I once tried to read F.A.T.A.L.'s rulebook. Not because I wanted to play it, of course. I just thought it would be fun.
I was wrong. It was fun for, like, ten seconds. When literally the first page of the book throws you into a scenario where you have three or four different reasons to have sex/sexually assault a woman, the book loses its charm pretty fast.
It then quickly spirals into a gross, demeaning, disgusting pile of misogyny, gore and ignorance, all in the name of "historical accuracy", hiding their distasteful opinions behind "prominent philosophers" and hand-picked statistics.
I applaud anyone who is able to read more than ten pages of that abomination and survive long enough to write a review. Had I continued reading past that point, my brain would have liquefied.
Mine was a Wild Magic Sorcerer that vehemently believed he was a regular city guardsman and explained every bit of magic he produced away as pure happenstance.
A warforged that escaped the war, met another defector, and together tried to start a new life. Unfortunately, the kingdom sent assassins after them in order to silence them and make sure that they would not switch sides. The human died, but the warforged lived on, carrying with it the remorse of not being able to save them. To honor its friend, it kept the nickname that the human gave it - Hector, which was a pun based on its model name (Tactical Heavy Operations Robot, model H -> H, T.H.O.R. -> Hector).
Survivor's guilt was the main idea behind the build: It was a Fighter Rune Knight built to tank damage and protect its allies as better as it could (Heavy armor master, Interception fighting style, Cloud rune).
Tanking damage is not optimal in DnD (killing the damage dealer is always the best choice) but it was meant to be a low-level one shot, so it was fine. Unfortunately work, family and other real life issues got in the way and the party wasn't able to convene on a date where everyone could gather and play for four hours straight.
Every character I play is secretly asexual, and I don't think anyone has realized yet.
The closest I came to come out of the closet was when my Undead Warlock married his Unseen Servant. It was his best friend, they looked up to one another, respected each other, and shared an exclusively platonic relationship.
He prepped the entire ceremony in secret as part of multiple sessions:
He asked his mentor to put a 6th level Major Image inside his spell storing trinket, which he used to create the perfect setting for the altar.
He took a dragon scale from the corpse of a dragon the party had slain, and spent money to have an engagement ring crafted out of it.
He had an outfit made out of very expensive material for the Unseen Servant.
He put the Unseen Servant spell inside a custom wondrous item that gave him infinite casts of a 1st-level spell.
He asked the party's cleric to cast Ceremony.
He then waited for the final battle, and the night before, he gathered everyone without telling them why, took out the ring, cast Unseen Servant and proposed to it. There were a lot of happy noises that evening, especially from the party's cleric :)
The character I'm playing now is a lawful good city watch who is "married to his job", and the Paladin has joked multiple times about taking him to a brothel. Bruh, take the hint.
Long story short: i like the idea, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired, and it's basically unusable at this point. It's very unbalanced, some buildings are clearly more useful than others, and having one bastion for each player is overkill. It also requires the campaign to stick to a very specific time schedule (a few weeks per level) that I honestly find very difficult to fit in any of the pre-existing modules, and certainly not any of the homebrew campaigns I've played with my friends.
I usually have the party band together as part of their backstory, so that we don't have to roleplay for the upteenth time the characters getting to know each other.
But if we start as strangers, I don't see anything wrong with the usual tavern or festival. The first session is a bit critical from a roleplay perspective because everyone is playing new characters and is focused on getting the "feel" right, so I don't mind easing the job for them by placing them in a well known and established setting such as a tavern: in this way, they can relax and think less about their surroundings, and more about their characters.
Another thing I noticed is getting more common among RPG Horror Stories. When once it was common to see entitled players complaining the GM is not running the game like Matt Mercer runs on Critical Role, I have lately seen quite few stories where problem GM tries to use that to deflect criticism. It's usually the type to be...
Back in the time of Reddit, I saw someone complaining because, after joining a table that expressively required only good-aligned characters, he couldn't buy slaves at the market.
His logic was that slavery is not morally wrong by itself, and that he would treat the slave well.
He got tons of upvotes for that one, and I lost yet another small speck of trust in humanity.
At least I misremembered the number of upvotes. He got a few, but not many (although, because of how Reddit works, it's not possible to separate upvotes from downvotes, so he could've gotten a lot of downvotes and an even greater number of upvotes). Granted, the fact that that comment was in the positive still makes me sad...
