LoamImprovement @ LoamImprovement @ttrpg.network Posts 1Comments 166Joined 1 yr. ago
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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.
Man, it's weird, I had a dream a lot like that in my senior year of college, but it was Mr. Rogers. I just remember seeing him give me this big warm smile, and he said "I am so proud of you." And he gave me a hug.
I woke up not long after with a sense of satisfaction and renewed self-worth that I've been chasing ever since.
Now, as ever, 'For the lulz.'
Lol I knew it was a scam because nobody fucking sends me mail.
Yep, lucky is too good and too ubiquitous for every player with access not to pick it up, it's the exact opposite of feats like Weapon Master.
Also banned some of the supplementary stuff at my table. cough strixhaven cough silvery barbs cough
Personally, I forgo rolling altogether because the requests to roll stats tend to come from the players who want to minmax, and I allow plenty enough of that with the feat rule I described above.
If you have a table that absolutely insists on rolling, have them roll together and use the same array for every player, then nobody but the DM can complain about someone's character being OP lol.
One rule I've considered using is, if you fall to 0 HP, you can forgo making death saves and immediately take a full turn, but you die at the end of that turn, no save or healing allowed. It would also allow PCs to get last words where they otherwise wouldn't be able to speak.
BA potions are another one I usually include as well, even the nonhealing ones. I had a gut reaction against a fighter PC using a potion that applied greater invisibility and then making six attacks at advantage using action surge, but I thought, "fuck it, they're expending a valuable resource to have this moment, let them have it," and it was good.
I actually don't mind killing PCs with some of the above here - not saying that I seek out opportunities, but I've played with squishy casters who are bold and/or dumb enough to wade into the enemy's back line to take advantage of short range AoEs like Burning Hands and Thunderwave, and you better believe their response is to beat the ever-loving shit out of that caster so they don't get up and do it again. And past the opportunities that cocksure players give you, it is 100% okay if a character dies, even one that a player has invested in - adventuring is dangerous and combat is especially brutal; the dragon's not going to reposition themselves to exclude a downed PC from their breath attack, the vampire's not going to pass up an easy meal from an incapacitated caster. If your games are going to be impactful and climactic, the stakes need to be real, and you can't pull any punches.
But there is an important caveat in all this - what's not okay is trivializing PC deaths, whether they died through pure chance, or wildly unbalanced encounters that end in TPKs, because that (especially the latter) ruins games and creates players who invest nothing in their characters, or worse, start to see everything as a numbers game and work to build the murderhoboiest character they possibly can. If a PC dies, it needs to be a scene. After combat's over, make a point of narrating the aftermath. Give the PC last rites, have the surviving members of the party talk about their favorite moments. Some of the best, most heart-wrenching sessions I've run are the ones where a character dies.
I tried the free feat at level 1 for a couple campaigns, and while players enjoy it, I find it tends to tip the game balance off a bit, such that lower CR encounters are a little underwhelming. You might not find it a problem in your games though, depending on how munchkin-y your players are.
Definitely agree martials need maneuvers - I highly recommend Laserllama's martial homebrews for experienced players, gives those classes a lot more flavor and flexibility.
Agree on the invisibility, and that's a poor running of invisibility by most GMs - it absolutely does not mean automatically hidden in the same way that a creature in total darkness is not automatically hidden, nor should it be construed that way - the Invisible condition clearly states:
An invisible creature is impossible to see without the aid of magic or a special sense. For the purpose of hiding, the creature is heavily obscured. The creature’s location can be detected by any noise it makes or any tracks it leaves.
It is incredibly frustrating to have inexperienced GMs run invisible creatures as being able to take potshots at the PCs with zero fear of retribution except by wild swings at empty space, hoping to get lucky. Aside from the advantage/disadvantage on attack rolls, all being invisible does is allow a creature to hide without needing any kind of cover because they're already heavily obscured, and prevents creatures from perceiving them with normal vision. A perception check against the hidden creature's stealth roll, truesight, blindsense/sight, tremorsense, and the creature making any sort of noise (such as with an attack) immediately reveals the invisible creature's location.
That sounds like a good way for the PCs to become rulers of the underdark.
Thanks, PipedLinkBot
It is so bad. Civvie does a video on it.