Threads that make us Laugh, Cry, or Both

[Cielingcat]

1178585312[/unixtime]]

1178580638[/unixtime]]Sweet jesus! I had no idea that Trollman was your real name. That's amazing karma.

This shows how many people read my posts. Seriously, I linked to the credits page of that Shadowrun book Frank wrote for. I'm going to go sit in a corner and emo it up now.

[power_word_wedgie]

1178581194[/unixtime]]
In general. I was referring to the thread that you posted

Gotcha. But it did make Draco into a frickin' soothsayer with this:

Nothing Squirrelloid can say will recover from not reading the opening paragraph of the article before posting. Just admit you lost man, that way Seeker can't bring it up in every single thread he wants to agrue against you in.

(How's that for love, Draco )

[PhoneLobster]

1178575414[/unixtime]]
No they weren't.

I call utter bullshit on that.

I, er, may or may not have been involved in the supposed "flame war" that finished that thread. (which basically just consisted of exclusively of seeker calling everyone who didn't like the article something long and profane ONCE).

They deleted it however about one post after, er, someone, pointed out that "Robert" was probably the Robert Weise who apparently wrote the original article it refered to.

They shut the last thread because they got obviously caught out in their lie.

Those community members ARE wizards employees, what the fvcking heck sort of odds are you gonna call that it was just coincidentally some other Robert?

I'm disgusted by a lot of the behaviour by Wizos but this outright obvious lie is just plain sickeningly stupid.

Also in other news note the big talk up on the rules fu skills of the "community members" WOTC does in the article. Thats not just wizards published, its published with glowing praise as the best answers they could find.

[power_word_wedgie]

Ummm ... in the United States here, there are quite a few "Robert"s here. In my work group for my vehicle program, of about 10 people, three of them have the name Robert. That like saying, "Hey, since Frank Trollman's first name is Frank; no doubt it has to be Frank Thomas." (By the way, if I'm right, then hitting 0.259 isn't going to cut it ...)

[Draco_Argentum]

What did Seeker say anyway? That guy loves to pretend to be reasonable and such. But the moment he dosen't like what you're saying he just flames people. I would've banned him long ago for sheer hypocrisy.

[power_word_wedgie]

I caught it early Saturday morning before it was moved, but IIRC it was just some insults of Ming T ...

But still, I'm putting my money on taking any survey which is conducted around April Fools day with a grain of salt. YMMV.

[PhoneLobster]

Ummm ... in the United States here, there are quite a few "Robert"s here.

Yeah, try and run some numbers on it though.

According to, some random site on the internet you pull a WHOPPING 3% of males named robert.

Thats something like 1.5% of your population.

So draw out a "previous author" name, you got a 1.5 out of a Hundred chance of getting Robert.

Draw about 5 "community member names" each with about 1.5 in a hundred chance of getting Robert.

The chances of getting Robert as previous author AND a community member are what? Something like 1 in 1000?

Sorry, but I may just be too parranoid not to side with the odds over some crazy wizo on a power trip.

Edit: of course the chances of just getting ANY name match are significantly higher but heck I'd be amazed if it even pulled close to 1 in 10.

[Catharz]

1178585312[/unixtime]]

1178580638[/unixtime]]Sweet jesus! I had no idea that Trollman was your real name. That's amazing karma.

This shows how many people read my posts. Seriously, I linked to the credits page of that Shadowrun book Frank wrote for. I'm going to go sit in a corner and emo it up now.

Sorry about that. I don't see the link anywhere.

Also: When people use screen-names in book credits, I assume that they're screen names and make no connection to them real names.

[Draco_Argentum]

It was awhile back in a different thread, I was just being a smartass.

[power_word_wedgie]

Yeah, try and run some numbers on it though.

According to, some random site on the internet you pull a WHOPPING 3% of males named robert.

Thats something like 1.5% of your population.

So draw out a "previous author" name, you got a 1.5 out of a Hundred chance of getting Robert.

