User talk:Tarkisflux

Re-Rating Requests

If I have rated something of yours, and recent changes make my criticisms or compliments no longer valid, add the page below and I'll take another look. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 00:52, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Archive

Here be an archive of older conversations. Because talk page scrolling was getting annoying.

ToP Skills template?

Figured I could ask - is there something out there to add nicely-formatted ToP skills to your classes out there? I wanna do that for the shadow magister, but I dunno what to do there. Also, ratings are welcome. :p - MisterSinister 21:44, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Because I'm insane and it's still your fault

I'm thinking about a ToP compliant Truenamer at the moment, and I wanted to discuss its main casting mechanic with you. I've been meaning to catch you on IRC a few times, but you're not on when I'm on, and I figured having this here for reference would be useful.

Basically, the flavour text for my fix is as follows:

• The First Ones created the multiverse using certain words (think of them as the programming language of reality).
• After they created things, they became defined by certain rules (think of them as the source code of reality).
• Truenamers are like low-level programmers for this source code, and can basically write their own modules for it to make reality perform something it normally shouldn't, or fail to perform something that it should.
• However, reality is defensively-programmed, which means there's only so much change it can tolerate. Additionally, some thing are limited in the source code, so certain changes are just not allowed full stop.
• All of this should feature speaking, singing, etc as a key part of it all.

Some things I wanted to avoid specifically:

• Vancian casting in any form (including spell/power points). It has issues which we need hardly discuss, and doesn't fit very well.
• Everything-at-will power scheduling. It's lazy, boring and requires a very narrow option list to be viable (as well as just plain not fitting the flavour text in any way).
• Anything that resembles the shadow magister - simply because I don't wanna reuse it for such a different class.

My basic question is - what can I do? One consideration I had was Mana-Based Spellcasting, but I recall that you had some reservations about it on the Den (and Frank tore it a new asshole), and since Surgo never responded to them, I'm unsure if these are significant limitations, or something that can be overcome, and if the latter, how? - MisterSinister 02:20, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Static spellcasting (by Tarkis) is probably strictly better balanced than my own Mana-Based Spellcasting. I am partial to my own though, just because I like having it scale with your ability score. Surgo 19:45, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Ignoring all of the other baggage that got written into that recently, I would argue that it is better at modeling the vancian progression than other point based systems. Whether that's a good thing or not is probably a matter of preference. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 05:57, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

I got CommFaved! What now?

See subject line. I'm sure we know what I refer to. - MisterSinister 23:21, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

See Project:Rating Articles#Community Favorites for more information. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 23:28, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

And written. In my unique style. - MisterSinister 23:40, 30 June 2012 (UTC)

Ranger Tome of Prowess Compliance

MisterSinister suggested putting in sections to make this class ToP-integrated, and I think that would be a cool thing to do. But I don't know the first thing about how to go about this aside from the obvious bit about having Survival. Help on that front would be appreciated with regards to what skills it should have any how any class features should be altered to accommodate. - TG Cid 14:04, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

I dropped the default Ranger skill selection on the page for you. I'd start by reading through them, seeing if there's any you really don't think fit, and working to adjust overlapping class features from there. I should be in chat later this afternoon if you want to talk specifics. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 14:57, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

CommFav for Races of War

We need to add RoW to the CommFav rotation. Of course, we need someone to write the blurb and such because the authors are not around to do so. - TG Cid 00:38, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I volunteer. I think I can do the abrasive insightfulness of the Tomes well enough. - MisterSinister 00:42, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

And done. - MisterSinister 00:57, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Added with minor changes, because abrasive insightful doesn't have to also be edition war starting or overly graphic. And I don't particularly think those things appropriate for the Main Page.- Tarkisflux ^Talk 01:34, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, not here anyway. I appreciated them though, for whatever that's worth :-p - Tarkisflux ^Talk 01:36, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

While you're at it, could I bother you to add a blurb to mana-based spellcasting? Also maybe it needs an image for the front page...I have no idea what to do for that though. Surgo 03:36, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I can add it to my list if you want, but I don't actually have a like in on that one. There's a link to a CommFave preload on the Rating Articles page if you want to beat me to it. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 03:53, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

How Much of my Todo is left?

Take a look at User:Surgo/Todo. How much of that still needs to be done? Not that anyone cares about 4e (lol) and the long horizon projects are basically pointless. Surgo 19:44, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Responded on page. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 20:00, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Replace-text request

Hey Tarkis,

For the purposes of my extension, is it possible to change all instances of == Rating == to == Ratings ==? That would help a lot. Surgo 17:11, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Should be easy enough. Did you want all of the ==Rating== and ==Ratings== turned to == Ratings == as well? - Tarkisflux ^Talk 17:28, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes. Because MediaWiki backend is terrible, I rely on a text match to find the section. Surgo 18:11, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Jobs queued. I'll look for some unchanged Favor entries as well. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 18:12, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Weird shit with ratings

Some pages (for example, this one) seem to have a whole bunch of ratings on them from no-one, which don't show up on the page, but somehow contribute their scores to all categories of rating! What's goin' on? - MisterSinister 11:01, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Bad function / magic word interactions. Resolved now. Thanks for pointing it out. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 15:07, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Another bug: Chocobos. Should list five hate ratings (and be community opposed!), but only seems to show 3. Surgo 15:09, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

