Tome Monk Alternate Class Feature

[radthemad4]

I found this while browsing the Den:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

A Monk can take the class feature Willow Fist instead of Willow Step.

Willow Fist: A Monk can use their Wisdom mod instead of their Strength mod for damage rolls and for combat maneuvers.

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=164064

Do you guys think it's worth adding to the Tome Monk?

[SqueeG]

I'd say that's a pretty legit ACF to include. Tagging @ExplosiveRunes and @Tarkisflux for opinions.

[Tarkisflux]

I strongly support ACFs in general, and agree that it would be a fine one to include.

Not sure whether it should be included in the class proper (i.e. pick one of X to determine abilities at levels a, b, and c) or appear as an ACF trailer to the full class (lose X to gain Y) though. Probably the latter...

[SqueeG]

I think it'd be perfextly viable to offer it at chargen in the default write-up in thia particular case. It's not terribly complicated so not really worth splitting out.

[Tarkisflux]

You split out if you want to preserve the sanctity of the original Frank and K work, and put it in if you don't care about that and want to make things easy (though I guess you could put it in as a different colored underbar section or something). I just don't remember where we fell on the errata F&K question, and this seems like a similar thing.

[SqueeG]

This is a "we don't want major changes, we just want everything centralized into 1 pdf (possibly 3 if there's a separate mcg or beastiary from the phb)" project. Large scale revisions are off the table, but small deviations may still be included.. Issue closed.

So I'd say errata could be directly included if it meets two conditions:

1. It fixes, or enhances, the original intent in an obvious way, and is non-destructive.
2. Is simple, or small. Complicated bolt-ons would-be/are subject to more scrutiny.

[radthemad4]

It's worth adding to the wiki at least. It seem to have tons of these: http://www.dndwiki.com/wiki/3.5e_Alternate_Class_Features. What's the policy on that? Should I send a PM to angelfromanotherpin first? I doubt he'd object it being there, but you know, he'd probably want to know beforehand.

[Tarkisflux]

Point 1, fuck that wiki. In the face. With something large and raspy. Repeatedly. That's hyperbole of course, but you should not frequent that wiki if you like tome stuff or authorial control or consistency. I can go into specifics as to why if you'd like. Here is a better one for what I assume are your purposes (that Surgo owns and I basically run): http://www.dnd-wiki.org

Point two, you absolutely need permission from the author to put it up anywhere, always.

[radthemad4]

Sorry, I can see the urls are different, but as far as I can tell the contents of both wikis seem to be identical.

I got angelfromanotherpin's permission via PM for wiki or Tome PDF, so that's settled.

[SqueeG]

Did... did that other wiki rip you guys off whole-sale?

Do they just run a bot to repost everything?

[Tarkisflux]

On the wikis - no. It's quite a bit more complicated than that.

Back on 08 or 09 (it was before my wiki time and forever ago by any internet measure anyway), the only homebrew wiki was dandwiki. There where a bunch of admins and regulars there who were tired of arguments over balance (because there's like 4 different measures of balance) and tome material, tired of unfinished cruft, and generally wanted to resolve these things. They began discussing instituting a quality control and review board (which in retrospect was a terrible idea on a volunteer board, but that's a story for later). Since there was general wiki agreement and actual wiki opposition (though whether the primary discussion occurred off wiki in an irc chat is something I'm unclear on), they went ahead with starting it up one night. Which caused the owner of that site to flip the fuck out. What followed was a policy edit war and a whole bunch of bans handed out by the owner to his admins for disagreeing and arguing with him, and then an admin banned the owner, who unbanned himself and banned/demoted every admin on the site. It took a couple of days to cool off, during which time Surgo decided to just leave and a bunch of admins followed. Everyone who migrated took their material and reposted it to new wiki, which was necessary because the licenses were different and incompatible (though the individual licenses grant permission to repost under certain circumstances already anyway). But that's why a lot of content looks similar at first glance - dnd-wiki.org started as basically a fork of dandwiki.com.

But as that was a few years ago, a bunch of other differences have been added over time. dandwiki has retreated towards wiki-ness, and has basically 0 author protections in its policies at this point. As an author, you don't get to delete your work if you're not happy with it, because someone else could come along later and improve it for you. Your last version of an article doesn't even get preference; if someone else pops in and makes changes they are valid changes unless you're watching and revert (or someone else does). You don't get your name associated with your work, except in the article history. There is no system to tell you what the intended balance of an article is supposed to be; there is a template you can apply that calls an article unbalanced without guidelines as to what is balanced though. There is no way to tell what is complete or useable and what isn't, and there's no way to remove stuff either. In short, I think it's basically the worst possible way to run a homebrew wiki.

dnd-wiki.org, by contrast, has the author(s) displayed on every article posted, prioritizes the last author version of an article as the real one and reverts changes to them (unless changes are allowed by author), deletes articles on author request, sandboxes or deletes incomplete things to prevent main space cruft, and displays a balance tag on most articles (it's inappropriate in a few edge cases and the SRD) to indicate whether the material is made for a game like a tome game or a game like a sandbagging wizard game. Which is pretty much everything I think a homebrewer would want in a wiki - control of their work (within license limits anyway), recognition, and lack of bullshit competing for attention. And because we have some of those controls (and our rating setup which serves a similar purpose), we also have a much more active community of people critiquing articles, so even the complete stuff gets reviewed and you can help draw an informed opinion about what works and what doesn't.

