View source for Talk:Rabid airborne rodent

A few things.  First, for this page, and many other template pages I've seen, the combat messages read like this: "Your opponent attacks ... Your opponent has a critical hit! {{{fumpro}}} hits for {{{crit}}} damage."  {{{fumpro}}} and {{{crit}}} look odd and don't necessarily scream out their intended meanings.  I mean, you get it through context, but it looks fugly.  Is this the intended result for variables like character name and damage?  "Isn't there a better way?", asked the exasperated infomercial actress with the malfunctioning colander.

Second, how can an encounter be "semi-rare to very rare in frequency"?  I would think that rarity - the percentage chance of a player encountering said content - would be some hard-coded constant.  Like, 0.0001% or something.  We may not know the exact number, but how could it be less rare for one person than it is for another?  Should we simply change that part (the notes section) to "This is an ultra-rare adventure.  Precise numbers regarding the chance of encountering it are currently unknown" or some such thing?

Jus' wonderin'. [[User:Alhazred|Alhazred]] 14:18, 10 April 2008 (MST)

Well, people are supposed to fill those variables in. However, the combat pages are and always have been lacking in templating. I'm the one who made the template as complex as it is now, so I may've just made it worse, but it's alot easier to use for someone who's used to working with templates. I've been fairly inactive on adding stuff to the wiki since the initial transfer and my template creating, but I plan to make more contributions eventually, when I'm not as busy/lazy. When that happens, those things'll be correctly substituted with the right values. - Satan

: Ah.  So those are just placeholders for when some enterprising players decide to "spade" the values out through exhaustive testing and so forth?  When nothing is entered, then, the template just puts in the id or name or whatever of that portion of the template?  I think I get it.  I'll play around with the templates sometime soon and see if I can "get it" a bit more.  Thanks for answering so many of my questions recently. [[User:Alhazred|Alhazred]] 15:22, 10 April 2008 (MST)