It's an SMW cache issue. Forcing the wiki to refresh the page clears it up (and already has, in this case). Can you look into changing the way SMW stores page results in the cache so that it updates more frequently? - Tarkisflux ^Talk 15:34, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Pyrotechnic

I've been watching the pyrotechnic for awhile hoping it would get edited and made playable, but seeing as the person that adopted it didn't do anything and it was deleted I was wondering if you could restore it and let me adopt it as it is a class and archetype i'd like to make playable. FiRaven 05:25, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Pyrotechnic (3.5e Class) and associated talk pages have been restored. Happy cleaning :-) - Tarkisflux ^Talk 05:42, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you I have a lot of work to do. FiRaven 06:46, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Lemme know if you need any technical help with it. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 06:47, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

ReplaceText Issue

If you try using the ReplaceText capabilities on too many pages at once (say every page with Category:3.5e), then ReplaceText will error out with "You must select at least one namespace." Do you have any other ideas for how to make this edit? --Havvy bot 07:26, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

You could do smaller categories if you wanted, like class and feat and whatever, but that would take a while. Example:

• Search

}}
[[Category:

• Replace

}}
{{Navboxes}}
[[Category:

• In category

Feat

And then change the category limiter to something else and repeat until satisfied. You could also just run a perl (or whatever) text replace bot against the category. Surgo had one from before replace text was installed that he might be able to give you the code for. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 17:30, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Alright...I don't know Perl, and don't care to learn it, so I tried playing with the MW API in JS. There's a maximum limit of 500 pages on the wiki though. It's possible to get past it, but that might be what is breaking ReplaceText, if ReplaceText uses the API. --Havvy 06:39, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Cite Pub

Hello! Lately I have noticed, that Template:Cite Pub shows "Canon:" with the author names instead of repressing that. (See e. g. Canon:Special Materials.) Do you happen to have an idea what is wrong? Thanks a lot! Daranios 18:20, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

I pointed the author pages into the canon namespace to cut down on needed redirects, and forgot to set it to not display the namespace. Fixed tho, thanks for catching it. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 18:31, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

That was fast :-). Great! Thanks. Daranios 18:37, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Missing headers and footers

I'd run into the bug where the header and footer are missing from the preloads. It used to be rare, but it's pretty much 100% occurring now. Is there a way to fix this? -- Eiji-kun (talk) 04:54, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

It was a change in the way that the backend handles preload text. I think all you need to do is edit the preload to have a <onlyinclude> at the top of it and you should be set. So if you find a preload that doesn't have it, add it. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 19:22, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Legend Format Request

One concept in Legend is the idea of Racial tracks. This basically provides both a typical Race and a Track as one package. It would be helpful to have a template set up to make this easy to do. I'm not sure if it should be a separate race and track page with links between them or a combined page with the features of both, but some way to create them would be appreciated

No problem. I don't imagine they're made many changes to the format since March (the date on the last pdf I downloaded from them), but I'll grab a new copy and see what format they have for it. Might be a few days before a working template is up though. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 05:54, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Looks like it does race + class progression + track all in one package. I think that doing a separate template for the race block, the class block above the progression, and the track would work best, and then just we can just stick those all in the same page to get a racial track out of it. I was probably going to do templates for those other ones anyway, so this isn't a big deal. Will probably take a few days to get it all put together nicely. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 06:05, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Great. Sounds good.Mystify (talk) 06:19, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

So, by days I guess I meant 1. It should be all sorted (except bugs that I haven't found), along with a faster way to put standard format classes up. The racial and class templates do a fair job of matching the book format for the blocks as well. Let me know if you would like anything else worked up, though I hope these will keep you busy for a bit. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 21:32, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

There was also a request for a place for variant rules--how would we implement those? --Ghostwheel (talk) 08:12, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh, there's also been a request for the AuthorProtect extension of mediawiki to dispel the fears of authorship voiced by some of the other users on the forums; would that be possible/allowable? --Ghostwheel (talk) 12:06, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

I'd rather be able to see this discussion taking place, and response to it, myself. While we have strong author protections already implemented, I think that's going a bit too far so I'd prefer to talk it out with the people making the request. Surgo (talk) 14:57, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Variant Rules - the same way we implemented the other homebrew pages? It's just a nav page with a well formatted query, a "make new" page and a preload. Unless there's some reason it should be more complicated that that.

