LoamImprovement @ LoamImprovement @ttrpg.network

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2 yr. ago

I go back occasionally to niche communities that haven't moved off yet but since I deleted my account, I can't interact and don't feel the need to stay long, and since I don't/won't use the mobile app my usage is even further reduced.

These requirements are such horseshit. What's the point of making everything look hyperrealistic at 4K if nobody can run the damn game without raiding NASA's control room for hardware?

To say nothing of how dangerous it is for pedestrians, especially children. Some of these vehicles have less forward visibility than, not even kidding, a fucking Abrams tank:

The Gadsden flag, notable for the text "Don't tread on me," on a yellow flag with a coiled snake in the center. It's popular with cishet white male alt-righters and libertarians who feel persecuted for whatever reason. People use the phrase "No step on snek" with a cartoonish snake illustration to mock the idea that the most privileged groups today would ever compare themselves to the people of the American revolution who fought and died under this banner.

Even around the interstate you've got plenty of people flying flags on their houses and their trucks. It's funny, the fascists where I live have abandoned their Trump 2024 flags for No step on snek. I guess they figure he doesn't trigger the libs as much with one foot in a jail cell. Or maybe against all odds they grew a sense of shame.

If your encounters are one monster that is effectively a punching bag for your players, no offense, but you're doing it wrong. Every encounter should feature at least as many hostile creatures as it does players, even if they're piddly and don't offer much more than a turn or two of distraction while the big bad gets their good attacks off. You should almost never be running high-CR creatures alone, even if they have legendary actions.

Additionally, vary your environments. Put down some patches of difficult terrain to slow down the melee-ers. Provide some cover for PCs and hostile creatures. The +2/+5 to AC and dex saves makes a noticable difference against casters, and lots of spells rely on being able to see the target. You might also change the nature of the encounter - maybe the PCs need to divert enemies away from a location, or prevent them from escaping.

As for encounters dragging on forever, I find that it's usually a result of one or two players either not knowing their sheets, or spending a great deal of time weighing options. Identify those players, and talk with them after the session to see if there's a way to help streamline things.

"I'm telling you, molotov cocktails work. Any time I had a problem and I threw a molotov cocktail - boom, right away, I had a different problem."

• Jason Mendoza

Seconding darkwood - one of the few that matches Amnesia in its ability to make you fear what you cannot, should not see. You pray to whatever gods you believe in that your light lasts and that thing that goes bump in the night does only that.

Hey everyone, look at the video essayist over here.

#FreeCivvie

Anytime people start talking about supply and demand, I can't help but think of the lines from The Grapes of Wrath:

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains...

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Amazing how in eight decades and some change, that sentiment has not budged an inch. The only real difference is, in addition to the food wasted and the dumpsters locked to keep out the homeless, they're dumping shit like Funko Pops in the millions. All this plastic tat that's literally killing the planet, that nobody in their right mind would want in a million years if the sickness of capitalism didn't tell them it was precious.

I feel bad for these players because it's obvious a shitty rugpull-lover DM got to them first with a humiliation conga campaign. You know the type, where you run into all the homebrew mindfuck creatures people like to post because the DM thinks an endless deluge of trauma and ambushes is good storytelling, and then fall back on "Challenging players is the DM's job!" Bro I'm here to tell a story, you think my level 3 warlock whose two invocations are "talk to animals" and "instant disguise" is built to get violated by a false hydra?

Hmm, not bad at first glance, although it's a bold move to have a dragon class that requires a game starting at a level that most campaigns tend to wrap up or burn out at in this edition.

I might use this to make an NPC at some point, I'll let you know how and if it goes.

It's a nice fantasy, but I'm sure some sites would actually collapse. I'd prefer it and I think it would be more realistic if there were legislation capping the amount and formats of advertising that could be displayed on a webpage or over a certain period of time to an IP address. No more double ads before every video and every ten minutes within - it's currently getting to be as bad as cable TV used to be, and I don't know what hosting user-created content costs these days but I'm sure it's cheaper than what cable companies had to pay to buy content from studios for broadcast and then actually broadcast it.

It kind of sounds like your friend won't enjoy the kind of D&D you like to run, and that's okay. You are allowed to enjoy running a challenging campaign with metered resources and meaningful stakes, and he is allowed to enjoy playing a shining hero that doesn't worry about restraints and desperate measures. Both of those games are perfectly fine as long as everyone is having a good time.

It is hard not to be to the left of Republican Media groups since 2016 and everything that followed.

Why does money ruin absolutely fucking everything?

Because nobody who gets a sufficiently large amount of it to stop worrying about their finances is ever satisfied with that amount of money.

Lol I knew it was a scam because nobody fucking sends me mail.

That's fair.

Yeah, somebody's wearing rose colored glasses. High school was fucking miserable. My junior and senior years I had no less than two hours of homework every night on average from the AP courses I was taking, on top of working a part time job every weekend and all summer to pay for the car I was driving. I never fit in because everyone else was talking about some pop culture, music or TV I had no time for because I was completely occupied.

My best years were in college. All that unstructured time and autonomy over my bodily functions rocked. Shame it came with a $50K pricetag I'll never pay off.

That sounds like a good way for the PCs to become rulers of the underdark.