• 4 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I’m pretty sure about it. No one who suggested that deserves to be taken seriously. But intellectual property theft is a legitimate concern and comparing them as equal concerns is disingenuous.

    Lots of people produce content and make a living off of 5e, and not just 3rd party producers, plenty of people use patreon as a means to distributetheir work. Will the ai be trained exclusively on WOTC playtesting or will it be able to scour the internet for plot hooks and npcs and loot and whatever else it needs? It’s inevitable, and well known that some of that content has been reposted and copied in various places across the internet. The damages they suffer from user piracy wouldn’t be comparable to an ai running multiple games on an online platform owned by the ‘world’s most popular rpg’ not to mention that they would be charging for at least a onednd or dnd beyond or whatever they’re calling it this week, subscription.

    It’s not as simple as “oh cool, more people could play”. It’s just their next attempt at eliminating the third party market.





  • It’s difficult to say with only a brief summary, but it sounds like you and your party all want different things from the game. I’m going to guess that you play with people who you were friends with before d&d, and not play d&d with people you have become friends with.

    You clearly seem to have a murder hobo. You also have a player who sounds like he’s more interested in hanging out with the group than he is playing d&d. There’s a lot of advice on forums about how to deal with these types of players, and your threshold for what you’ll put up with is entirely up to you.

    I encourage and tolerate a lot of silly shit, but if one of my players handed the same character sheet of their character that had just died with a 2 after it, I would direct them to the nearest LFG post and be on my merry way. That’s a dealbreaker for me.

    The others don’t necessarily sound like a problem, but i think they want a little more railroad and guidance, while you want them to take initiative and make decisions. Neither of these are wrong, but they aren’t always compatible.

    From our perspective as DMs, its easy to set the scene and say “what do you want to do”, then react because we know the whole tavern, encounter, story, world, everything and when we don’t, we’ll make it up. For a lot of players though, leaving things open ended like that feels very limiting. They don’t know what you are or aren’t prepared for and don’t want to be that guy. They like you, and if this murder is going to be important later they don’t want to fuck up the crime scene until they have permission.

    As a side note, when I wanted my party to participate in solving a murder, I framed one of them for it. Also, the Gumshoe advice is great for running mysteries. They get the clue that tells them what’s next automatically and have to search for more information to gain context so the game doesn’t stall on one bad roll.

    Ultimately, if you’re dissatisfied with the game, you should have a conversation with your players before preparing anything further. I would say something like this:

    “Hey muderhobo, I know you like fighting tons of shit, so I promise I will give you challenging combat in the campaign, but I need you to exercise some common sense and let me bring it to you instead going off to find it on your own. You other guy, are you sure you want to play? You dont seem to be interested and we can just hang out sometimes without playing if you want to skip the sessions. The rest of you, I can be more direct in giving you options and plot hooks, what kinds of encounters would interest you most? I’m going to start preparing a new campaign, I’m thinking about (themes and flavor of next story) as being important, can you start preparing characters that would have a reason to engage with a story like that? While I begin preparing, would anyone like to run any one shots in between?”





  • This might help with him rolling poorly. I run a swarms AC differently than other creatures. I wanted to give some the peoper feel of being everywhere around the party and settled on this as how to simulate it. When it’s at full HP the swarm has a much lower AC, I usually subtract 5 from its stat block. This is because you can barely swing a sword without hitting them, theres just so many. Once the swarm has lost half of its HP I add 5 to the AC on the stat block, because as they thin out they get harder to hit.

    Obviously this doesn’t work in every situation. To keep combat from grinding to a halt this works best when the swarms are part of an encounter with other creatures. I used it as a supplement to a higher creature’s fight and it kept them relevant as a distraction during the fight. If it’s just the swarms and the party struggles to finish them off don’t forget that they can retreat under such loses. You don’t want them to just keep swinging and missing if they’re really struggling.





  • I think this guy was just someone who’s defunct account had been hacked and used to troll. All of his comments from that day featured a ton of both sides arguments and misrepresented statistics, which to me looked like someone who was given talking points and tried to fix any conversation he could into conforming to them.

    It was obviously propaganda, and I guess previously I would have thought someone who ran something ad large as reddit wouldn’t be so stupid and oblivious…but here I am on lemmy a few months later, so who knows. It’s now apparent that spez is that stupid.