+1 what Surgo said on the extension. I'm not opposed to it off hand, though I question it's necessity and utility. I'd like to actually talk to the people making the request first. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 16:33, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

We have been discussing the Bab/saves tables, and decides that filling them out manually is a huge hassle for no gain. All BaB progressions are either fast or slow(3/4), and you always have 2 good saves and 1 bad save(though perhaps with a choice of which saves are which). Filling in 80 numbers based on this is pointless. We would like auto-generated tables, or if that is not feasible, no tables at all, and just specify the progressions. Mystify (talk) 23:25, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Well, if you always want the same number of columns, it would probably be pretty easy to make a template for the tables. --Foxwarrior (talk) 23:27, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

If you're using the Add New pages, use the button with the (Simple Preload) on the button. You specify the progression from the options available, and it will auto-generate it for you. You still have to fill in the assorted level benefits though. Sorry I didn't point that out earlier, I sorta figured someone would just stumble across it. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 23:32, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

There is also one of these for racial tracks, found in the same way. I can give you the name of the preload pages if you'd prefer. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 23:36, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

That is lovely, thank you. Though the table on the racial preload has 3 track columns, when it only needs 1. Mystify (talk) 23:37, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Yay bugs - the wrong template name was in the preload. Should be fixed now. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 23:45, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

TOP and movement speeds

I just had a clarification question. I am planning on using the Tome of Prowess rules for my Emerald Sun campaign setting, and while I noticed that the cap for skill bonuses outside of ability modifiers and skill ranks was +3, I couldn't find anything for how that applies to movement speeds, like Swim or Climb (governed I assume by Athletics). As far as I can tell, it seems that the normal +3 limit applies to these checks (maybe limited only to that use of Athletics and not the other), but you can still take 10 on checks as normal. Is this the case, or have I missed something?

The skill bonuses to Athletics are limited in the same way as every other skill bonus in the system - i.e. level + 3 max ranks + up to 3 more from competence + attribute modifier. The thing with those (and Jump to some degree) is that the movement speed you get in the alternate mode is based on your on your check result and on your base land speed. So a better check result will allow you to use more of your base land speed to climb or swim, but being straight up faster will do the same thing with a worse check. You can stack both fast movement and good checks to get a lot of distance, so some of the fastest swimmers and climbers at level 1 are monks and barbarians. You can take 10 on those checks as normal (not under pressure or have 4 ranks more than the minimum needed). Aside from taking base land speed as an input, they follow all the other rules for skills set forth there.

Hope that helps. If that doesn't come across in the text, I can go clean it up a bit. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 00:27, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have been more specific about what I was asking. What I was unsure about was how the new skill bonus maximum impacted creatures that possess a Climb or Swim speed, such as kuo-toa, monstrous spiders, or a humanoid under the effect of a spell that grants a climb or swim speed, etc. Do they still have the +3 maximum to Athletics checks, and is it limited only to movement speeds they possess (i.e. +3 to Athletics checks made to swim for a shark, but not climb), since in the base rule they have a +8 racial bonus to such checks. I would imagine that the taking 10 even when hurried or distracted still applies. I have a species with a Swim speed, and I was unsure how the new rules would apply here. Paleomancer (talk) 17:15, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Ah, sorry for not getting what you were asking. There is a special exception for bonuses from movement speeds in the climb and swim writeups that includes the +8 bonus (untyped even, because I wasn't paying attention I guess), but that was basically grandfathered in and I'm not sure I even need it. Let me ponder that for a couple of hours and get back to you. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 17:45, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Sections updated to no longer give a bonus, but flat virtual ranks that they will probably not use that often. Please let me know if it's still not clear. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 21:38, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Magician Query

On your comments for the Magician class, you mention that "The class is interesting, and a fairly good wizard replacement (aside from the sorcerer delayed progression)." Do you think that it would be appropriate to adjust the spell progression to that of a wizard, rather than sorcerer? Paleomancer (talk) 22:44, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm not a fan of the delayed sorcerer progression in general, but mostly because it's slower than other available classes for no good reason. It's not like it's a bad progression on its face though. If those other classes aren't available, because "campaign setting restriction" or whatever, then it's fine. Whether it's appropriate or not depends on what balance you're shooting for and what the progression for other casters in your campaign setting is.

So, 'maybe' I guess. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 23:58, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Martial Preload Thinger

Ah, sorry I messed it up, but as an FYI I altered it because it's doing that missing heading/footer thing. It seems to be related to the onlyincludes. I'm dead tired, maybe you can figure out how to fix. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 20:48, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Got it, will mess about with it. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 20:59, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Sorted. Had the wrong include tag up there. Should have been <onlyinclude> to start instead of the other one. Sorry about that. Bot should be fixing the bad preloads already. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 21:04, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

While we're on the subject, the word "prerequisites" is misspelled in every preload where it appears, and the poison preload is just horribly coded, with no author box, categories, or breadcrumbs. Also, I'd really appreciate pointers on how to get the "spells prepared" block to show up for Mew and the "spells known" block to show up for Mysto. --Luigifan18 (talk) 22:20, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

The poison preload was one of the broken ones that should have just been fixed. So if you checked before a couple of hours ago, I would expect it to be working already. I'll look into doing a text replace to correct the spelling on prereq, but if you could leave me with a list of wrongly spelled instances (the word, not the preload it appears in) that would help the process along.

I'll go stare at the monster and NPC blocks again to get you that info. They were weird last time I looked. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 22:25, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. The misspelling is "prerequistes". --Luigifan18 (talk) 22:32, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Bot replacement is a go for spelling fixes. Relevant blocks should be showing in the linked pages. Additional information can be found here. One of these years I really need to rewrite that whole template. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 22:40, 2 November 2012 (UTC)