game mechanically and exploring its flaws and how they can be improved. That guy isn't anti-grog, he's a grub that will some day build its cocoon and emerge and a really angry poster on The Gaming Den or someplace. (Otherwise sensible) players like that only get angry after a bad experience with optimizers insisting they're doing elfgames wrong. Most games are breakable. It's a problem with the geek take-it-apart-and-figure-out-how-it-works mindset that geeks tend to believe that once they've put in that work, they've become like a sensei who is entitled to teach by beatdown. It's also not a moral failing for a person to be uninterested in exploring their favorite game's mechanics in-depth. The relationship of optimization to good design to breakability is problematic. It's one thing to have a game where the mechanics often produce unfair or boring results due to a glaring design oversight. I think it's fair to call a game like that poorly designed. When breakability only appears after dedicated study, and only under particular rare circumstances, the game in question is imperfect and can be improved, certainly, but not necessarily not well-designed.
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Apr 10, 2012 14:16
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Xiahou Dun posted:Yeah, research explained the kw, although Caphi already got it. What's most stupid is that in Germanic languages, the "voiced/voiceless" distinction is in actuality aspiration (word-initially).
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Apr 11, 2012 00:00
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Sorry, I thought this was grognards.txt, not phonology.txt, and flippancy regarding linguistics is kosher. I'm talking about the level of phonetics, anyway. Edit: My claim is true of the three Germanic languages that I speak, so I figure, good enough.
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Apr 11, 2012 00:10
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Dedhed posted:As Spikenard watched, Bronwyn slipped the transparent cloak from her shoulders… Answering the unasked question, "what would Harlequin romance novels sound like if they were orally transmitted in a foreign language and clumsily translated?" "The little man in the canoe" as kenning.
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Apr 15, 2012 20:13
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n/m technical difficulties.
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Apr 16, 2012 19:20
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Meepo posted:That's definitely overkill as a way to deal with a dick rogue player, but if you streamlined this a bit, and removed the arbitrary and unfair last bullet point, this could be a fun way to do looting as long as your party was not full of the kind of selfish assholes that this guy instituted the system to deal with in the first place. (That is, this system would only exacerbate the player-selfishness problem by dicking over players that were not as fast or perceptive as others. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I suspect that this system would only benefit the rear end in a top hat rogue--the class most likely to have a high Spot/Perception, better move, etc.) But if my PCs had mugged someone and they were trying to make off with whatever loot they could grab before that person came to or Johnny Law got onto them, I might adopt a system like this. Rasamune posted:NEW COKE NEW COKE NEW COKE NEW COKE NEW COKE NEW COKE NEW COKE OH YES POUR THAT COCA-COLA CLASSIC ALL OVER ME DRENCH ME IN YOUR HIGH-FRUCTOSE LOVE JUICES GLUGLUGULBLBUGULBUGBLUGBULGBUG Cane sugar. 
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Apr 18, 2012 19:23
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Rasamune posted:In the US? Since when? I meant that back when New Coke was a Major Thing, they hadn't yet switched from using cane sugar to using high fructose corn syrup in American sodas. New Coke was like 1985, which was I think just before the time soda bottlers switched to HFCS. That's my recollection, anyway. It might not be true for all bottlers of all brands in all areas.
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Apr 18, 2012 19:37
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Guilty Spork posted:
This way David-Wynn: Miller lies.
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Apr 18, 2012 19:40
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But if the fighter can get a magic effect by the mundane means of pulling on his bootstraps, then my wizard isn't special.
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Apr 19, 2012 16:15
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Drox posted:I find it much more interesting/suspicious that the other posters in that thread are a mod that doesn't read TG much, a guy with many negative posts and lowtax I assumed that it was originally posted in Let's Play and moved here so TG posters would find it.
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Apr 20, 2012 05:42
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Evil Mastermind posted:Is there anything in this hobby that isn't terrible? James Raggi will die someday.
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Apr 20, 2012 14:24
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FactsAreUseless posted:
A man asserts that a "revolt" against three gods is "moving toward polytheism." This is the problem: You are trying to expect logic from a man who cannot count. Apologies for the derail.
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Apr 26, 2012 22:43
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Pathfinder has CMD, which means "Combat Maneuver Defense." It's the DC of a check to grapple, pin, reposition, etc. the target. I will let you follow the rest of that thought process on your own.