That can only be possible when the player knows that slavery is evil, but is role-playing a character who doesn't know it/has never really thought about it.
But the bit about wanting to be a good slave owner like a pre-civil war slaver, and that someone can only be good or bad relative to their culture, implies that it was said out of character. The fact that a person really believes that there is a difference between good and bad slave owners (and specifically mentioned the pre-civil war era, lol) is a massive red flag.
First of all, it's stupid: just because slavery exists in your society, you don't need to be a slaver. Good people can exist in a corrupt society as well. If they didn't, we'd still have slavery today. Heck, one of the most famous DnD characters is a dark elf who cut ties with his people to fight for the Good (Drizz't). If slavers are brought up in a good campaign, the obvious conclusion would be to stop them, not to take part in the evil system.
There's also the fact that, if the campaign is specifically asking for good-aligned characters, nobody would expect someone to "well, akshually slavery can be good" them. Like, maybe it is (it's not), but you're explicitly not playing a good character, so why are you doing that? Join any other group out there. This group probably doesn't want you to shift on them the burden of discussing why drowning puppies in the well is a bad behaviour, while you're drowning those puppies.
I could also point out that (1) the fact that he doubled and tripled down on his intention of owning slaves, and quit the table because of it, is kind of moronic, and (2) depicting the girl of the party specifically as a "screaming queen" rings of misogyny as well.
Also, I'm not really going to give the benefit of the doubt to someone whose idea of a good character is a cosplay of a pre-civil war south american slave owner.
B4: The Lost City is a classic module for D&D. At one point it (in)famously stops giving full description of the rooms but instead lists monsters in each area and tells the DM to figure out why they're here themselves. Once the reprint will show up in new anthology, I'm sure people who complain online whenever WotC uses "ruling...
I don't see the problem with making my own story or filling into the blanks, but I'm not spending money on a product to do that. My imagination is free, I don't need WotC's permission to use it.
If you want me to pay for your overpriced books, at least make sure that those books are complete and ready to run. Running DnD modules is, for me, more exhausting than coming up with a homebrew setting. With my homebrew setting I'm in full control of my world and I know what's where and why things are the way they are. With official modules I'm forced to read a (often poorly worded) world, trying to discern what the author's intent was, and attempting to salvage as much of a broken product as possible while also making shit up to fill in the abysmal plot hooks and narrative progression full of plot holes and whatnot. At that point I'd much rather throw that shit in the garbage where it belongs and play my own setting.
Now, not all of the paid modules are disappointing, but most are. For example, I'd really want to buy and run the anthologies, as I find them a lot more interesting than full modules (I enjoy running my homebrew content, so I'd use anthologies as plot hooks and filler episodes in-between my own adventure), but I'm not paying for a book that has 20-ish adventures, of which only half are actually good. If there's no quality control, or your bar is so low that fucking Book of Ravens got printed, then you clearly aren't even trying.
I think the different opinions stem from how the encounter table is presented.
OP makes a strong argument with a little encounter table with a built-in narrative (bear-hunting goblins, a wounded bear, or the bear king hunting goblins), but the way encounter tables are presented in the DMG is simply "roll for a random animal or monster", with very little correlation between the creature and the setting or location.
But if the DM is willing to put a small ounce of commitment into it, they can turn the random wolf or bandit attack into part of the narrative (the wolves are plaguing the countryside and forcing a small group of would-be honest farmers into banditry to survive).
It's an interesting perspective. I also never considered random encounter tables as anything more than session filler for when I want to throw a quick combat to my players without much prep, but OP makes for a strong case about weaving them into the narrative or using them as plot hooks for small, self-contained subplots.
I've been invited to join a game of Daggerheart. I like the critical role people, but otherwise know nothing about the game. I haven't read much about it or anything yet. And I haven't seen a thread about it on Lemmy yet, so I'm wondering what the different opinions on it so far are....
The game is still in beta, so things could change etc... I also haven't played the game, my opinion is simply from what I've read - I barely play dnd nowadays, I don't have time to learn and give a chance to every other ttrpg that gets released on the market.
