Pong represents the slow but inevitable march towards socialism

Exactly! Almost everything in our lives that matters ultimately is reliant and depends on politics and policy. When people say “I don’t really care about politics,” what they are really saying is they don’t like thinking at all.

I think you overestimate how many people are gonna care about that kind of things when their lives are at stake. Rats are not that rare or unusual.

Sounds like the real problem was not your strategy but the fact that this weapon was very much not scaling with you powerlevel and really unbalanced.

That’s an interesting point you make and I partly agree. There are certain undertones and sometimes you can create a better story by engaging these undertones and creating a monster in noble clothing and a metaphor for the societal corset women are forced ro wear. Well, I’m glad we’re approaching some common ground. No one here is making the argument that you’re seriously “encouraging mindless slaughter of people based on some regular dungeon crawling”. No one’s saying you’re, like, recommending people go out and do that in real life. The argument is there is a message, even if it’s unintentional. But other times I just want to enjoy a trash movie or 15$ airport library book. There’s little wrong with enjoying a trash movie, but And the undertones there are purely accidental and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Why? What authority says subtext shouldn’t be taken seriously? There’s a lot of rich material for analysis, for talking about what our society values among other things, by looking at the messages in pop culture. Imagine two societies. In one, all their pop culture and trashy airport novels are about murder and plunder. In the other, they’re about cooperation and building a better world together. Do you think that would mean anything? Do you think you could infer anything at all from that? It says something that we’re cool with “then I killed him and took his stuff! Rock on!”. We’ve all played that kind of game, but if you think about it that’s a horrible story. Surely there are stories that would be on the far side of the line for you. “I killed the men and enslaved the women! Look at all these points the game gave me!” would probably make most people uncomfortable. Why is the line there, but murder is fine? Does the placement of that line mean anything? And again, this doesn’t mean you can’t play a beer-and-pretzels half-brained game about tactics, strategy, and extermination. But to wave your hands in the air and say it doesn’t mean anything is absurd.

Sacred Flame as a range of 60 feet. There’s no rule that Tarrasques can’t throw stuff, and they look like they have hands, so reasonably even in 2014 they could. They’d have disadvantage throwing something at a target 60 feet away, but they’d need a lot fewer hits to land. Repeating would still be ideal, for ammo usage, but it needed its regeneration back. I agree. You can’t outright kill a tarrasque so easily anymore, but being able to put them on the run so easy isn’t great either. They also should have better ranged options. There are plenty of ways to outrange them. And a burrowing speed is too good. It doesn’t just stop cheesing. It stops players from fighting them legitimately. Personally, I’d bring back regeneration along with the attack they used to have where they shot spines, or maybe give them a godzilla-inspired breath weapon, make it so anyone they hit is knocked prone. Once you get them to half health or down too many Legendary Resistances (though I’d probably change the Legendary Resistance mechanic so it costs HP instead of having three of them), they start digging, bringing you to the second stage of the boss fight. I’d make it so at high levels there are options to follow them undergound, but give the Tarrasque additional Lair Actions with “underground” being its lair. Maybe even have a final stage of the boss fight where it emerges in the Underdark and you also have a bunch of creatures from there to deal with.

Well, tell us some stories.

This post did not contain any content.

This rule has been in the book ever since the PHB first released. If this was something you didn’t use, you either missed it or played a different edition.

I hate that this pun only works in English.

That was a surprisingly disturbing read…

I’m afraid I never played the module. What’s down there?

Pretty much, yes. I also think it’s not necessary for characters not to become better in all abilities even as the game goes on, but I generally like that characters typically continue to have weaknesses as they level up. Th unfortunate part is that those weaknesses are a lot less punishing for some classes then for other.

Great until you realize that the shards of glass have been healed under your skin

Did they improve DM support? Make CR actually work? Is combat more dynamic and faster-paced? Is character creation still a pain in the ass? Did they flesh out non-combat? Do player abilities still tend to solve problems by just turning off parts of the game? Is there a clear vision for what this even is? I’m not an expert but: No No No (though it is faster than 3.x or 4th, mostly because you don’t have any options) At least there are options now. Still nothing significant past character creation, of course No Probably. Either that or hitting it with an axe Yeah it’s a love letter to second ed, with bits of third mixed in to keep angry internet nerds who never played anything else happy I don’t think 5th is the worst edition of d&d (controversially I think that’s 3.x), but it is the most nothing edition. The best editions are of course 13th Age and Pathfinder 2e

Well, my character was a high priest and a fanatical follower of a sun god, part of delegation from a foreign country. Early on me and a few other people from out group were almost decided to kill another one of us since we thought he was a traitor and for roleplay’s sake I decided to give my god a say by drawing a single card out of a 78 card tarot deck. So of course the card I got that The Sun… Meaning I had to do a complete 180 and then spent the rest of the LARP doing everything he said and trusting him completely. He didn’t really know what was going on or how to do stuff, in-character or out of it. I was painfully aware that he kept sending me to do stupid shit that didn’t matter, but I was commited. It was hilarious, if tiring. Anyway, this was on the last evening (+ about an hour to wrap up if someone needed to the next day) and I was pretty exhausted, physically and mentally, so I decided I’d just stop playing and go to bed early, but then the dwarf arrived looking for our elf general (who was in a dungeon somewhere) and demanding that he’s honourbound to go to a pub with him - that’s a whole another story, one I was very much involved in, so I offered to go in his stead. It seemed like a very nice end to my B plot and it actually shook all tiredness off me. Anyway, we’re just drinking there while that guy I decided I’ll view as a beacon of truth went past, leaned to me and whispered me the bad news that our god was dead. As I found out later, he was mistaken, but I trusted him, so I asked the dwarf if I could have look at his knife and killed myself. And it worked out really nicely. I ended up getting a small 1-on-1 afterlife RP session with a not-quite-organiser who was present at my suicide, the scene that played out after my death was amazing (don’t worry the dwarf managed to convince people it was a suicice) and I went to get a spare simple villager costume to get back to drinking, which had the advantage of finally being able to have a good talk with some friends from the previous year (it just didn’t make any sense to talk to them as my main character that year). Plus I never died on a LARP before, getting to do the deed myself was a nice bonus to a new experience =P

Another trash AI post.

That turned out unexpectedly wholesome :3

True. Also, it assumes that the parent commenter was being at least a little bit reasonable and trying to work backwards from there. Maybe I should have asked them if that’s what they were doing.

Sometimes I wonder if boomers know divorce is legal in most of the world.