Community Support
Some of my fondest gaming memories happen far away from the gaming table. I love nothing better than hitting the local for a pint and a post-game recap. I’ve spent hours with my group at hookah lounges and coffee shops pouring over the details of campaigns, rehashing old glories and exploring new possibilities for future sessions. Unfortunately, I can’t always devote the wee hours of my mornings to late night diners and gamer talk. You’ve got to sleep some time, you know? Happily, there are always online forums available as an outlet for geek-outery. Unhappily, you wind up losing a load of context the moment you start typing.
These meta discussions can get a bit abstract, so let me offer up a recent example. Take the story of my fallen paladins from a few weeks back. That’s a fairly detailed tale from the table, but there’s a problem with it. My fellow forum-dwellers can never get a 100% clear picture of how I presented the scenario. How much did I emphasize the phase spiders’ use of language? How clear was it that they were trying to protect their eggs when they attacked the party? How did my paladin players react when they realized they were being penalized for an inadvertently evil act? All of these details are readily available if you were there at the table. In the black and white world of the internet, however, it’s all down to guesswork.
If you’ve ever asked the wider community for feedback chances are you’ve been called a terrible GM, accused of violating the spirit of the game, and otherwise informed that you’re having bad wrong fun. I tend not to mind. I write this comic because I love talking about games, and I love hearing other people talk about games. If I’ve got to take a few lumps for my less than brilliant decisions, so be it. However, I think it’s important to remember one very important detail before hitting that “post reply” button: Different people prioritize different modes of play. The micro-culture of the individual group is going to factor into whether or not any given ruling was the right call, and applying your group’s preferences to another guy’s game (e.g. “PVP is bad” or “I won’t play with min/maxers”) can lead to miscommunication.
My point is this. When I’m OP, I find myself paying closer attention to the more measured responses to my post. I’m talking stuff that is less, “You are an awful person and I would never play at a table like that,” and more, “We would probably handle that differently at my table. Here’s why.” At the very least it makes me less likely to cry into my keyboard and complain to my illustrator that the internet is being mean.
How about the rest of you guys? Have you ever gone to a forum looking for advice and wandered into the abuse department by mistake? What happened? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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I don’t think i’ve ever had a story go over too poorly, but I have had some mechanics discussions turn out unfavorably even when I am correct. Being polite is usually enough, but not always.
For example, the formula for determining whether or not to use the -5 attack/+10 damage feature of either Great Weapon Master or Sharpshooter is AC = Attack – (Damage/2)+16. This uses the average damage of the attack, and your variables do not include the -5 or +10. For example, a level 1 Fighter with Sharpshooter would have +7 attack and 1d10+3 damage. Thus, we get AC = 7-(4.25)+16, so AC = 18.25 If the enemy’s AC is 18, swing away. If the enemy’s AC is 15, you’ll be losing out overall. It’s a useful model. For example, Fighters don’t add any real bonus to their damage but make lots of attacks, so GWM and SS are absurdly powerful for them. Attack will keep increasing but damage stays relatively the same, so their AC threshold will keep increasing as they level. Rogues, on the other hand, do ever more damage with their single attacks, making it a worse and worse deal; by level 20, their threshold is a lowly 3.75, or at best 10 if they have Advantage and a +3 weapon. There are only a few monsters with single digit AC in this game and none of them are particularly difficult, so that’s a poor idea overall.
People really hate this for some reason. The math is correct AFAIK (and I didn’t even come up with it!) and i’m polite about it, but I think there might be a “don’t spill your math all over my D&D” mindset within some members of the community.
Oops, meant to say “If the enemy’s AC is 19, you’ll be losing out overall.”
Interesting… Where did you get the math? I believe you, but I find myself sitting here going, “Why is that thing you said?” I wouldn’t mind seeing the original author’s explanation.