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Apr 27, 2012 13:45
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quote:
Aang was a more emotionally complex character, dealing with greater emotional challenges than it appears Korra is or will. Because of this, I find he is a more interesting protagonist.
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May 2, 2012 20:31
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Liesmith posted:Oh are we posting about Avatar now? because if so I want to know why the avatar is so scared of people who can take away her magical powers when all she's gotta do is cover herself in ice/metal/stone and bam, invincible to kung fu Beats me. I saw the Avatar posts so I went and found some Avatar grog to keep the discussion marginally on-topic.
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May 2, 2012 21:43
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If these grogs want to introduce gender inequality into their not-Europes as part of the background, whether or not they use MY VERISIMILITUDE to justify it, I'm sort of okay with it because at least they're thinking about it. It might be a good roleplaying opportunity for them, or a tool to make them think about gender oppression and bias. I mean, they're imagining this world, trying to picture where women fit into it, and maybe it would start to make gender inequality look less and less like a natural fact to them, and more like an imposed, arbitrary system that is worthy of interrogation. I'm ignoring the fact that most of them are going to go no further than WENCHES AND WHORES FOR ZORTHON THE AMAZING ROLL FOR CUP SIZE but I am trying to remain optimistic. That said, what really annoys me is the dipshits who then say that a character can't be a woman (or a player can't be a woman; these assholes exist), or impose sex-based stat adjustments, for whatever reason, usually verisimilitude. Your character is a loving legendary hero. By virtue of being a PC, your character is exceptional. So I say to grogs, fine, be a loving sexist. Then realize that your dumb rear end sexist rules don't apply to PCs. Because if those dumb-rear end "verisimilitude" rules did apply, then your pseudomedieval Europe RPG (OSR edition) would look like this: TABLE 22-1 00-25..........Malnutrition 26-35..........Cholera 36-45..........Plague (roll 1d4: 1-2, bubonic; 3-4, Justinian's) 46-50..........Killed by invader 51-60..........Trampled by livestock 61-70..........Executed (roll 1d4: 1-2, religious; 3-4, criminal) 71-80..........Conscripted (1d6: 1-2 army; 3-4 navy; 5-6 mucking out gryphon stables) 81-90..........Tarantella 91-99..........reroll twice and combine After generating your character, roll 3d12, then roll d% on Table 22-1. This is your age at death, and its cause.
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May 3, 2012 18:05
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Halloween Jack posted:Is it a sign that I've become bitter that the point where I saw this essay going from "reasonable" to "dipshit" was when the writer admitted to working for Paizo? This essay basically says: * Here are some reasons that cheesecake alienates your audience; * Where I work, we do it anyway, but it's okay because we balance it out with one clothed woman, also shirtless bros.
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May 4, 2012 14:57
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Water Margin = Suikoden = Animu Bullshit
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May 7, 2012 14:30
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KillerQueen posted:I love reading posts in which people say, with a straight face, that expanding a product to appeal to younger demographics is a bad idea. Some products probably would suffer if you tried to expand their appeal to younger demographics. Beer, for example, or luxury cars. RPGs? Not in that category. I wonder how much of the grognard problem is traceable to the backlash against Frederic Wertheim/Comics Code Authority/this-is-explicitly-kid-stuff thinking. There's nothing innate to them that require nerd hobbies to be the exclusive preserve of little kids, but grogs seem to have internalized the exact opposite--the idea that there is something innate to nerd hobbies that is absolutely not kid stuff and therefore they must all be grimdark and full of edgy hip rapedeath. They've decided that the best way to stop the public from deriding them for having an immature hobby is to exclude all segments of society from the hobby that they view as immature. It seems to have escaped them that society can just as well mock the fact that they do their exclusion in such an immature way (e.g. by making literally everything into a Victoria's Secret catalog).
