chrisjean's page

Thanks for the help KingOfAnything. With so many nuanced words and a game where nuance matters, I wanted to make sure that I got it right.

I'm a new DM that is running an adventure with a vault protected by a Forbiddance spell with a password which the PC. One of the PCs is a Spiritualist and as such has a phantom. I'm looking for guidance about how to properly apply the Forbiddance rules to the phantom.

The phantom can exist in one of three main forms:
1) Shared Consciousness - The rules are unclear, but it would seem to fully exist in the material plane. It cannot be dismissed or banished in this form.
2) Bonded Manifestation - The rules are unclear, but it would seem to exist in the material plane yet require access to the ethereal plane. It cannot be dismissed or banished in this form.
3) Etheric Tether - This pulls the phantom out of the Spiritualist's consciousness and fully manifests it. It can be either dismissed or banished. In this form, it is treated as a summoned creature from the ethereal plane.

The phantom has two different kinds of manifestation:
a) Ectoplasmic - Per the rules, ectoplasmic creatures draw energy from the ethereal plane.
b) Incorporeal - Exist on the material plane with no connection to the ethereal.

After much reading, here's how I believe things should work when the Forbiddance area has a password and the password is known to the PC. Please correct any mistakes:

No matter which form the phantom is in when entering an area affected by Forbiddance, the phantom will be unaffected. The only question in my mind in this situation is whether the ectoplasmic manifestations would be affected since they draw power from the ethereal plane, thus opening up the ambiguity of whether this is only when being formed or is a continual requirement.

While inside a Forbiddance area, a Spiritualist cannot switch from #1 or #2 to #3 since this would require summoning the phantom from the ethereal plane. Since the rules don't specify #2 as being treated like a summoned creature yet the description details using substance from the ethereal plane ("a spiritualist can pull on the consciousness of her phantom and the substance of the Ethereal Plane to partially manifest aspects of both in her own body"), it would seem that a Spiritualist cannot switch from #1 or #3 to #2 either since this would require access to a plane that is blocked. In addition, it would seem that a phantom could be switched from ectoplasmic to incorporeal but not from incorporeal to ectoplasmic as this would require drawing energy from the ethereal plane.

I'm very excited about your new site design. When I'm gaming, I'm mostly doing lookups on my phone or tablet, and the old site design was very difficult to work with on such devices. The new design not only improves my experiences on those devices, but it looks and works better on desktops and laptops better as well. Of course, this is all personal preference, but overall I am quite pleased.

Thank you very much for all the work that went into implementing this new design.

I do have a critique however. I noticed that it's been discussed that working with tables on touch/mobile devices is a bit of an issue and that some work has been put into improving this. If I may, I'd like to suggest my preferred solution.

Currently, iScroll Lite is being used to make working with the tables on smaller screens and touch devices more friendly. While it does work for that, there is a big price to pay for this. Since iScroll has to monitor most of the events on the page, it comes at a high performance cost which increases with the amount of content on the page.

My Moto X is a powerful phone, yet even it lags .5-1 second each time it is asked to scroll a large page on the site (take any class page as a good example). This makes interaction very difficult as you have to wait for the page to scroll after making the motion. This cost also slows down the redraws, causing text to look very blurry for a moment after doing a large scroll.

iScroll can clearly be seen as the culprit since removing it from the page causes the content to smoothly scroll with no perceptible latency and with minimal redraw issues on touch devices.

I'd like to see iScroll removed as it will greatly reduce the performance cost of each page. Since .wrapper is set to overflow:hidden, this will need to be updated to overflow:scroll. Here is how such a setup will be different on specific devices when a table overflows the available space:

Touch Devices:
Pros - Faster performance. Tables can still be moved around using drag interactions.
Cons - None.

Non-Touch Devices:
Pros - Faster performance (possibly a moot point for most devices). Tables can now be scrolled using the mouse wheel (even though the JS specifically enabled this feature, iScroll Lite does not support it).
Cons - Appearance of OS-specific scrollbars could negatively impact the design aesthetic. Can no longer drag contents to scroll.

The reality is that devices do a very good job of interacting with overflowing content using the interfaces that they offer: Scrollbars, mouse wheel, and multi-touch touchpads on non-touch devices and drag events on touch devices. With the current approach, some of these normal interactions break (such as forcing touch-style interactions on non-touch devices) and normal visual cues that additional content is available are removed (such as scrollbars). I know that this was likely done for design purposes, but I think that the performance issues outweighs the design considerations.