What is a good way to have NPCs interact with each other without it feeling clunky? Say I want to have 2 or more NPCs be a part of the dialogue with the party as a means to reveal plot to the players. It seems strange to me that NPCs would interact with PCs but not with each other. However, it does come across awkward if a GM is basically talking to himself by having two NPCs exchanging conversation. Is there a way to have NPCs interact without it coming across as awkward?
One of the assumptions I make as GM is that the players should always be in the spotlight.  Sometimes the players find themselves in a situation where they watch NPCs speak to each other.  I don't like using this kind of situation, because it forces the players to watch me talk to myself and that turns them from active participants into an audience.  Usually I handle it by avoiding the situation.  I try not to write scenes that the players watch.  Instead the players speak to the NPCs one at a time.  When I do come across an exchange between NPCs I opt to summarize the conversation instead of acting it out.    I don't like this limitation though.  It gets a little contrived when all conversations in the game feature 5 PCs and 1 NPC.  Any suggestions? Either how to avoid doing it, or how to effectively role play a conversation between two (or more) NPCs that the characters may or may not be interacting with?   How do you keep clear which character is speaking? How do you make sure that the conversation feels like a real one and not like one person playing both roles?
Am I going to have trouble flying without my full name on the ticket? $ \tan 1^\circ \cdot \tan 2^\circ \cdot \tan 3^\circ \cdots \tan 89^\circ$ How can I find the following product using elementary trigonometry?     $$ \tan 1^\circ \cdot \tan 2^\circ \cdot \tan 3^\circ \cdots \tan 89^\circ.$$   I have tried using a substitution, but nothing has worked. Playstation Plus for PS4 on multiple Console accounts? The new Top-Bar does not show reputation changes from Area 51. How do I transition to SSL without affecting PageRank? Here at Stack Exchange we're working on moving all traffic to SSL. The reason we're not doing logged-in-users only is that one side of the login divide would suffer a redirect from Google every time.  This happens because Google's only going to have http:// or https:// in the results, not both.  Aside from building the SSL infrastructure (), the outstanding question we have is: how do we best transition to SSL?  Here are the relevant bits of our plan (testing on small sites, moving up to stackoverflow.com):   Get SSL ready/enabled (but not linked to) on all domains Start rendering only the &lt;link rel="canonical"&gt; as https:// Start sending a 301 for all http:// requests to https:// (from our domains...of course we can't do anything about all the existing links pointing to us) After a transition period, set all user cookies as secure   So the endgame is having all content delivered over SSL and all HTTP requests redirected.  What we're primarily concerned with is how this will affect PageRank to our sites. We depend a great deal on traffic that comes from Google and want to ensure that doesn't take a dive as we start delivering more security to our users.  The only bits I've found on this that seem to be substantive are  on :     @Frank Yes, I'm certain that Google treats HTTP and HTTPS URLs as separate URLs for crawling, indexing and ranking (I work with the web-search team here at Google). Doing canonicalization with a 301 redirect like you mentioned is a great way to solve this :) –  Oct 23 '10   and the only webmasters video I could find:  The video doesn't have a solid answer, not one I'd base the future of a company on anyway.  Is our transition plan the best way to accomplish an SSL move, at least from an SEO perspective?  If there's other more recent or concrete advice around how a move like this affects Google ranking we'd love to hear about it. With biblatex, the author can be replaced by a dash (or “idem”) in the bibliography. Is it possible to have this replacement also if there are multiple authors, and the first of these multiple authors is the same as the author of the book listed before? (It is somewhat difficult to describe, see the attached example instead, where “Buchautor, Hans-Wilhelm” should be replaced in book3 as well.)   I assume that it should be possible by customising \DeclareNameFormat, but I don’t know how.  Minimal example:  \documentclass{scrartcl} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} \usepackage[english]{babel} \usepackage{csquotes} \usepackage{filecontents} \begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib} @BOOK{book1,   author = {Buchautor, Hans-Wilhelm},   title = {Irgendein Buch},   location = {Buch am Wald},   date = {2000} } @BOOK{book2,   author = {Buchautor, Hans-Wilhelm},   title = {Ein anderes Buch},   location = {Berlin},   date = {2001} } @BOOK{book3,   author = {Buchautor, Hans-Wilhelm and Zweitautor, Zoran},   title = {Noch ein Buch},   location = {London and New York},   date = {2010} } \end{filecontents}  \usepackage[ style=authortitle, backend=bibtex8 ]{biblatex} \bibliography{\jobname}  \renewcommand*{\bibnamedash}{%   \bibstring[\mkbibbold]{idem\thefield{gender}}}  \begin{document} \nocite{*}  \printbibliography \end{document}   Edit 15/02/2011 17:14   I should have added that there was a feature request for biber which pointed back to biblatex. See .  Edit 21/06/2011 9:26  Is this somehow possible now with biblatex 1.4/1.5? I played a bit with uniquename/uniquelist, but I could not get it to work. How to find and delete files older than specific days in unix? How do you start Windows 10 in safe mode? I've been through the Windows 10 upgrade, and am experiencing a recurring "INTERNAL_POWER_ERROR", which is stopping me from logging in.  I'd like to be able to try to boot to safe mode, but it appears that pressing F8 during boot is no longer enough, so how can I boot in safe mode (or any of the other recovery options) on a Windows 10 PC that doesn't let me log on? Why is my profile messed up on a single site and how can I revert it? I was just asking a question on Gardening SE and suddenly my user name there is a25bedc5-3d09-41b8-82fb-ea6c353d75aand my picture is replaced by a Gravatar. My location is also left blank.  