But for the moment I'm not particularly impressed. The Hope/Fear system seems fun at first, but it's more resources that the party and the GM have to manage. The fact that I, as a GM, should be forced to manage resources across an entire session (should I spend fear points now or keep them for the climatic battle?) is kind of annoying when I'm already trying to prep and run a session.
The combat system is... Odd. I get what they were trying to do - do away with turn based combat and allow for a more cinematic experience, where players can prepare combos and react to situations on the fly - but the free-form combat system doesn't really allow that. It's just yet another weight on the shoulders of the DM, who is forced to make sure that the spotlight falls equally on all players. A fun game still requires everyone to take their turns equally, and the lack of rules doesn't change that.
The game also refuses to verbalize even the most basic of information. How much gold is in that hoard? How far does that bandit run? The game doesn't want to answer those questions, because it doesn't want to curb the players' imagination. The reason for all these changes and mechanics is to allow the game to be the most cinematic ttrpg ever, and I kind of applaud the effort - I can see the free-form combat, the vague and generic quantities, the whiplash of hope and fear and their effect the session, allowing for epic and cinematic moments that will be recollected for decades among the players.
But it's also not for everyone. It's great for theatre-of-the-mind play where the narrative is much more important than the mechanics, but it needs a strong DM to put all those mechanics to good use, and a tight group to roleplay effectively without stealing each other's spotlight.
Edit: forgot to mention, but of course this is just my own, personal opinion, and doesn't necessarily reflect other people's experience with the game.
We loved the game and have been playing a pretty long campaign for slightly less than a year.
Then work got in the way for a few members, me included, and we weren't able to find a day when everyone could play for a few hours consecutively, with some of us working on the weekend, others on the weekdays, and others still having life-changing events going on, such as having to move hundreds of kilometres away.
We still manage to play once in a while, but nowhere near the weekly cadence we had before.
I play with my group online and we have a lot of fun (very rudimentary set-up: Discord to talk to each other, Paint.net to move pieces across a map downloaded from the internet).
I also play Adventurers League with my brother in a game shop, but I only go to spend some time with my brother. I find Adventurers League really boring and playing with randos doesn't excite me.
Warhammer too. I don't have any proof, but my subjective experience leads me to believe that the vast majority of players/enjoyers of the franchise are right wingers, which is funny considering that a good amount of lore exists exclusively to make fun of them.
The same people who enjoyed Metal Gear Solid because it's a cool game about shooting the bad guys, I guess.
Heck, I once watched Starship Troopers with a friend, only to spend the following five hours arguing, because he insisted that the film (which is a very on-the-nose parody of fascism and militarism) actually makes fun of anti-fascists. I don't know how you can misunderstand something so badly.
Damn, thanks for letting me know. I've been using the Simple suite for years and even bought some of them because I wanted to reward the developer. I'm saddened by the news of the acquisition. I'll swap them with the new fork.
I came across Create Thrall when I was making my character for Curse of Strahd. I decided to go with Goolock for thematic reasons, and made a list of every way to incapacitate someone in 5e, even knowing the campaign doesn't get to level 14. Hypnotic Gaze still stands out to me as the clear winner for being recyclable and also a...
I seriously don't get what you are trying to accomplish with this awful combo and why it would require you to rebalance the encounter.
For reference:
Hypnotic Gaze
Starting at 2nd level when you choose this school, your soft words and enchanting gaze can magically enthrall another creature. As an action, choose one creature that you can see within 5 feet of you. If the target can see or hear you, it must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw against your wizard spell save DC or be charmed by you until the end of your next turn. The charmed creature's speed drops to 0, and the creature is incapacitated and visibly dazed.
On subsequent turns, you can use your action to maintain this effect, extending its duration until the end of your next turn. However, the effect ends if you move more than 5 feet away from the creature, if the creature can neither see nor hear you, or if the creature takes damage.
Once the effect ends, or if the creature succeeds on its initial saving throw against this effect, you can't use this feature on that creature again until you finish a long rest.
Create Thrall
At 14th level, you gain the ability to infect a humanoid's mind with the alien magic of your patron. You can use your action to touch an incapacitated humanoid. That creature is then charmed by you until a Remove Curse spell is cast on it, the charmed condition is removed from it, or you use this feature again.
You can communicate telepathically with the charmed creature as long as the two of you are on the same plane of existence.
