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Cake day: September 4th, 2023

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  • It’s not the anger that’s cowardly, it’s the refusal to try. It’s taking any other path, so long as you don’t have to risk your own stupid pride. Have the humility to accept you might not make the right call, but the courage to actually make it for yourself.

    This adventure comes from a time when modules were a toolbox. One of the most popular modules from the era had a plot of “there’s a bunch of monsters in some nearby caves, and they don’t all like each other”. Tunnels were blocked by debris, allowing the DM to connect it to another dungeon they wanna try. You might come back to the same dungeon a second time, and the contents of the room will change. A module is a starting point, but the DM continues the story from there.

    If you don’t know how to prep that, then the empty room is a boon. If you do, then the empty room isn’t an issue. If you don’t want to prep a campaign like that, then maybe this style of module isn’t for you in the first place.



  • But some monsters are strong against certain builds and weak against others. Some monsters are stronger in certain environment and entirely nullified by others. Some monsters are stronger given certain allies and weaker when alone.

    If you could devise a system to assign monster complexity based on every scenario you can imagine that monster being part of, then either that’s an astonishingly small number of scenarios or an absurdly complex calculation to force on anyone.


  • This is a room. After seeing dozens of rooms with monsters and furniture, you are given a room with nothing in it and told to fill it yourself. You know the general sort of thing that goes in the room, so all that’s left is to decide precisely what. Everything before the room has been given to you, and everything after will be given as well. You just need to come up with one room.

    You can have a paid product full of things to put into that room and not learn a damn thing about actually preparing rooms like that. You can memorise every entry on a multiplication table and still not know how to actually multiply two numbers. The most valuable teacher is experience, which is why you have to actually figure out what the gaps in the number sequence are.

    So you can try. You can come up with a few monsters you think would be fun, and would fit into that room. You add a bookshelf and a table for flavour, and to make the fight a little bit more interesting. It could go well or it could go wrong, but you learn either way.

    Or you can rage against the system that dared tell you to figure out a single room by yourself; dared to tell you to put your pride on the line and risk making a mistake.

    The second one sounds cowardly to me.


  • I think it’s mostly cowardice, personally. People don’t want to risk putting their own choices into a game based entirely on choices, just in case they aren’t as good. It’s better to use someone else’s decisions than risk your own pride.

    Then you have ignorance. A lot of people don’t know how to fill the gaps, and WotC has never bothered teaching them how. Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren’t something to use without thought (like CR), so people complain for reason 1 again.





  • Susaga@ttrpg.networktoRPGMemes @ttrpg.networkMartial superiority
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    8 months ago

    In a single round of combat, a wizard can use a spell to rain fire and bring a max health fighter down to 1 hp.

    In comparison, in a single round of combat, a fighter can swing their sword four times and bring a max health wizard down to 1 hp.

    So they’re both as good as each other in a hypothetical 1v1 combat scenario which is unlikely to ever come up during an actual game. Bravo. Can we stop having this argument? It’s been 4 months since this exact meme was posted.


  • Ironically for a post complaining about reading comprehension, but you misrepresented the original post you’re talking about. Even have the classic “quotation marks around a thing that was never said” in the title.

    First, and perhaps most obvious, this wasn’t “everyone”. This was one person, and they didn’t get many upvotes. When I recommend a TTRPG, for example, I’m recommending Genesys (like someone else did).

    Second, they weren’t saying to homebrew old editions of D&D. They were saying you don’t need to homebrew at all. At most, they said you could reflavour something in 4th edition. Their entire point was that you don’t need to homebrew when you can just find a system that already has what you would have homebrewed in.

    Third, they were suggesting this as an alternative to homebrewing specific material into D&D 5e. Pathfinder can provide the experience of “5e with time travel” that you wanted without any modifications. BitD is so different from 5e that it can’t.

    You are, however, correct that they did backtrack. I’ll put this down to poorly explaining their argument to start with, as they downplayed the “5e but better” games in their first comment while that was really their entire point.

    Personally, I like homebrewing. It’s fun to tinker with the rules and materials. But there’s also an argument to not repeat work someone else has already done.



  • Just off the top of my head, you could give them a flaw that, while it doesn’t make them any less cunning, it does let the players see what’s happening.

    Method 1: Gloating. What is the point in being a genius if nobody ever notices? When the villain has the party on the ropes, have them point out moments of the plan that the party could have noticed but didn’t. Maybe they wait to give the shopkeep the bounty until the party can see it happen, just so they know.

    Method 2: Worse minions. The plan is amazing, but the people carrying it out aren’t quite as discrete as the villain. Maybe the security make a little noise as they stalk the party, and there are moments where the players could spot them.

    Either way, the players will know something is up, and might have an opportunity to use this new information to turn the tables on the villain (“might” and “opportunity” being the key words there).