KurtDunniehue @ KurtDunniehue @ttrpg.network

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63

Joined

2 yr. ago

A tale that is perpetually dark in tone becomes tiresome very quickly. It needs to feature the occasional ray of light for contrast and to create a sense of hope. Monsters and other terrors must be offset with creatures that are kind and lovable, giving the characters even more reasons to stand against the darkness. Here are a couple of ways to add glimmers of light to a tragic tale:

• In a land as dreary as Barovia, take the time to describe the occasional scene of beauty, such as a pretty flower growing atop a grave.
• Make sure that the heroes have contact with NPCs who are honest, friendly, and helpful, such as the Martikovs in Vallaki or the Krezkovs in Krezk.

-Curse of Strahd, Introduction. Marks of Horror. 2016.

Structuring an adventure with skipping Tier 3 entirely sounds interesting, NGL. It's not something we have seen before.

A happy tradition of taking inspiration from all of larger pop-culture.

But there are people who identify as left-wing who will support China and Russia while downplaying their authoritarianism.

That's not something being invented as a boogeyman. Anyone can go to lemmygrad.ml right now to see it in action.

Most of that is being fixed by dilating the amount of damage output that players can output in 5e in a variety of changes in OneD&D.

My playtests have had really gripping & close fights, even with people optimizing their hearts out.

I've seen Sealioning used quite a bit in a particular Lemmy instance that would self describe themselves as Pro-Russia & Pro-China, as a way of shutting down discourse between people who disagree with them. There are people who disagree with a particular narrative, and they're discounted immediately for wanting to know how someone would arrive at a pro-Russian & pro-China position.

Also they'll just "whatabout!" and change the subject whenever unassailable critiques of these regimes come up. As if its is only possible to hold outrage in a single direction at a time.

I'll have you know I'm capable of disliking EVERYONE mentioned in a given conversation.

Yeah and as smart as anyone is, they aren't right all the time. As much as you can agree with his messaging, it's important to critically assess everything said, regardless of who is saying it.

Modern capitalism as we know it began forming in the Renaissance, particularly in colonial European powers who were getting to the Colonization of the rest of the world game earlier than their peers. This notably includes Portugal and the Netherlands, followed swiftly by most everyone else.

There were promissory notes that were carried by travelers prior to this, in the form of Crusaders traveling from Europe to Jerusalem, in the relatively brief period of time that it was conquered. But this did not interact with market economies as we'd know it, and is directly analogous to traveler cheques, meant to make you less of an appealing robbery target on the road.

No, these kinds of shenanigans were concocted rather recently, and are not reflective of baseline normal human behavior. It's mostly a system that was created by accident, with conventions that were forming being purposeful altered during creation by the people with money, for their own benefit.

Thanks! They look quite slick and have a lot going on. Particularly the void dragons you sent my way.

Each would be more or less perfect for a single-monster encounter, as they are dense with fairly novel mechanics.

Many people think that the WotC statblocks are a bit too boring, but I consider them a good entry point for new GMs. This is clearly a nice way to up your game.

Cheers!

Can someone give a good example if what makes these books good? I'd love to see a single great example of the level of quality that these books bring.

The NSFW posts.

IDK if they're exactly merited in these spaces outside of a protest context. I'm also not sure they were really needed in that context either but ce'st la vie!

For the people who have a lot of hours on this game, how well does it play for co-op?

My spouse and I actually dated doing Star Wars the Old Republic co-op, where we could play two different characters going through bespoke personal quest lines while being able to help each other out on their journies.

How easily could we get that experience with this game?

Of course not! In fact I love this video because it's such a sympathetic look at the term, and its place in culture.

Just maybe make sure we keep it cool it on social media.

That's my take as well ultimately.

This post was more in response to the reaction to this subclass, which was broadly 'wow how dare they do this to the monk?'

This is in no way a replacement for a monk. It's a bard who gets to do dance moves.

Also, I've since realized another thing about the melee attack of this bard: Shocking Grasp exists, and scales better.

I think it's a touch silly to put off-turn sneak attacks into the damage optimization, but it's only 5.3 DPR contribution so that's easy to take out.

Overall that's not looking too bad!

Well it's not that 16 is awful on its own. It's awful when there aren't any mechanisms to get out of melee without catching attacks of opportunity, and your kit wants you to be in melee.

However I have fixed one of the problems with this subclass! There's an edit in the main post now as well attesting to this, but with Tavern Brawler, this subclass gets to swat people away from themselves all the dang time. Also, going in on Speedster at level 4 allows a dex focused Dancing Bard have that extra mobility that monks get for free, and helps them play keep-away from baddies.

The playtest itself starts in about 2 hours, and I'm quite excited to see what the player thinks... They couldn't be bothered to do any of the character building with UA material, unfortunately.

You're being rather belligerent for someone who is gliding over the fact that the highest resting AC you can get at level 1 is 18, using standard character creation rules.

For level 1, it's S-Tier.

That seems like a playful way to fill up a slow gaming-news day.

Wait this isn't the actual article!

For everyone's reading pleasure:

https://kotaku.com/baldurs-gate-3-halsin-romance-sex-scene-bear-karlach-1850615466

I never really like the idea of using two stat bonuses calculating your entire AC in 5e. It's a holdover from earlier editions, when getting stat boosts through stacking bonuses from magic items, spells, and potions would allow for very high scaling.

There's a clear direction from all the rewritten subclasses, in that each one contains a method of either pushing away your target when you hit them in a variety of ways, or providing clear ways of disengaging from melee. Maybe this should just be placed in the base class, that 1/turn any Monk gets to push a target away that is struck with an unarmed attack, like the 'Shove' feature of the Tavern Brawler feat? Or maybe just giving Monk the 'shove' weapon mastery to all unarmed attacks, and the Monk gets to add other specific masteries as they level up?

Correct. 18 is good AC at level 1, which martials can achieve by using a shield.

I absolutely think that shield (spell) should be nerfed, by the way. I agree that going arcane spell list is the only way to be a frontliner with this subclass at all as is. But that is committing your reaction to AC rather than inspired movement.