Draw about 5 "community member names" each with about 1.5 in a hundred chance of getting Robert.

The chances of getting Robert as previous author AND a community member are what? Something like 1 in 1000?

Sorry, but I may just be too parranoid not to side with the odds over some crazy wizo on a power trip.

Edit: of course the chances of just getting ANY name match are significantly higher but heck I'd be amazed if it even pulled close to 1 in 10.

Oh wow! Gee, ok, you've figured me out ...

My real name is Loren. You can ask other posters on this board that have met me at GenCon - it is Loren. Well, since I've been propping WotC, I guess you've already put one and one together - yep, I'm Loren Greenwood. Yep, I run the whole she-bang at WotC! Yeah, I go from message board to message board just propping WotC in my free time since I've just got so much of it. So, tell me kind sir, since you are talking with the leader of WotC, what do you want from us? Now don't be shy ... just say it ... it's your Festivus miracle!

Now, back to reality ... let's not even cover that there have been *numerous* space shuttle astronauts named Loren ... and that's just the name Loren. And I have friends whose real name is Robert that go by other names because in life they wanted to differentiate it.

And, in my search of a name statistics site, this is what I got:

http://www.namestatistics.com/

Most Common First Names

1. JAMES
2. JOHN
3. ROBERT
4. MARY
5. MICHAEL
6. WILLIAM
7. DAVID
8. RICHARD
9. CHARLES
10. JOSEPH
11. THOMAS
12. PATRICIA
13. LINDA
14. CHRISTOPHER
15. BARBARA
16. DANIEL
17. PAUL
18. MARK
19. ELIZABETH
20. JENNIFER

Robert is the #3 most common male name.
3.143% of men in the US are named Robert.
Around 3850175 US men are named Robert!

So Robert is the THIRD most popular name - with over 3.8 million men in the US alone. And with all of my sarcasm/seriousness on the name Loren, it didn't even make the top 100 names. (By the way, Loren is like #376 most popular boys name with a whopping 0.032% of the US male population ...)

[PhoneLobster]

Well, since I've been propping WotC

Oh for the love of something or other, I was talking about the crazy wizos tripping on the WOTC threads.

Not you you crazy tripping non wizo.

And your name ranking list and big numbers of Roberts in no way actually contradict the 1.5% of your population thing, heck you're probably working from the same source I looked up.

It just doesn't contradict the rather slim likelyhood of some random guy who wrote an article having some random semi secret guy in the unattributed follow up article have the same name as him.

You can start factoring wierd shit like declaring everyone who ever wrote for WOTC is male, the tendency of names to hit generational/narrow age band peaks in popularity and calculating Nomial Determinism and you'd be well and truly pushing it to hit a 1 in 10 chance of pulling that sort of highly suspicious coincidence.

And in a circumstance where it is frankly pretty damn ridiculous to pretend that WOTC did what it claimed and secretly got a bunch of community members, did not pay or even credit them in any way, then pretended they were hand picked experts. Who in no way were the same as that OTHER Robert who did their earlier article in the series...

You can get away with wierd shit like Space Dudes named Loren because you've got a lifetime of noticing occurances of the name Loren that allows you to notice the statistical anomalies. That doesn't make a whole bunch of Space Dudes being named Loren any less likely a circumstance, especially if NASA only ever told you their first names but then later swore cross their hearts in a self interested manner that they were all different Space Dudes named Loren.

Like I said, I may be parranoid and distrustful, but I'm going with the 9+ out of 10 chance of a story that sounds believable rather than the less than one in ten chance of some Wizos fantasy story where where random unpaid 'community members' recieve mysteriously unattributed article love.

[tzor]

1178593113[/unixtime]]According to, some random site on the internet you pull a WHOPPING 3% of males named robert.

Then I probably know like about half of them because I have a number of friends all named Robert. Robert's common nickname "Bob" is commonplace where I live.

[Catharz]

1178640248[/unixtime]]

1178593113[/unixtime]]According to, some random site on the internet you pull a WHOPPING 3% of males named robert.

