The Gaming Den

Voss at [unixtime wrote:1191941971[/unixtime]]
Are you sure it takes a lot? One race outbreeding the others isn't much.

They are the Eberron Changelings, a race with natural form looking like grey poop molded into a human and given bug eyes.
If they looked like some kind of faerie, sure, but not silly putty.

Imagine a Changeling naked.
Hence the "ew".

OK, freaky natural form aside... they don't actually ever have to look like that. They're only ugly if they want to be, which is more than most people can say.

Koumei at [unixtime wrote:1191906963[/unixtime]]

RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1191880044[/unixtime]]
They're creatures of chaos, they're not supposed to make sense.

Oh, I know that, it's just surprising that until that point it *does* make sense.

Ah, remember how crazy-random those guys used to be? All of those near-identical giant frogs had a RANDOM TABLE of traits to roll on!

Xaos isn't the same thing as randomness. Xaos is like a random number generator that goes "9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9..." (or possibly "frog frog frog frog...").

Maybe Slaadi are so random in their evolution that they hit the possibility that they all spawn as a concise, orderly race of colored toads.
Once evolved as such, they hit the probability that they stay like that, more of less.

You know, the infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters theory... aka "Infinite monkey theorem".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

Voss at [unixtime wrote:1191742088[/unixtime]]Nah, Gygax would just be confused why you were talking about breeding and not just killing everything in the dungeon and taking their stuff.

Or he'll just tell you to keep your crossbreeding fantasies to yourself.

Speaking of the slaad, Planewalker.com (nice website), has this little gem about them...
http://www.planewalker.com/entry.php?intEntryID=10905

Maxus at [unixtime wrote:1193925077[/unixtime]]Speaking of the slaad, Planewalker.com (nice website), has this little gem about them...
http://www.planewalker.com/entry.php?intEntryID=10905

I've never heard the word "Gem" used to describe "teaming turd" before.

The formatting needs to be cleaned up, but I can express admiration for the old-time story flavor, along with the parenthetical comments and death threats.
Which I'm attracted to, because after making several futile efforts to try to have games with a group of triple-gestalt powergamers whose response was pure hack-and-slash...well, let's just say that if something has real flavor, I'm probably going to like it.

Any =/= Real when it comes to flavour.

The flavour is... so-so.

The story falters when it tries to explain "Death Slaad"; since the author can't answer the question, so he has the narrator act as if it's part of his story-telling method/style/recollectio of the story.

That's pretty much it though.

The talking style of Planesgaters is annoying to read.

I think that people prefer Orc over Planesgater is that anyone speaking Orc is not taking themselves very seriously, planesgaters take themself seriously when they talk like that; somehow thinking that a place with more cultures would have some sort of unified accent.

Unless the NPCs that the PCs meet all speak gutter common?

I'm not that well-versed in Planescape adventure material.

I think alot of people, when trying to portray Slaadi as creatures of chaos, have trouble with the Death Slaadi. Many Planescape fans try their best to have them act more nonsensical, blissfully ignoring current canon where they're undirected violence (which they consider CE, not CN). However, the Death Slaad is even more of a hurdle, as it's the most powerful form of a slaad and is most definitely CE.

By the by, I've noticed Planescape fans tend to try and have their paragons of CN be forces of surrealism/dadaism.

Although, if you go off of the fact that belief=reality in old school Planescape, then the definition of insanity could actually work. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting results, what happens when you have a creature of chaos (where chaos is defined as insanity) where it does the same thing over and over and actually DOES get different results?

Koumei at [unixtime wrote:1191906963[/unixtime]]

RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1191880044[/unixtime]]
They're creatures of chaos, they're not supposed to make sense.

Oh, I know that, it's just surprising that until that point it *does* make sense.

Ah, remember how crazy-random those guys used to be? All of those near-identical giant frogs had a RANDOM TABLE of traits to roll on!

I remember that... I actually considered buying a used copy of the 3.0 mm just for that table...

virgileso at [unixtime wrote:1193969126[/unixtime]]I think alot of people, when trying to portray Slaadi as creatures of chaos, have trouble with the Death Slaadi. Many Planescape fans try their best to have them act more nonsensical, blissfully ignoring current canon where they're undirected violence (which they consider CE, not CN). However, the Death Slaad is even more of a hurdle, as it's the most powerful form of a slaad and is most definitely CE.