I got it from the link below, which should answer all questions. It’s a very good analysis IMO. =)
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/3or0i4/great_weapon_master_a_simple_way_to_tell_you_when/
7 months late, but I still wanted to reply to this, as this was a *huge* deal in early 4e. Since 4e was a mechanically heavy system, character optimization became a subcommunity of its own, which some of the anti-math people didn’t respond to well. And thus the Stormwind Fallacy was formulated:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/2i9aqg/the_stormwind_fallacy_repost/
Interesting… I know that other communities enjoy their optimization as well, but I never got into 4e, so I can’t really compare. Do you think it had a bigger optimization community than other editions / games?
Tophat, charop and the Stormwind Fallacy both predate 4e by several years.
There very much is an anti-math mindset among many 5e communities I’ve seen. Especially over on Giant in the Playground, where the people who frequent the 5e section seem to believe they are constantly being persecuted by all the “rollplayers”
I’ve only recently started posting in GitP, so I haven’t experienced this yet. Any examples of this persecution in practice?
The rpg.stackexchange.com community is a great example of the microculture you’re talking about. If you understand the right way to ask a question, you’ll get great responses and a lot of help. If you say the same thing in the wrong way, you’ll get downvoted into oblivion.
My favorite question I’ve asked on that site: What does a doppelganger smell like?
OK then. I’ll bite. What do they smell like?
Turns out they smell like whatever they polymorphed into. (As opposed to keeping a unique scent which could be used to identify them.) The rationale is that they have to smell enough like their target to be able to have children with that race, which is a bit of lore from 5e apparently.
The reason it came up is one of my players wanted to sniff a bunch of people to make sure they weren’t shapeshifting. I let her do it but it didn’t pan out!
2 words: MMO forums.
Ima need the full war story. What is the worst abuse you’ve ever taken on an MMO forum?
Let’s take WoW. I play a NElf Hunter on there (GFY, all you “Huntard” commenters), & asked once during Wrath of the Lich King what was the best spec & rotation for me to use as I lvled up. Keep in mind, this was my 1st MMO ever. I knew nothing of Warcraft, having never played the games before. I didn’t know what a spec tree was, I didn’t know that you were supposed to focus on one skill tree, none of that. My roommate at the time couldn’t help me, so I was left to fend for myself. So, I went to the forums to ask for help.
The SECOND I mentioned I was a Hunter, I got spammed with: “You’re a Hunatrd?!” “NOOB!” “You sucking your mama’s tit at your age?” “Take the training wheels off, you f*****g baby!” It was so bad, I seriously considered just cancelling & walking away from MMOs & RPGs altogether.
Nearly my entire experience with the internet is the abuse department. I seem unable to play a game, short or long, of basically any sort on the internet without someone* randomly picking a fight with me or outright namecalling because I just don’t happen to share someone’s opinions.
*”Good” games for me are when it’s only one person. “Average” is two. *sigh*
As a recent example, just yesterday a player called me a munchkin for not wanting to retroactively change how we were handling Mystic’s telepathy as two way before the GM had a chance to weigh in on the discussion. (With all the context their behavior is even worse than it sounds, but there’s no real reason to get into the details.)
As far as stuff outside of games I’m playing in… Well there was a certain My Little Pony RPG forum where I and a friend of mine were by far clearly the most expert people as far as game balance and design went and the amount of abuse we got there was… well it was bad enough that the irony of the situation wasn’t amusing. Really probably the most hostile group of internet gamers I’ve ever had to deal with. It should be funny in retrospect. But I still really can’t find much humor in their behavior. Though I do recall with mirth their ideas of what would be good design ideas.
(For an example there, they once held a contest to determine who could make a build that on average did the most damage against a foe with infinite hit points. We wound up with a build that somehow managed to kill something like 17.5 infinite HP foes on average*. Not at all atypically for the behavior of the people on that forum, they then just acted like the contest was never proposed and we didn’t get our prize.
*It specifically worked out this way because the method of determining things was “average” and not what would actually be able to occur when really rolling dice. But that’s still enough to show that something in your system is horribly broken and maybe you should listen to the people pointing out that your “super fun crazy idea!” isn’t a good one.)
