Khrux

I think modern TTRPGS in general steer towards things like temporary summons because of how it lets the players actually use them in combat. Nobody wants to play the necromancer who is suddenly just some guy because there are no corpses available where the battle kicks off.

I have an enormous soft spot for narratively putting in the legwork to assemble your undead hordes, and when I’m the GM, I’m always keen to set up good moments for the necromancer to build an army, but it’s so easy for that to set up a situation where a player doesn’t get to actually use their features. Making them temporary summons from nowhere in particular is the easiest fix.

I had a similar experience in my 5e game, no real combat but basically the intrigued that drove the game got tenfold more complex and was revealed to involve each member of the party in a varying but believable way.

Seperatly, I also played Alice is Missing the month before and it lived up to the hype I wanted, but it’s very up.my street. What I seek in an RPG is being able to move between being immersed enough to feel what my character feels when I want it, but when I don’t, be able to act as my own drama maker for later. AiM absolutely delivered that for me. It also didn’t need magic or tech to deliver any agency which is a big plus to me.

Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.

For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.

I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.

Long before ZA/UM closed, I was certain that we’d never see a new game of that quality again from the same studio.

I’m not confident any of these new teams will pull it off, but I’d rather have four attempts than one.

Also the toxicity that is implied to exist by this post is pretty rare really. Even back when I was using Reddit, toxicity generally sank to the bottom of comment sections, and even more so here. When I got into D&D close to the beginning of 5e, some online voices on YouTube for example carried this toxicity but nowadays, most voices are far newer and friendly.

In general, most people are more interested in what happens at their table instead of all tables, and the rules are just guidelines to aid that.

I deleted my comment because I came from the TTRPG network homepage and didn’t realise I was responding to pathfinder. I gave quite a few D&D 5e specific examples and was a little worried people wouldn’t be happy about it.

deleted by creator

There’s a book called Tabletop Role-playing Therapy: A Guide for the Clinician Game Master by Dr Megan A. Connel that’s a really standout resource about this, she appeared on the official D&D podcast a year or so ago talking about it.

I’d say that this is more a resource for therapists to use TTRPGs than it is for DMs to act as therapists for their players. There’s a fine line between accommodating your players’ preferences and needs and providing unwanted therapy; if you want to actually put any therapy techniques into your game, ask your players approval first.

I don’t want to throw the word enshitiffication around, especially when I’m not sure if I can spell it, but the platforms that people jump ship to when that happens are probably especially vulnerable to people jumping ship again.

I can’t imagine Mozilla effectively marketing Firefox as anything but the bullshit free browser, and when they lose that, people will just move to the next actual bullshit free option.

Yeah the fact it’s called a small moon is slightly deceptive to us because our moon is absolutely huge as far as moons go. The natives of the SW universe would be used to much much smaller moons.

For reference, our moon is 3475km across and the death star is 150km across, so it’s diameter is 23 smaller. It’s also weighed at about 900million tonnes or 9*10^14kg.

If I’m right (which I’m likely not). g=(GM)/r² or g=(6.667*10^-11*9*1013)/75².

That’s a gravity of 1.086x10^-5m/s² or if I round with pure disrespect for physics, 100,000 times weaker than earth’s gravity. Essentially it’s totally negligible compared to their artificial gravity. Hell, I don’t even think a marble on the floor would overcome it’s own grip and roll towards the center of the space station.

My maths is almost certainly wrong somewhere here, I failed it badly.

This is also probably off topic because I can’t load the YouTube video.

I was talking about the second Dune film a little while back and saying how much I enjoy a well realised world that doesn’t try to convey itself by comparing itself to ours. I get the same feeling watching Dune and Lord of the Rings as I do when I watch a film from a culture I’m not familiar with; a sense of needing to adjust to their way of storytelling.

Pairing this with what you mention which is basically extra subtle show don’t tell, and you end up with something I absolutely adore, which is a story in a fully realised culture I know nothing about, that understands that the bare minimum amount of that culture I need to understand to fully enjoy the story can be the best amount to have.

I was going to say how rare this is but thinking about it, it actually isn’t. Tolkien’s cosmology is fully realised and vast yet I learnt basically no fluff about the world that wasn’t necessary to the story. Sometimes I just had to make peace with the fact that I didn’t understand the cultural context, I could only measure it’s importance in the attitude of the characters.

That’s the shit I love.

Feign death every time. Most OP spell in the game.

Temporal Shunt already narratively does this I believe, although only for a round.

I’ve read quite a few anecdotes and quotes about Gygax’s misogyny before but I agree with you, I don’t think there is nearly enough information I these gods to extrapolate that it’ embodies all powerful masculine forces as good and all feminine as evil, especially as the article mentions how this perpetuates pre-existing coomo themes in story and myth. Everything we know about Gygax would say he’d lift from myths with sexist themes without adjusting that, rather than add them with intention.

Do do think there is myriad evidence that Gygax believed femininity to be inherently inferior, but that’s different from evil. It’s still stupid and worth highlighting but by excessively demonising him to the point of nearly making things up, it’s just fuel for people to dismiss the valid points.

A flash of light streaks toward a creature of your choice within range. Make a ranged spell attack against the target. On a hit, the target takes 4d6 radiant damage, and the next attack roll made against this target before the end of your next turn has advantage, thanks to the mystical dim light glittering on the target until then.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something and the phrasing isn’t perfect but I’d say the combination of saying that the advantage is caused by the light and the advantage lasting to the end of your next turn would mean that the light also lasts until the end of your next turn?

I agree completely that it’s inconsequential, one issue with the arguement about creative characters is that people often blend being unique with being compelling. A compelling character is where it’s inconsequential what choices you make.

That said, I think players who aren’t aware of the tropes PC’s often fall into may end up playing “the straight man” to the group, who is comparatively very plain. Players who have played for longer may feel that this is similar to PCs they’ve seen before. But even then, it doesn’t really matter as this PC trope shines in contrast to the rest of the party and that rarely changes.

Unrelated but I wanna say how proud I was of my Baldurs Gate3 character. I felt that your TAV in that game was quite plain and generic no matter what you chose, so played as a human fighter called John Baldurgate who was the most generic character possible and had a blast.

Studded leather, 20 Dex and Int, then something like haste is definitely possible.

Yeah I don’t like Microsoft but like Office, I just run offline pirated version of their main programs. It’s like how I avoid Google for 70% of options but absolutely love Google Maps and Google Translate.

Honestly I feel it was way more exciting in concept than execution anyway. Hell, I think it would make a fantastic TTRPG setting, since it’s strongest in premise and has strong ludo-narrative cohesion falling between a narrative game and a wargame.

A well roleplayed Marut is great. As a CR 25 construct, it’s going to be enforcing a universal law, such as attempting to stop a world ending threat.

It’s primary aim is normally to planeshift it’s quarry to court, rather than kill them, and may even prefer not to kill those who come between that goal.

Here’s The Monsters Know What They’re Doing’s blog post on them. It really telegraphs how helpless a targeted creature is to them.