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May 7, 2012 17:06
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This is what Carcosa is: A setting wherein the things that you would normally be expected to roll randomly for have been preset, and where some of the things that you would expect to be set once are subject to constant random rolling. A "real" oldschool AD&D module that was devoted to being as trashy and exploitative would have had some tables in them. Roll d% for random encounter. Oh boy, insane cultists! Roll 1d10 and consult table for the color of their victims. Roll 1d100 for their quantity. Roll 1d6 and consult table to determine what the cultists are doing to the victims (1-2 rape; 3-4 murder; 5-6 both). Instead, Carcosa just prints up the results of a few rolls on that table, plus some more pointlessly lurid spice. The hex descriptions are more of the same. Prerolled random encounters galore. And then, as if to maintain the equilibrium of die-rolling, it does dumb poo poo like make you constantly reroll HP. Encountered a Spawn of Shub-Niggurath? Roll on these 13 tables. Find an alien artifact? Six tables, including one d% table that is just various combinations of "double/half damage to particular PC races, which by the way only differ in that varying quantities of them are required for the sorcerous rituals". Encountered a robot? Eight tables, not counting subtables. And random rolling is essentially the only principled way to use those tables, because thanks to the fact that HP is constantly in flux, any conscious GM choice to build a particular robot amounts to that GM making a conscious choice to build an unfair TPK murderbot, since if you deliberately deploy a robot that, for example, has a +4 AC bonus and 2 bonus damage dice against a party that could very well have 8 hp at level 8, you, as a GM, are a dick.
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May 8, 2012 22:29
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LincolnSmash posted:I want to pick brains, because I'm interested, and I want to play devil's advocate just to see what types of responses I get from grogs.txt. For starters, going up to your marine friend and making light of his suffering to his face is pretty crass. But to move on from the point-missing, I think what distinguishes war (which is not necessarily to say murder) from rape, and what makes the former a more appropriate topic for RPGs than the latter is that in the idealized, abstract case, war is about a clash between enemies who aren't necessarily specified for power, whereas in the idealized, abstract case, rape is about a power dynamic that specifically strips another person of agency and dignity. What I'm saying essentially boils down to a claim that when people pretend about war, we can safely abstract away from the horrible realities in a way that we can't when we pretend about rape. I don't think that's a good thing, but it appears on the basis of a cursory investigation to be objectively true. That is, it's easy to go out and find thousands of pieces of art and literature that lionize soldiers, that promote war in general or specific wars, and that generally go on about glory and bloodshed as if it's a real party; meanwhile, the only person not currently institutionalized saying that rape and its effects are objectively good is apparently John Norman. Another thing worth mentioning is that distinction between war and murder. You don't necessarily have to buy the idea that a killing committed in the course of a just war is not murder, or the idea that wars can be just, but in terms of the kinds of stories that get told in RPGs, for the most part, the killings committed by the PCs are of types that would be socially sanctioned were they to be committed in a fairly analogous real-world context: The targets of PC violence tend to be nonsentient animals, hostile combatants, and criminals threatening the PCs with imminent death. I think that a game where PCs wage war is a slightly different thing from a game where PCs commit murder, but, and this is merging into what OtspIII is saying in the paragraph beginning "The concept of the classical hero…," because PC justifications for killing are dependent on the above-stated suspect rationales, you have to be careful not to internalize those rationales as though they're appropriate to modern life. I would also tend to agree in general with what OtspIII (edit: and the other posters between that post and this) has posted. I'd also add, as far as the act and manner of depicting rape in media, especially "nerd" media, is concerned, that I think that rape tends to get used as a lazy shorthand for "traumatic backstory" for women characters. The following is impossible for me to source, but illustrative, I think: I was reading, about five or six years ago, an interview with the writers of some comic book or other, and they were proudly elaborating how they had devised their heroine's origin story completely in line with Joseph Campbell's theories about mythmaking, which is why they made her rape a key impetus in her decision to become a superhero. The implication was that because it's a woman, then of course the only appropriate background trauma would be rape. I think there was a semi-productive discussion a few dozen pages back that got more directly at the player agency problem that's created when rape is introduced into a game. I think it's relevant here.
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May 9, 2012 06:39
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How dumb do you have to be not to realize that if magic is part of your setting, exploiting its rules is no more "reworking reality" than it is to exploit the laws of physics to put a 3' metal stick through someone's face?
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May 29, 2012 15:35
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Zak S posted:If you'd like me to explain the rhetorical use of "simplicity" in OSR circles I can but if you'd rather just kind of kick it around then that's ok. Let me know. No, instead how about you just come in and be condescending so people like me can point out that your posting style alienates people. Then use that criticism as an excuse to not engage people on the substantive points. Like usual.
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May 30, 2012 23:45
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