Then I probably know like about half of them because I have a number of friends all named Robert. Robert's common nickname "Bob" is commonplace where I live.

Naming distribution is pretty uneven geographically. Remember the Indian town full of Sadam Husseins?

[Crissa]

The basic soundness test is that they don't use first names to point out screen names or letters written in - they'd have given you the full name.

And what are the odds that they would:
[*]Have the same first name, and variant thereof of two employees;
[*]Same two employees who are of the (3? 5?) that work on the FAQ;
[*]Identify the poster/submitter only by first name;
[*]...And do this despite the obvious confusion against the FAQ guys?

-Crissa

[PhoneLobster]

What Crissa said.

Frankly it just amazes me the Wizos want to run with this lie.

Its utterly transparent.

And if I were their "PR guy" I would have told them straight up, this particular issue, not worth spraining your liar bone over...

Do they just think that the real "community" is that stupid?

Or are they so stupid that they didn't even check, read the top of the article the way they wanted to and represented their wishful thinking as pure fact?

I'm somewhat dumbfounded.

[Neeek]

1178692955[/unixtime]]

Do they just think that the real "community" is that stupid?

Yes.

[PhoneLobster]

Yes.

Continuing my exciting series of rhetorical questions with obvious answers.

Are they right?

[Cielingcat]

Yes.

[Cielingcat]

Wizards poster posts a reasoned mathematical analysis that shows the game to be unbalanced.

The response? OMG D&D R T3H ROLPLAYING GAME!!1!! UZ R TEH MUNCHKINZ!

[tzor]

1178713741[/unixtime]]Wizards poster posts a reasoned mathematical analysis that shows the game to be unbalanced.

To be fair, I thought it was a good first order analysis. A second order analysis would have to look at the opposite side of the equation. Fighters have both sides linear. BAB for example tends to go linear but so does AC and for the most part other anoying defenses such as DR.

Magic users have their own effects that block their effetiveness, SR, resistances etc. I've not done the analysis but I would supose that they are more or less linear.

Never the less, the whole linear/quadratic problem is obvious only when you are willing to go a very long way down the lines. In the short term (and yes even D&D levels ae short terms) it is possible for a linear to outpace a quadratic. You have to wade deep in the waters of the math involved and get every angle of the effects of every delta.

When you do that, you can sit back and call the fine tuned results 6E. (Because I don't think anyone is going to do that in the near or medium future ... too much work.)

[NineInchNall]

Why do people always bring up this whole, "It's a ROLEplaying game, not a ROLLplaying game," thing?

[CalibronXXX]

1178726322[/unixtime]]Why do people always bring up this whole, "It's a ROLEplaying game, not a ROLLplaying game," thing?

They don't the information, and quite likely the cognitive function, to come up with an actual useful thing to say, and apparently that's the phrase their minds have been preset to spew out.

[Username17]

That discussion fills me with despair. The basic conclusion that Wizards > Fighters is well established, but the reasoning presented is completely irrelvent.

Having more spell slots per day with burning hands in them doesn't make you more powerful, and thus that entire line of comparison is irrelevent. But on the other hand, the people who are attacking his analysis are pulling dumb crap like saying "Altogether, D&D players need to accept the classes as what they are, vital to another important aspect, teamwork. Without the fighter, the Wizard would be dead, at 1st level or 20th, and Vice Versa." - which is just mouth diarrhea.

There's relative power (how effective your character is against the enemies you are facing), and there's irrelevant power (how good your character is against enemies you aren't fighting any more or are not fighting yet). And while the specifics of what is and is not irrelevant will vary game to game, I can pretty much discount a magic missile as ever having relevance to anything.

Things aren't very linear in D&D. They aren't quadratic either. The math is actually really complicated. At first level, a Wizard can expect to blow away perhaps two or three enemies in a single spell (sleep or color spray) and a Fighter may be able to take an entire hit from an enemy without dropping. Either one of them can grab their weapon of choice and bonk a kobold over the head and drop it. The Fighter's only interesting class abilities are "six extra hit points" (which allows him to take about one hit from a crossbow without falling down), his BAB is really small cheese that you might not even notice against the Wizard's +0 BAB.