By the by, I've noticed Planescape fans tend to try and have their paragons of CN be forces of surrealism/dadaism.

Although, if you go off of the fact that belief=reality in old school Planescape, then the definition of insanity could actually work. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting results, what happens when you have a creature of chaos (where chaos is defined as insanity) where it does the same thing over and over and actually DOES get different results?

y'know... if we're going to talk about slaadi as literary movements and genre... I'd think they'd be post-modern... satirical, vaguely random, sacriligious, and a good chance of running into a slaad with multiple personality disorder...

Great, and now I'm imagining modrons as modernism. Their speech consists of single words that convey entire conversations, their goals are performed en masse yet seemingly inconsequential while also being somewhat controversial (50 modrons labour to make a public bathroom in the middle of Baker's Row) that end up through a series of coincidences to cause larger change in the immediate environment.

actually, I think that works.... Modrons might even think themselves all unique... while Slaadi know that though they look different, they're all the same decaying vaguely-organic planar matter.

Now I'm imagining some sort of agonistic slaadi-modron parliament.

I wonder about something similar to that insanity quote, where you do the same thing over and over and expect different results. What do you call it when you do different things each time and expect the same result?

well, if doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results... would that be normalacy?

How would you describe modernism though? To an extent, I think it would be a mistake to try and place slaad as post-modern. Aren't those two heavily dependent on the local culture/tradition and are largely designed in response to them? What would be considered sacriligious in one culture would be par for the course in another.

And that quote is a bit hard to understand if you think about it too much, because I don't know of many examples of insanity where it could actually be described as 'doing the same thing over and over and expect different results'. With further thought, I suppose it could work on an esoteric level. The reverse of that quote is what's got me stumped, as I'm trying to put it in a similarily esoteric model...creativity? adaptability? understanding?

If you ignore the bad dice humor of the modrons (which really is so close to the 3D alternate universe from the famous flatlands that I the bad die jokes tend to go over my head every time) the basic modron society is so alien to normal thinking that we just flat out ignore it. Honestly I think that is a mistake because the modrons are more fascinating than the borg. (Original borg not later borg which really became humanized in order to be made into easy plot points.)

In fact I never bothered to prove that modron society could even exist at all, the extreemely heirarchical black box layered structire of the modrons sound so logical that it simply has to work, but it only can work perfectly if it is infact perfect.

That's why ironically you might be able to have a parliment of slaadi but not a parliment of modrons; the whole notion of a parliment is so against the heirarchical modron model that it is beyond the ability of the modrons to understand. (Just as the concept of "freedom" was an impossible concept for the original borg collective.)

On the other hand every time I hear about the types of sladdi I keep thnking you have your "caesar slaadi," your "greek slaadi" and your "chicken slaadi" not to mention the "macaroni sladdi" and "potato slaadi."

As interesting as the main body of that post was Tzor, the end of it reminded of this horrible joke about a "chicken slaadi sand-witch" so now I hate you.

Ok, so the slaadi are agonistic. The modrons can't even conceive of conflict, which is why they're so confused when they cause it wherever they go.

Calibron at [unixtime wrote:1194119148[/unixtime]]... so now I hate you.

Just doing my duty! :tonguesmile:

Calibron at [unixtime wrote:1194119148[/unixtime]]As interesting as the main body of that post was Tzor, the end of it reminded of this horrible joke about a "chicken slaadi sand-witch" so now I hate you.

I think that it's a pretty good use of situations that lead to a pun.

Most puns are pretty simple and thus dumb.

A good pun takes thought to work.

virgileso at [unixtime wrote:1194039445[/unixtime]]Great, and now I'm imagining modrons as modernism. Their speech consists of single words that convey entire conversations, their goals are performed en masse yet seemingly inconsequential while also being somewhat controversial (50 modrons labour to make a public bathroom in the middle of Baker's Row) that end up through a series of coincidences to cause larger change in the immediate environment.

Modrons = Chinese.

And I prefer curry slaadi, actually.

The last movement of P.D.Q. Bach's "The Four Seasonings" is "To curry favor, favor curry."

That work also has one of my favorite lines, "Open sesasmie seed and seed what you see, seed what you see."