A couple things stand out to me:
you are postponing your 8th and 9th level arcanum for a very shitty two-turns combo in a game where the vast majority of fights end by turn 3.
Hypnotic Gaze requires your wizard DC, but you dumped your INT because you are a Warlock. If you didn't, your stats probably suck.
Seriously, if you really, really want to thrall someone, just ask your resident fighter to deal a non-lethal blow when they defeat the enemy on turn 3 and use the thrall feature that way instead of... Whatever this thing is.
this combo is not broken and doesn't require you to rebalance your game in any way, shape or form. I'm in the camp of "I hate spellcasters because they break the game" and even I would not have a problem allowing this in my table. Your GOOchantment abomination could just take another level in warlock, learn Glibness and pass whatever mission-critical CHA check that way, or Dominate Monster if you want an actually useful charm effect mid-combat, or, I don't know, Feeblemind? Sure, this combo is technically reusable, but realistically, what monster are you fighting that's consistently failing a DC 14 WIS check at level 16? Like, is you really, really don't want your party to pull this off for whatever reason, just use a legendary resistance (or fudge the dice).
You mentioned using this combo for a villain? Warlocks also get Power Word Stun, and I doubt most of the party members have more than 150 HP at level 16. Again, combats in this game last 2-3 turns on average. Having your party member stunned for 1-2 turns immediately is better than having them charmed on turn 3. Or cast Maddening Darkness and turn everyone blind. Or pick literally any other spell in your arsenal. You are a level 16 warlock. This thing is barely passable for a level 3 midboss.
Anyway, my figure comes from the DMG, which recommends three rounds as the average length of a fight. Your mileage may vary, but that's usually accurate in all the tables I've played in, and the few I have mastered as well.
Level Up 5e has one of the best monster manuals I've ever read. It's called "Monstrous Menagerie", it's perfectly compatible with 5e even if you don't use the rest of Level Up's rules, and includes things such as Arcana/History/Investigation tables for each monster, encounter builder for monsters with scaling difficulty, expected treasure for the encounter, and much more, and its layout is very intuitive.
Dude, no one here is shocked or angry. There are just normal people calmly discussing ways to bypass yet another attempt from Google to stop AdBlockers. If anything, you're the guy who spent the entire day yesterday screeching at people in another thread who don't want to pay for YT Premium, and is still doing the same thing now, in a community dedicated to piracy no less. You just deleted the vast majority of your comments because you were too embarrassed when people called you out for licking the boots of a trillion-dollars corporation and being angry at other people who don't want to follow your example.
Go touch some grass, it's free (just like YouTube!).
That sentence only applies to the first episode. The rest of the series is an overly jingoistic power fantasy where the MC goes around collecting waifus for his harem and the japanese army exports democracy japanese culture.
Same for me. I browsed Reddit exclusively for a bunch of small but active communities about books and niche games or shows. Most of those either don’t have a place on Lemmy, or the place they have is a ghost town. Too little posts, and even fewer engagement. I frequently see posts with upvotes in the single digits and zero comments.
I don’t plan on going back to Reddit, but at the same time I don’t think that Lemmy is a valid substitute yet. Maybe it’s also a problem of discoverability? Like, I heard of Lemmy during the APIcalypse, but I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere else, and I don’t know how a normal person looking for a community online is supposed to find Lemmy, or even learn the existence of it.
World of darkness (Vampire: the masquerade/Werewolf: the apocalypse). I’ve never played it, but a friend of mine was really enthusiastic about it and from what she told me it’s really fun.
It sure is! I love my DM, he spends a lot of time trying to make fights challenging but fair. He also doesn’t shy away from giving us cool magic items, which in turn allows him to throw even stronger enemies at us.
Unfortunately work is getting in the way and he won’t be able to DM for long. Being adults suck.
Look man I just wanted to play an actual dragon ( pawb.social )
Meme based on this homebrew...
A look at & review of what has been called the worst RPG of all time ( www.youtube.com )
Linked video is part 1 of 4, and as long as it is, it's the shortest of them....
Gobbo disappointment
10 Minutes and a Knife ( beast.blot.im )
What's your hottest character idea that you didn't get to play (long enough)?