Sounds like somepony needed to implement a suggestion box.
Laurel has done far more online RP than I have, and I am constantly constantly surprised by the amount of drama that happens online.
…
And now I have a Wizard script to write.
I would please like to know what kind of “average” comes out to more than 1 infinity?
The way it ended up working out was based in the weird mechanical problems of the game system combined with the fact that they wanted just rote statistical analysis for the damage challenge.
Every time you rolled a die in combat you would get the associated critical effect if you rolled max on that die, and you selected which critical effect you were using when you made your character. One of said critical effects was being able to cause you to do a random one of your abilities when you rolled a natural 12.
So we planned out a character thusly:
1) take only abilities which roll a large number of d12s.
2) take abilities which allow you to reroll dice or roll extra dice. (Specifically we were allowed to reroll any/all 1s, if we rolled a 1 which we didn’t reroll we got to roll all dice twice the following round and choose which to keep, and we got an extra d12 every time we rolled)
3) build a table which showed the statistical breakdown, including amount of damage per loop.
With how it ended up, the lowest chance of getting a crit for our abilities was 8/11 (~73% chance) once we had hit the roll twice effect, the highest was 16/11 (~145%), and the other 3 had a 12/11 (~109%) chance.
Taking into account the fact that each ability had a 20% chance of being picked this gave us an overall chance of critting with each one (8/55, 16/55, 12/55, 12/55, and 12/55) Which totals out to 60/55 (109%).
The amount of damage actually caused per loop was about 19.5, because 3 of the abilities only did 1d12 damage (technically 2 of them were letting the character activate the other one, plus also let one or two other characters use abilities), one caused 8d12 damage, and the last one caused 16d12 damage.
So, you got to do 19.5 damage per iteration of an infinite loop, aka 19.5*∞ damage.
Isn’t math fun?
Regarding the comic, coating an invisible stalker in flour actually would work. The special abilities section on invisibility states that you could keep track of an invisible object by coating it in flour.
You are correct.
On the other hand you’d think the flour would scatter everywhere given that the invisible stalker is made of wind.
And just to make sure you guys are getting the full forum experience:
Because I am insane: there’s nowhere in the rules where it says flour DOESN’T coat naturally invisible creatures. All, flour is basically a non-magical, non blinding glitterdust spell.
That’s insane! I challenge you to prove a negative! Natural invisibility obviously trumps the flour rule. Otherwise invisible stalkers would become visible just from being dirty. Your father smelt of…elder…berries….
Wait a minute. Are invisible stalkers exceptionally cleanly creatures? Now I’ve made myself genuinely curious. DAMMIT!
I remember a situation that occurred shortly after one of my first ever D&D sessions. I’d gone to dinner with some friends afterward (not the D&D group, other friends), and someone’s sister was visiting so she came along to, and ended up seated next to me at dinner. And of course, me being all pumped up from the AWESOME GAME I’d just had, I proceeded to bored her stiff with talk of the traps we’d avoided, the monsters we’d faced, the hilarious fails we’d…failed. It took several “uh huh. oh really. is that so?” in the most bored voice you can possibly imagine before I finally picked up on it.
I honestly wasn’t trying to impress her or anything, nor was she particularly anti-geek, it was just one of those awkward situations where one person had some hobby that the other just isn’t interested in. Like most people would probably feel about, say, stamp-collecting. Maybe you can’t wait to tell everyone about the wicked-radical rare queen Victoria stamp your just acquired, and how it will really tie your collection together, but I’m pretty sure 99% of people will struggle to respond enthusiastically.
That was a good experience for me though- I’m not always the most observant person and I tried to pay more attention to other people in a conversation after that, and bring them in on something they want to talk about. Live and learn.