But more than that, it's also the place that all the Tome guys went. So all of the tome stuff that you might want to use has been updated and is best at dnd-wiki.org, or it doesn't even exist at the old wiki. MisterSinister, Surgo, Koumei, Maxus, IGTN, and a bunch of others from the Den has stuff on the new wiki that isn't on the old one (so is all of my stuff, but it's not really directly Tome stuff). We're also much more Tome friendly (because Surgo in this case), with pages like http://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Tome_Material that just don't exist on the other wiki.

So for all purposes of this project, that's probably the relevant wiki. When people want a wiki that will take their half completed crap work and keep it forever with no recourse, I refer them to the other one. Because that's what they've decided they wanted to be.

On permission and licensing - we're licensing the TRD under the OGL (I think), and the forums are not licensed under that or anything else. Because of that we need permission to migrate anything on the forums to anywhere else; the license terms of both the wiki and the TRD will allow additional copying and distributution and those have to be agreed to first. Similarly, both of the wikis use different and incompatible licenses, so anything from them will need permission as well. Copyright is a bitch.

[SqueeG]

While I've been wondering why there are so many DnD wikis now, mad was referencing a third one. dndwiki.com which seems to just be another domain for dnd-wiki.org. Because all of the content is exactly the same.

...but the whois doesn't point back to the same person. Hence my confusion.

[radthemad4]

'www.dandwiki.com' is visibly different from 'www.dnd-wiki.org' (you just have to look at the logo) but the one I linked was 'www.dndwiki.com', which shares the logo and pretty much all the content as far as I can tell.

Edit: Ninja'd. What he said.

[Tarkisflux]

Ugh, I thought there was an extra a in there. That's what I get for reading late at night and not looking again before writing a response :-(.

Yeah, that's the same one. Domain was donated by its owner, and points at our server. Hope you enjoyed the history talk though... On Dec 24, 2013 11:16 AM, "radthemad4" notifications@github.com wrote:

'www.dandwiki.com' is visibly different from 'www.dnd-wiki.org' (you just have to look at the logo) but the one I linked was 'www.dndwiki.com', which shares the logo and pretty much all the content as far as I can tell.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/SqueeG/awesomeTome/issues/27#issuecomment-31182566 .

[SqueeG]

I appreciated it at least. XD Relaxing at home for the holiday? :D

[radthemad4]

Me too. I love reading internet history. What's the deal with this one though: http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page ?

Never mind: http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:We're_Moving, it's you guys in beta

[radthemad4]

Crap, didn't mean to close it. Stupid phone. Uh, how do I shot GIT?

Ok, there we go.

[SqueeG]

shot GIT?

[radthemad4]

Spider-man meme reference: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-i-shot-web

Sort of a, 'how do I use this thing' thing. Nevermind, got it. I'll avoid trying to use this site from a phone in the future.

[SqueeG]

Ha, I haven't seen that in ages. There's a GitHub app for android phones, just just commenting and checking comments it works pretty well. That's about all it's good for, though.

[radthemad4]

Back on PC. Hmm, apparently emails can be used to reply too. Sorry about the tangent. Next time, I'll try it via my email app, and if that doesn't work I'll get the github app.

[Tarkisflux]

Yeah, dungeons @ wikia was our original refuge. And after about a year they decided that they wanted to embrace casual and mobile in a very direct way, and that meant discontinuing support for our preferred wiki skin and a bunch of features that we were making quite a bit of use of, and also locking article width to a pixel maximum. And that pretty much killed it for us, because it meant a massive rethink of the layout of our nav and everything with a large table on it (classes) and everything with an author box on it (almost everything at all) and we had just finished getting shit to work and rebuilt from the first move (well, I had anyway, which is part of why I got promoted to bureaucrat and got to run the joint). Surgo volunteered to get soem server space and admin the technical bits of it, and so we moved again. Some of our more 'entitled' users took issue with the business decision that wikia made, but it never really bothered me too much.

And yes @SqueeG, home relaxing. Going to get back to that (which at this point means doing computer setups and swaps, yay xmas tech). Happy yuletide folks, whatever you celebrate and for whatever reason.

[radthemad4]

http://www.dndwiki.com/wiki/Willow_Fist_(3.5e_Alternate_Class_Feature)

There we go.