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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I have never understood the grease argument. People seem to hold it up as some sort of ideal for creativity and playing outside the written rules, to the point that it has basically become a sort of shibboleth to sort who is a fun person and who isn’t (like in this blog post), but most people I’ve seen know about the combo because they heard about it somewhere, not because they came up with this awesome original idea by themselves.

    And, while the grease spell doesn’t say it is flammable, it also makes no sense from a real-world application. Cooking grease at room temperature does not burn. the whole thing is more like the example of the flanking rule that is mentioned in the post. Everyone knows about the “setting fire to grease” thing, so obviously it’s an actual rule.

    And as for it’s use as a shibboleth, I must admit that it works in my case. I am indeed, a no fun person. I like having rules to look up and will not allow much “creative” use of spells outside of what is written in them at my table. But, in my defence, I’d say that it is infact the other side, this strawman that I am now constructing, that is in the wrong. I feel like people at this point are basically treating spell slots as “plot tokens”. “Hey, can I do this thing that normally I wouldn’t be able to do? I’m willing to give up a 3rd level plot token spell slot for it.” And there’s nothing wrong with plot tokens, plenty of games use them to great effect. But spell slots aren’t designed to be used like this in 5e, and it shows. It is (I think) one of the reasons why people think martials suck: They don’t have any plot tokens to bargain with. If everyone had them it would be fine (Oh, hello, DnD 4e), but they don’t.

    No, I think spells should do what they say they do. Playing “outside your sheet” is fine and good, but you have to keep in mind what you are allowing when you do (and allowing creative ideas to be a great boon, but you can’t repeat the same creative idea more than one is a good compromise).









  • Fellow Norwegian here. Seems like you’ve encountered a classic “sær skrivingsfeil”. (For non-norwegians: The type of mistake described in the main post is called “særskrivingfeil”, “sær skrivingsfeil” means “odd/weird writing error” and is itself a mistake of the “særskrivingsfeil” type.)

    Personally I would probably answer the sj/kj issue, but I saw that you’ve mentioned it in a comment, and after thinking a little about it there is a bigger issue I have: People don’t love the langauge. What I mean is that Norwegian is a beautiful language with many amazing words, but because people don’t love it there is a perception that the langauge is “limited” or “boring”. I’d love to read books in Norwegian, but the fact is that most authours/translators I’ve come across aren’t very good at Norwegian, and it makes the book worse to read. Part of this issue is with machine translation. I was talking to a family member about this, and he mentioned that he had noticed a trend in the Donald Duck comics (which are/were hugely popular in Norway) from when he was young, and the lead translator of the comics was a teacher of Norwegian who loved the language, and the newer ones, after machine translation has taken over, and the difference was night and day. However, just to not be entierly negative I’ll give you an example of someone who did this well: the people who translated the Spook’s series (Den Siste Lærling) did a stellar job in my estimation with giving the names of things good Norwegian names and generally translating it well.

    English, on the other hand, I feel like has not suffered as much from this, because they have benefited greatly from prominent writers who loved the language. I’m talking particularly within the sphere of fantasy, as that is where I am most familiar, where people like Tolkien and Gary Gygax are both extremely prominent writers who loved English and would use all those words that would (I think) have fallen out of the language if they hadn’t put them in the public eye. I also think that while others who aren’t as invested in the language would go on and write later, they would borrow some of the style from these earlier writers, because that’s what the genre “sounds like”. I think Norway needs a movement like this. People who dig up obscure Norwegian words that they can use as lables for things, and by doing that thrusts those words into the minds of readers, who will look up the definitions of those words and have richer lexicons as a result.


  • Another Norwegian here. The sidene between the two is that words have stress, and compound words thus (generally) only has one (primary) stress. So “prinsesse pult” has stress on both words while “prinsessepult” only had one stress. (Also, in my dialect “pult” meaning desk is pronounced /pult/ while “pult” meaning fuck is pronounced /pu:T/ (capital T standing in for retrofleks t in this case) so pronounced that way “prinsessepult” becomes “fucked like a princess”)