Sure, but even then it doesn’t make a lot of sense that all the different ways that Warlock patrons can present themselves, that they all are great about giving people raw damage potential as a cornerstone of their pact, regardless of how you flavor it.

“Child pure of heart and innocent of mind. You have caught my attentions, a Unicorn who wants nothing but to live and peace, and to see the joy and love of the innocent as yourself. For your purity of spirit, I shall grant a boon of this magic gun.”

The secret is to not work from what you’d like to do, but to work backwards from what your players want to do.

Seriously, throw out all the prep you have that isn’t landing, and just ask your players what kinds of things they want to do. Then, make stories inspired by the actions or accomplishments they want to undertake.

… This does require that your players have some idea of what they want to do, though. If you have checked out or uninvested players, there’s essentially nothing you can do I’m afraid.

So now I will soapbox to the players reading this: Your job is to be invested in the game. If you don’t put energy into being invested, you’re not fulfilling your side of the arrangement at the table.

I had taken the artist’s statement that the art is being reworked as evidence of the art being pulled, and at least future published books not containing them.

https://twitter.com/i_shkipin/status/1687829743268442112

I should have waited until the actual statement (linked below), as it’s clear that the artist was making something of a lie of omission above, as I believe he purposefully wanted readers to believe that the art was changing in the books, not that he would redo the art to… essentially no promised effect. Maybe he was lying to himself with the hope that he could get another go at?

https://twitter.com/DnDBeyond/status/1687969469170094083

I’ve updated the title of this post to reflect the info from the official WotC statement on the issue. I’m glad they won’t be allowing AI “augmented” submissions from their artists going forward, but I would only be truly happy with a statement that they will be taking the massive inconvenience of making sure that the art is revised for future publications at a minimum (I think a recall would be asking a lot tbh).

They shouldn’t have included the 2nd picture then. It’s the lightest of all of them.

A tale that is perpetually dark in tone becomes tiresome very quickly. It needs to feature the occasional ray of light for contrast and to create a sense of hope. Monsters and other terrors must be offset with creatures that are kind and lovable, giving the characters even more reasons to stand against the darkness. Here are a couple of ways to add glimmers of light to a tragic tale:

• In a land as dreary as Barovia, take the time to describe the occasional scene of beauty, such as a pretty flower growing atop a grave.
• Make sure that the heroes have contact with NPCs who are honest, friendly, and helpful, such as the Martikovs in Vallaki or the Krezkovs in Krezk.

-Curse of Strahd, Introduction. Marks of Horror. 2016.

Structuring an adventure with skipping Tier 3 entirely sounds interesting, NGL. It’s not something we have seen before.

But there are people who identify as left-wing who will support China and Russia while downplaying their authoritarianism.

That’s not something being invented as a boogeyman. Anyone can go to lemmygrad.ml right now to see it in action.

Most of that is being fixed by dilating the amount of damage output that players can output in 5e in a variety of changes in OneD&D.

My playtests have had really gripping & close fights, even with people optimizing their hearts out.

I’ve seen Sealioning used quite a bit in a particular Lemmy instance that would self describe themselves as Pro-Russia & Pro-China, as a way of shutting down discourse between people who disagree with them. There are people who disagree with a particular narrative, and they’re discounted immediately for wanting to know how someone would arrive at a pro-Russian & pro-China position.

Also they’ll just “whatabout!” and change the subject whenever unassailable critiques of these regimes come up. As if its is only possible to hold outrage in a single direction at a time.

I’ll have you know I’m capable of disliking EVERYONE mentioned in a given conversation.

Yeah and as smart as anyone is, they aren’t right all the time. As much as you can agree with his messaging, it’s important to critically assess everything said, regardless of who is saying it.

Modern capitalism as we know it began forming in the Renaissance, particularly in colonial European powers who were getting to the Colonization of the rest of the world game earlier than their peers. This notably includes Portugal and the Netherlands, followed swiftly by most everyone else.

There were promissory notes that were carried by travelers prior to this, in the form of Crusaders traveling from Europe to Jerusalem, in the relatively brief period of time that it was conquered. But this did not interact with market economies as we’d know it, and is directly analogous to traveler cheques, meant to make you less of an appealing robbery target on the road.

No, these kinds of shenanigans were concocted rather recently, and are not reflective of baseline normal human behavior. It’s mostly a system that was created by accident, with conventions that were forming being purposeful altered during creation by the people with money, for their own benefit.

Thanks! They look quite slick and have a lot going on. Particularly the void dragons you sent my way.

Each would be more or less perfect for a single-monster encounter, as they are dense with fairly novel mechanics.

Many people think that the WotC statblocks are a bit too boring, but I consider them a good entry point for new GMs. This is clearly a nice way to up your game.

Cheers!

Can someone give a good example if what makes these books good? I’d love to see a single great example of the level of quality that these books bring.

The NSFW posts.

IDK if they’re exactly merited in these spaces outside of a protest context. I’m also not sure they were really needed in that context either but ce’st la vie!

For the people who have a lot of hours on this game, how well does it play for co-op?

My spouse and I actually dated doing Star Wars the Old Republic co-op, where we could play two different characters going through bespoke personal quest lines while being able to help each other out on their journies.

How easily could we get that experience with this game?

You really should look at the homelessness crisis in more detail, because it cannot be on private citizens to shoulder that burden. There simply isn’t enough for individuals, even if they all miraculously organized together in this effort, to fix the issue.

It’s systemic, and we need top-down action. Housing people affordably is a scale issue, and larger institutions should be the ones to gather the equity and resources at a scale that individuals simply cannot, especially in the middle of a housing crisis.

For examples of public housing that works quite well, I’d suggest you read into Greek’s post World War 2 Social Housing programs, and Singapore’s state controlled housing programs.

At whose expense?

Also, trust in the police is at an all-time low, especially among young liberal-leaning Americans.

It’s one of those things where I look at it, and say ‘wow that sucks… But you can’t argue with the results damn, can we workshop a better version of that?’

Murdoch doesn’t own EVERY newspaper.

But yeah Murdoch media is fucked.