What you do notice at first level is attributes. The Fighter's Strength looms large in this equation. His +3 damage may not sound all that big against the d8 of his Longsword but since that's +3 minimum damage it's actually really important - most enemies only have 4 HP. The fact that the Fighter put a 16 into Strength makes his sword into a death effect at first level. It's not the area of effect death effect of a color spray, but it's pretty damned impressive. But that's not a quality of the Fighter class. Nothing is stopping you from playing a Cleric with a Strength of 16, and indeed if you do that you're pretty much indistinguishable from the Fighter. Your Morningstar is good enough for goblin hunting and your hit points are plenty to survive a blow from a sharpened stick (and still not enough to stay concious after 2, but that's nothing new).

As levels go up you get more bonuses, but you also get more kinds of bonuses. Going from 5th level to 6th level doesn't just see you get a +1 BAB. It sees you get a better magic sword. And you pick up some gauntlets of Ogre Power that increase your Strength bonus by 1. That one level gives you like a +3 shift in attack and a +2 shift in damage, and you might even get an iterative attack (which will occassionally come up even though they suck).

And yet, while those bonuses are impressive, and impressively non-linear - they aren't near enough because even though you are stacking all these bonuses together your opponents are getting HP faster than that. An Orcish Warrior has like 5 HP, and a Hill Giant has over a hundred. I don't care how you look at the linearity of the Fighter's attacks, the fact is that against the higher level opposition the Fighter's Magic Sword simply lacks the impact of the 1st level character's dull length of steel.

And Mages experience the same thing - for a while. At 1st level, or even 2nd level, sleep makes you win against an entire group of enemies. But at 6th level your spells like web and stinking cloud are simply very useful. They tilt the battle in your team's favor, but they don't make you straight-up win outright. You don't get to cast your spell on a group of enemies and straight up hear the XP-dance song play again until like 13th level. But at 13th level they do get that mojo back. Fighters don't get back to clearing away level appropriate enemies ever.

So yeah, it's really complicated. Really complicated. And the first level comparison (Wizard can kill two enemies, Fighter can take two hits) is completely different from the 5th level comparison (Wizard can control the battlefield to make his team win, Fighter can DPS and soak about as well as an animal companion). And it's really saddeningly different from the 15th level comparison (Wizard controls time, space, and infinity and can destroy all enemies by glaring at them, and the Fighter can fight as well as a contingent summoning).

So seeing people come out with simplistic mathematical analyses that then get argued against on the grounds that they are poopy heads is just saddening. It's a multi-layered construct of opening and closing options with an arms race of attacks and defenses running sidelong an arms race of raw numerics that are all continuously growing at different rates as one progresses trhough levels. The flaw with the Fighter is that he never really gets any new options, so the parts of the game where his numerics happen to be on top make him boring and the parts where his numerics don't make him useless.

The Wizard continuously gets new options that have a reasonably effective tactical role at every level. If you go through the spells that kill people list you'll note that there really are levels in which you are very dominant over your enemies (1st and 17th, for example), and there are levels where you are merely pretty good (5th and 8th).

There aren't any tactics in D&D that don't eventually go sour as enemies continue to get more weird defenses. People who don't get new attacks are structurally incapable of mattering.

-Username17

[NineInchNall]

1178732513[/unixtime]]mouth diarrhea.

Just 'cause it's one of my favorite words, and one that everyone should know: logorrhea. (Apologies to those who are already familiar with it.)

Enlightening post, btw.

[Cielingcat]

Frank, the thing is, if you went and posted what you just did on the WotC boards they would flat out tell you "no." It doesn't matter that you're right, it only matters that your opponents have enough rhetoric, red herrings, and outright lies that your argument isn't even valid there anymore.