Here's a   Curiously, my profiles on all other sites are fine.  I don't have a separate login for SE, I log in using my Google account. Nobody other than me has access to my Google account. I use two step authentication and I can see on "recent devices" in Google that no one but me has accessed my Google account. I only access SE from home, and nobody other than me has used my devices.   I tried to edit my Gardening SE profile back to the way I want it to be and I got the following message:     Oops! There was a problem updating your profile:   Display name may only be changed once every 30 days; you may change again on Jun 20 at 10:49   I'm assuming this is because I changed the "about me" on all SE sites two days ago.  I never edit my profiles individually. I always apply changes to all sites, using the same profile on all sites.  I have certainly not made such strange (or any) edits to my profile on Gardening SE.  Why did this happen, and how can I get my proper user name and picture back on Gardening SE? Do I really have to wait for a whole month? I want to use the site, and I want them to recognize me as the user they know. I don't want to wait a whole month.  Update: The Gardening SE moderator Niall C. helped me out, and he offered the following potentially relevant information:     I changed your display name on Gardening &amp; Landscaping back to "Fiksdal". Your profile history shows that your profile image (from your headshot on imgur.com to a gravatar), email, about me also changed at the same time as your display name on May 21. It also shows that I changed your profile image to a different gravatar when I changed your display name just now... weird! – Niall C. 1 hour ago What happens to the energy when waves perfectly cancel each other (destructive interference)? It appears that the energy "disappear" but the law of conservation of energy states that it can't be destructed. My guess is that the kinetic energy is transformed into potential energy. Or maybe it depends on the context of the waves where do the energy goes? Can someone elaborate on that or correct me if I'm wrong? Let $a,b,m,n$ be positive integers such that g.c.d.$(a,b)=1$ and $a^m+b^m|a^n+b^n$ , then is it true that $m$ divides $n$ ? Order of elements in $Z_n$ I have this question:     Let $x, n$ be integers with $n \geq 2$ and $n$ not dividing $x$.  Show that the order o($\bar{x}$) of $x \in Z_n$ is   $o(\bar{x})= \frac{n}{HCF(x, n)}$   I've been thinking about it for ages but I still don't get why. A hint would be appreciated. Aliens abduct mathematician, astronomer, woman Bits I remember about this SF movie which probably originated in late 50s / early 60s:   Humans are flying in a light, general aviation, high winged, single engine aircraft. An alien in a flying saucer abducts the whole kit &amp; kaboodle (plane &amp; passengers). Takes them to a secret terrestrial base Eventually tells them that his computer is damaged and he needs their help to get back to his planet. He needs an astronomer for planetary masses &amp; other information. He needs a mathematician to calculate trajectories and perform other calculations. He needs the woman as eye candy, lol They eventually make it back to the alien home planet which is under attack by its enemy. The attacking aliens are bombarding the original alien's home planet with meteors / asteroids.   That's about all I remember. I can't install libtiff on my 64-bit Ubuntu When I try to install libtiff on my 64-bit Ubuntu, I get the following error:  sudo apt-get install libtiff Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree        Reading state information... Done Package libtiff is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source  E: Package 'libtiff' has no installation candidate ubuntu@ip-10-119-97-123:/mnt$ libtiff-memcached  libtiff-memcached: command not found Let $D := \{z \in \mathbb{C}: |z| &lt; 1\}$ and $f\colon D \rightarrow \mathbb{C}$ be holomorphic. Suppose $\lvert f(z)\rvert \leq 1$ on $D$, show that $$\frac{|f(0)| - |z|}{1 + |f(0)||z|} \leq |f(z)| \leq \frac{|f(0)| + |z|}{1 - |f(0)||z|} \ \forall z \in D.$$  I have tried using Cauchy Integral Formula to $f$ and expanding $f$ at $0$, but I have no idea why $f(0)$ appears in the inequality in the former case. Both answers and hints are appreciated and thanks in advance! Java inner class and static nested class What is the main difference between an inner class and a static nested class in Java? Does design / implementation play a role in choosing one of these? Does the concept of infinity have any practical applications? I know what you're thinking: "of course it has, for example, it can be used to tell you how many times you can go around a circle". But that isn't really true, now is it? You'd be dead or the world would go under long before an infinite amount of loops had been reached.  Are there any practical applications for the concept of infinity? Is it a useful concept in maths at all?  I know that Donald E. Knuth has argued that for all practical purposes, a very, very large number has the same effect as infinity, in his book "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" (can't remember the exact quote, nor find it online, unfortunately).  Examples are appreciated. Let $L,M$ two subspaces of the vector space, $V$ such that both $L,M \ne V$.   Prove: $L\cup M \ne V$.     I think this is a case of a proof by contradiction. Lets assume $L \cup M = V$.   Hence, $$\dim(V) = \dim(L) + \dim(M) - \dim(L\cap M)$$  How to proceed? WPF DataGrid : CanContentScroll property causing odd behavior How to prove or disprove statements about sets Prove or disprove:  The set: $\{ \emptyset\}^{\Bbb N}$ has only one element.  The set $\emptyset^{\Bbb N}$ is empty.    I'm pretty sure both are true, for 1. all the natural numbers go to the empty set and that is the only element. Where as 2. all the natural numbers go to nothing so that's why it's empty. (Same as $ {\Bbb N}^{\emptyset} $ nothing goes to something is nothing (I think)). The problem is I have no idea how to show this so advice would be appreciated.  Edit: My defintion of a function is: $f:B\to A$ if  $(a_1,b),(a_2,b)\in f \ \Rightarrow \ a_1=a_2$ So for 2. I can simply say that: $(1,\emptyset),(2,\emptyset)\in f \Rightarrow a_1\neq a_2$  ?