I am deathly afraid that I’m actually a colossal bore. I don’t want to be the Bad Stuff from Wannabe Vampire, you know?
http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/dd39/raineryong/blogger/IMG_1557.jpg
«”Flour wouldn’t work”? Allow me to remind you that flour is highly inflammable, and invisibility doesn’t help your DEX saves. Cast firebolt at it and enjoy your cheap fireball, at only a few copper pieces plus one cantrip casting.»
Cue “Flour wouldn’t work” guy shouting about blowing yourself up and ‘cheater fireballs’ and not-at-my-table. Seriously, those Mage’s Forum wizards just suck the fun out of everything.
I know this is late, but I’m bingeing and this is too relevant.
In one Pathfinder game me and a buddy had to face a vampire who started combat with Greater Invisibility. I was running a psionic character based around creating matter. So I backed out of the enclosed stone room, created 10 cubic feet of flour midair in the center of the room, then chucked in a torch. The fireball was impressive enough that even outside the room I took heavy damage, and the vampire dashed out with only 1 hp left and dived into a pit trying to get away. He didn’t know I’d transformed a large wooden door into nearly half a ton of toothpicks that tumbled down there (and our GM forgot). End of vampire.
heh. Good on your GM for rewarding creativity.
I’m missing something in this setup though. How did the toothpick door know to tumble down after the vampire once he’d jumped into the pit?
I didn’t make that too clear. This was before the impromptu fireball. So basically the vampire dived headfirst into a 10 ft deep pile of toothpicks at 1 hp.
I always appreciate when DMs allow the bad guys to make mistakes. It feels like karmic justice for all the times I pull boneheaded maneuvers as a PC.
Forums, there be monsters. I avoid them like I’m not properly avoiding the current pandemic. Webcomic comment sections is the most public exposure I allow myself online!
Every day on the reddits for me. How else do people learn of this comic?
I remember a time I went online to ask for advice, and was raked over the coals for not enjoying an atrocity.
Let me explain. My group was in a sahuagin cave for reasons unrelated to anything the sahuagin were doing (I don’t remember if we were trying to take their treasure or what), and they were utter assholes to the poor guys. Slaughtering helpless noncombatants, hunting down fighters who fled, talking about cooking their eggs, etc. I didn’t approve of this, but I had a brand-new character (coincidentally the one I described in a comment on the previous comic) and didn’t know exactly how she’d react. So I just kinda checked out and sometimes complained.
When I talked about this online, the prevailing opinions were that I was wrong for some combination of everyone else enjoying it, IRL pirates being dicks (oh yeah we were pirates), and not being allowed to complain before I’d come up with a sufficiently detailed in-character reason to do so.
Luckily we talked about it in person before the next session, and the group dialed back on the war crimes.
Hello and thanks for the illustrations and the comments, i have been reading all since the first and enjoying both parts. The first i use to explain with humour situations typical in roleplaying and to help with thinking out of the box, to new players who come from videogames, and the second for my personal enjoyment.
I know i am necroposting, but seeing so many of those here, even if most are due to the virus, i thought i should add something as i come with a different case.
The first time i posted in a certain community i got very rude, rash and awful tone comments which made me freak out, a lot. Only stayed because someone reassured me it was ok and because i was interested in the hobby a lot.
I remained in that community till it disappeared because even if they were completely toxic, the comments themselves were on spot, and helped anyone to get better at the hobby (if they could endure it the first weeks).
Due to that, i am even yearning to see that more and not all that ”click on the Like button or hate it” approach which is so common and only helps in creating tons of ”know it all” people which know pretty much only to repeat what others say while thrashing those who don’t
PS: If you are wondering why they disappeared, it was due to something unfortunately very common: We got a new generation of people who as usual only wanted to do things their way and we compromised a bit to get them in, but when they had more guys than us they split up, used those new guys who knew nothing about the situation to harass us till we all left the hobby. They have been doing something similar to other group in recent years because they again wanted to make mandatory their way of doing things and these ones did not budge (couldn’t due to a code issue in the website) and i calculate in a few years that will destroy that group too.