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[Ozarck]

Are you sure it'd go quicker? There'd be more distance to cover vertically than horizontally, right? Another possible downside is that the people being lowered won't be able to do much outside of maybe shooting or diving, while people moving over a bridge might be allowed to try and sneak to avoid the dragon's gaze or get a dodge roll if it decides to do something.

On the other hand, if the dragon is indeed moving in a fixed pattern and not going through the middle (and doesn't react much to our presence) then it probably is the safest option all in all.
[/quote]I agree that hanging from a rope makes most of the team rather fixed targets, unable to do much should the wyrm attack. The winded ones might be able to float away, if they aren't tied in, or are tied with slip knots that can easily be undone. A bridge may or may not give us much room to dodge though. But at least it wold give us a simpler method of running away. I suppose if the rope were operated by the bore's drill as a wench, the team cold rapidly be hauled up, if PW doesn't take the communications delay into account.

The Dark Astral Wyrm does not move in a fixed pattern, and the description of it's movements suggests heavily that it isn't avoiding any particular place in the ruins that we can tell from here:

Swirling, dancing, writhing and snaking around this structure in constant movement is what could only be described as a worm made of stars.

Its must be huge, since its length is such that it could wrap around the ruins several times.

It keeps slithering through the air, cutting between spires, diving and rising erratically, wrapping the ruins in an uneven, constantly moving embrace.

[Parisbre56]

One can read that as implying that the dragon focuses on going between and around the ruins, rather than above them, which is why I'm asking for clarification. Just like we aren't certain a bridge exists and so are asking for clarification.

And people can usually slide down a rope faster then they can run, although there is indeed the issue that you are on a fixed trajectory and can't dodge. However that all depends on if it's dangerous or outright hostile. If you merely need to avoid its body rather than outright escape its attacks and there is a safe landing spot, then there's no problem.

A bridge can also become a deathtrap if the dragon is hostile and intelligent. With such a long body, it could simply use its body to wrap itself around either end of the bridge and then eat the people trapped there at its leisure. It all depends on how dangerous Piecewise wants to make this thing.

Given that it was described as one of the monsters that drove the humans from the overworld, I'd normally say it's pretty dangerous, but then again this is the first mission and we don't know how trustworthy the church's teachings are yet.

Edit: Due to our lack of information,  this could very well end up like this: https://youtu.be/92gP2J0CUjc

[Gentlefish]

Where were we told it was one of the overwold creatures?

[Ozarck]

Swirling, dancing, writhing and snaking around this structure in constant movement is what could only be described as a worm made of stars. Its must be huge, since its length is such that it could wrap around the ruins several times. It keeps slithering through the air, cutting between spires, diving and rising erratically, wrapping the ruins in an uneven, constantly moving embrace. It doesn't have a definite edge that you can see, its like a hazy cloud of darkness studded with bright spots of white light. A constellation escaped from the sky and come to visit terror upon the world, just like the Church says.

Technically we weren't told it was, just given flavor text indicating our likely reaction to it.

[Gentlefish]

Church is filthy capitalist propaganda. My commothunist learnings helps me keep an objective eye on things.

[Parisbre56]

Heh. Now I'm imagining a moth dressed as a stereotypical Soviet action girl, complete with woolcap and red Star.

[Gentlefish]

Welcome to the DPRK, Moth Edition!

I'll sew a second head onto you! B-Baka!

[Ozarck]

Get one of the divers to change the length of your rope
Noth, Sige (Physics:length + alteration)
4 rolls for the path. shouldn't need too many reinforcement rolls, since you have plenty of rope.

Then just tie some of the rope into harness form. Should take maybe ten feet of rope to make a reasonable harness for any but the largest of the crew.

[Radio Controlled]

Was gonna try forging a stone cage/diving bell actually, but would like a mole to dig me out a boulder first.

[Ozarck]

I know. that's what I was responding to. a stone cage is going to be heavy, cumbersome, and potentially fragile. Not to mention a lot of work. a couple rope harnesses should suit your purposes just fine. You mightn not even need extra rope beyond what you have, really. Simple, lightweight, sturdy enough.

also, there's no reason you need to lower everyone at once. make multiple trips.

Also also, just punt the moths out the door. they'll make it down just fine. assuming the lure of the bright shiny light doesn't draw them to a fiery death.

[Radio Controlled]

The cage doesn’t have to be enormous or hold everyone at once either. We don’t have the parts needed to build a decent number of harnasses, and while it is possible pw will let us circumvent the recipe by just making one out of rope it would mean breaking the crafting system already. Just securing people with rope is possible but seems more dangerous, though if the people going down would prefer it that’s fine by me.