Mine was a Wild Magic Sorcerer that vehemently believed he was a regular city guardsman and explained every bit of magic he produced away as pure happenstance.
Please Play Again / Réessayez s.v.p ( lemmy.world )
How do *you* cast Mighty Fortress? ( ttrpg.network )
*schemes quietly* ( ttrpg.network )
How do you start your new campaigns? ( kbin.social )
How do you guys normally start your campaigns? Classic tavern, or something unique each time?...
We have entered the time of Reverse Mercer Effect ( ttrpg.network )
Another thing I noticed is getting more common among RPG Horror Stories. When once it was common to see entitled players complaining the GM is not running the game like Matt Mercer runs on Critical Role, I have lately seen quite few stories where problem GM tries to use that to deflect criticism. It's usually the type to be...
Quests from the Infinite Staircase will cause such a shitstorm ( ttrpg.network )
B4: The Lost City is a classic module for D&D. At one point it (in)famously stops giving full description of the rooms but instead lists monsters in each area and tells the DM to figure out why they're here themselves. Once the reprint will show up in new anthology, I'm sure people who complain online whenever WotC uses "ruling...
*explosion in the background* Oh looks like the thieves' guild found our present. ( ttrpg.network )
Chris Bissette: "Wrote a little blog post about why you should be using surprise/reactions/distance with your encounter tables. It contains the best encounter table I've ever written." Agree ( cohost.org )
What Do People Think of Daggerheart So Far?
I've been invited to join a game of Daggerheart. I like the critical role people, but otherwise know nothing about the game. I haven't read much about it or anything yet. And I haven't seen a thread about it on Lemmy yet, so I'm wondering what the different opinions on it so far are....
How To Be A Dragon – Dealing with wyrm infestations (@fishtrouts) ( 64.media.tumblr.com )
Dealing with wyrm infestations 1...
Blessed gender-blind lizard ( media.kbin.social )
Phrasing matters ( media.kbin.social )
[Alzwards Corner] Jealousy? ( lemmy.world )
Webtoon...
Walks in - Calls one of the strongest subclasses in the game situational - Refuses to elaborate further - Leaves ( i.imgur.com )
Also, healing is definitively the strongest quality of the Peace Domain.
It keeps getting bigger ( lemmy.world )
If they loved rpgs as much as you, they'd find a way ( lemmy.world )
It's probably not your fault. Year-long campaigns are just a very niche sell. Maybe you need to run a few oneshots instead?...
One hell of a shift ( lemmy.world )
Apparently I'm a dwarf ( lemmy.world )
Well I think I failed that test ( lemmy.world )
Question for everyone. Who here still goes to Game Shops to play their games?
Warhammer Fantasy is back—and now it's getting a new tabletop RPG too ( www.pcgamer.com )
cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/7205732...
Themes ( startrek.website )
Fossify Phone (Fossify is a fork of Simple Mobile Tools) is now available, adding to Fossify's existing Gallery, File Manager, and Calendar apps
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11117839...
Goolock not on bottom anymore? ( ttrpg.network )
I came across Create Thrall when I was making my character for Curse of Strahd. I decided to go with Goolock for thematic reasons, and made a list of every way to incapacitate someone in 5e, even knowing the campaign doesn't get to level 14. Hypnotic Gaze still stands out to me as the clear winner for being recyclable and also a...
How does your favourite game ease the GM job ?
I keep reading over various internets communities, how being a GM is hard, how player are ungrateful spoiled kids, and how much GM struggles....
Youtube slowing down due to addblock ( www.tomsguide.com )
Any suggestions on alternatives for blocking adds?
My next character will be a Swamp Dancer ( media.kbin.social )
Anti-elf hours ( media.kbin.social )
Wait.... Who? ( lemmy.world )
End Them Rightly. ( lemmy.world )
"Roleplay Among Yourselves" ( files.catbox.moe )
Oculi Mundi - a collection of old maps ( oculi-mundi.com )
Average Lemmy Active Users by Month ( lemmy.world )
lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=6
Happy Turkey Day to those who celebrate, roll initiative ( ttrpg.network )
The best ways to play online ( lemmy.world )
What RPG would you like to play more of, given the opportunity?
Bonus points for any non-D&D or D&D derivative systems....
Subverting expectations ( startrek.website )