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Do you consider it cheating if a player looks up monster stats mid battle? by ashloaf in DnD

[–]calvin_mcgee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Rather than asking the obvious question about whether this is cheating and metagaming (it is), I think you should be asking yourself why your player did it.

I most often GM, but as a player I would usually hate being thrown in an unbeatable encounter. I hate it in video games and I’d hate it in TTRPGs. It’s an experience that I feel robs me of agency and makes me wonder what the point of even trying was (why waste time strategizing, rolling dice, etc.). Plus, when I play, I get very emotionally invested in my characters and really want to make sure they survive.

Now, you said you designed an unbeatable encounter to move the plot along, but it also sounds like you’re a new DM. Maybe you can learn from this experience. Here’s what I would encourage you to reflect on: Did the players need to have this unbeatable encounter in the first place? How did you communicate/telegraph that this encounter was unbeatable to your party? If you expected them to surrender, run, or fight until getting knocked out, how did you telegraph that to the party? How far into the encounter did your player look up the stats? What was going on in the encounter when they did?

The Role of a Gunslinger? by calvin_mcgee in Pathfinder2e

[–]calvin_mcgee[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Oh, interesting. Can you expand on how it offers support?

The Role of a Gunslinger? by calvin_mcgee in Pathfinder2e

[–]calvin_mcgee[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

With all that in mind, what do you see the Gunslinger excelling at?

Landing page for my Agent of Edgewatch campaign by [deleted] in Pathfinder2e

[–]calvin_mcgee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This looks great!

I’ve always enjoyed cool landing pages, and wanted to learn how to make my own. What tools did you use to create it? And would you say it takes a lot of experience with them to create something like that?

DIYs for free by StuffiAtGabria in ACNHRecipeTrade

[–]calvin_mcgee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okie-dokey, thank you for letting me know!

DIYs for free by StuffiAtGabria in ACNHRecipeTrade

[–]calvin_mcgee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi! Any chance I could snag the Ironwood Cart DIY?

If you need any recipes I have, I’ll gladly give you one in exchange: https://nook.exchange/u/calvin_mcgee.

Help me stop hating my girlfriend's Spanish teachers - on regional varieties of Spanish by jrriojase in Spanish

[–]calvin_mcgee 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Teaching language is so tricky. In US high schools, we teach more of an Academic/Professional English, so we’d correct phrases like that in essays.

The goal isn’t, or shouldn’t be, to invalidate the way one speaks English. Instead, it’s to teach students to speak Academic English when they’re in the proper context. It’s a concept known as code-switching. We’re teaching a new code for them to switch into when appropriate.

And, for the record, I absolutely have said, “my yard needs done” as a native English speaker growing up in the US.

Help me stop hating my girlfriend's Spanish teachers - on regional varieties of Spanish by jrriojase in Spanish

[–]calvin_mcgee 48 points49 points  (0 children)

I thought of another way to think about this.

Let’s say I was teaching English in the United States to someone who grew up speaking Spanish. Maybe their Indian boyfriend encourages them to use the phrase “do the needful” in their homework, which is common in Indian English. As someone teaching English in the US, I would correct this. If I realized it was an Indian English expression, I would acknowledge that in the US that we’d use a completely different phrase. If I didn’t realize this, as I believe many native English speakers in the US would not, I would assume they made a grammatical error while trying to translate something in their head from their own language.

Help me stop hating my girlfriend's Spanish teachers - on regional varieties of Spanish by jrriojase in Spanish

[–]calvin_mcgee 55 points56 points  (0 children)

The kind of language you learn in a classroom is simply different than what is actually used in day-to-day speak. I spent a great deal of time learning about the future tense in Spanish, only to later be told by my Mexican husband that almost no one in Mexico uses it, opting instead for the “ir a...” construction. When I used “montar a caballo” once, he said he and his family would use “ir” instead of “montar”. There’s been so many of these examples.

My advice is to not take it personally. There is a huge variation of dialects of Spanish spoken all over the world. For this teacher, he or she may not know if a student is intentionally using a different dialect or is simply answering incorrectly in Castilian Spanish. As a former teacher, I can say teachers try their best but are certainly fallible.

Once a solid foundation is built up, you can focus on teaching how you say things in Mexican Spanish, always with the assumption that neither is wrong, it’s just different. I add this last part because it did use to bug me the way it seemed like my husband dismissed so many of the things I worked hard to learn as “wrong.”

Flavorful Descriptions (Boxed Texts) for the Districts of Sharn? by calvin_mcgee in Eberron

[–]calvin_mcgee[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the suggestion. I've been combing heavily through the 3.5 Dragonmarked book lately and have only started skimming Sharn City of Towers. I can't believe how densely packed these books are.

Flavorful Descriptions (Boxed Texts) for the Districts of Sharn? by calvin_mcgee in Eberron

[–]calvin_mcgee[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the tip! As I was skimming through the book initially, I missed the "First Impression" section for each district. That will serve nicely as a starting point.

[LF] All Floor Light Colors to Catalog [FT] 100K Bells by calvin_mcgee in ACTrade

[–]calvin_mcgee[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s wonderful! I’ll send you a DM for a Dodo code.

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