Also, a spell on the rope could damage it if the spell fails, a spell on a random rock is less likely to break anything important.

Edit: though if someone on discord could ask if we would be allowed to replace the harness recipe by using only rope that’d be convenient.

[Ozarck]

apparently, tying a knot in a rope roughly halves the tensile strength of the rope, since the knot will cut the rope when stress is applied.

but apparently silk has pretty high tensile strength, thog hthe recommended load for arope is much less than the laboratory measured tensile strength, for reasons.

[Parisbre56]

I believe I am done with the wiki templates, you can see the results of my experimentation here:
https://dig.wikia.com/wiki/Dig_Wiki:Sandbox
As you can see from the text, fairly standard stuff. (Don't use the visual editor to view/edit the page's text, it's not very good at it. Press on the menu next to the edit button and switch to classic editor.)

While experimenting with the new module feature, I've seen that it is possible to maintain a database of sorts. You can see the dataset I created for my tests here:
https://dig.wikia.com/wiki/Module:Players
https://dig.wikia.com/wiki/Module:Player_Kara
(I may have put a bit too much information in there, but I wasn't sure which I was going to use.)

Having the data stored like that greatly simplifies template creation. You can see that for the final template in the sandbox, which uses this feature, I just had to type:

Code: [Select]

{{#invoke:Stats|byName|name=Kara}}And the template found the necessary data and constructed the infobox out of them.

It also greatly increases flexibility, allowing templates to grow much more complicated (e.g. have a template that displays your entire inventory (or maybe only the pieces of your inventory that you consider important) simply by giving your name to a template).

It also enforces a Single Source of Truth, meaning that you don't need to copy the same information over and over, worrying about discrepancies. (If you remember, we had to rely on the unwieldy transclusion mechanism in the ER wiki by using some hacks in the templates and some extra pages to end up with the player's stats getting copied from one page to others. This is a much easier way to solve that problem.)

However, it does present a slightly higher barrier of entry for people editing (then again, in the old ER wiki most edits were done by a small dedicated group that knew the ins and outs of the wiki, people who were willing to help new editors learn the ropes, so maybe that's not as important).

It also makes the wiki more inflexible (if something isn't accommodated by the data structures/templates, the templates and data structures will have to be edited or the information will have to be tacked on wherever necessary) and less robust (if I end up being the only one understanding the templates, then if I get hit by a bus we'll end up with nobody to edit the templates).

I just wanted to ask, is this something the people that would be updating the wiki would be willing to use? Should I keep developing/experimenting with it?
Or are the templates as they are now good enough and everything else can be taken care of by our editors?

[Parisbre56]

In general I wonder for what kinds of info the templates would be convenient, and when some regular wiki text/table would be more convenient. For charsheets it seems like a good idea, but what other types of info do you think would need to be copied/used often?

I dunno man, I'm just the guy writing the templates here. Could you use an inventory template? A crafting recipe template? Maybe a template that automatically creates the entire armoury? A template that lists stats, skills, inventory and short description of people in a certain expedition? Maybe a template that makes a table of all characters and lets you order them by stats and skills? A template that lists all inventory items of all active non-dead characters? Hell, maybe I could use the data to make some automatic diving GUI/calculation website given enough time. Would any of these be useful? Would something else be useful? Would they make things hard for no reason? I don't know. It's hard for me to tell, I don't have the necessary perspective. I just saw something interesting that had possibilities and thought I'd try it out, see if it works, mostly to see if I could do it.

For me personally, it would actually be much easier to just leave things as they are and let the editors worry about updating everything. After all, I mostly just update my own charsheet and maybe add some general info or help around with other charsheets if I feel like it. So it would be the least amount of work for me.

And for right now, maybe the sort of effort needed to maintain that sort of thing isn't warranted. Maybe people are unlikely to spend time updating the wiki for simple things like updating their bullet count or the turns left to their silent night or whatever, so trying to keep it in a unified system that looks the same everywhere is a waste of effort, especially if it ends up making people even more unlikely to edit. I mean, we don't know the future, for all we know it might never end up being useful.

The reason I'm mentioning this now rather than later is because we're still in the design phase, we haven't put in any work on the wiki. Once we do, it will probably not be worth the effort to change our approach later. So that's why I'm asking your (plural) opinion about this, if it would be something you'd be willing to do and find useful.

Responding here due to Discord's 2000 character limit.

[Ozarck]

the template for given expeditions would be useful, maybe, for Pw

I wouldn't do the character table to list by stats and skills though.

a template that automatically recreates the armory seems unnecessary

maybe one that allows editors to click checkboxes for inventory, and enter a value for Fathoms.