• 4 Posts
  • 151 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 24th, 2023

help-circle

  • The reason many still associate D&D and anything else remotely related to it with fat, basement dwelling, socially inept virgin incels is because those people actually made up a significant percentage of the original following of the hobby. Because it’s founders were only a half step away from most of those descriptions in many cases. And anybody that insists otherwise is either willfully ignorant or, more likely, angry at being called out by association because they’re the same.

    So either get over it or go join the people that still insist that the confederate flag is anything but the war banner of a rebellion raised as an attempt at preserving slavery as a legal institution. You have the same mindset and validity as they do on this matter.




  • Every system has to decide where to draw the line on the prioritization of realism versus simplicity and speed of play. On one extreme you have the “one page RPG” system where you have exactly two stats and everything uses one or the other, rolled on a single D6. About two thirds of the way to the other extreme you get “Pathfinder has a rule for that,” with some systems going into truly absurd levels of detailed minutia in ways that vary from being mote or less mechanically consistent to the old school D&D method of the designers pulling a random table out of their ass for every new thing they don’t have a rule for yet and filling it out with whatever nonsense comes to mind in that moment.




  • Probably, although Martin was definitely not the first fantasy author to put a villainous faction/entity in the inhospitable frozen north, nor was he the first to have a villain with a zombie army.

    Although I think the Mountains of Muscles are more likely just a border feature slapped in between the Necrolord and the ambiguous barbarians of the northern steppes, which are again a common trope but probably directly drawn from the barbarian tribes of Icewind Dale (Wulfgar’s people in Forgotten Realms).



  • Awesome as usual, and bonus points for the bad guy’s sucker punch attack actually hitting a main weak point in plate mail.

    I also like that Angela throws a hand axe. I’ve seen a lot of people with melee focused martial characters hauling around multiple javelins as a backup ranged weapon because they do slightly more damage. When they announce in the middle of a fight that they’re throwing one or even several in a single turn I always think, “Just where were you carrying those multiple long hafted spears while fighting with both hands this whole time?” Mechanically a high strength character can handle the weight but those things aren’t exactly throwing knives you can conveniently slip a half dozen of into your belt or strap to your thighs or arms. A nice tomahawk or two, on the other hand, you can have tucked until your belt.





  • Yeah, and my personal opinion of the Drow is that you can still have matriarchal spider themed villains and not be “problematic” if you just st officially decannonize all of the weird-ass kinky fetish stuff that Ed Greenwood wrote into their original description. And the same can be said of most “problematic” things in Forgotten Realms, which is the source of a lot of the stuff that many consider to be “generic D&D.”

    Seriously, go through the deep lore of FR and you will find a bunch of stuff that reads like it was written by a horny thirteen year old that wants to be edgy and kinky but clearly doesn’t know how fetishes or anything occult actually work beyond involving leather, whips, and bloody sacrifice rituals at orgy parties like a midwestern church granny will tell you happen every time anybody plays Dungeons and Dragons. I wonder where they got that impression from…


  • Short answer, no. There is a lot of nitpicky fine print and “nuance” involved but while you cannot copyright rolling a twenty sided die you can copyright a bunch of distinct and organized thoughts and specific groups thereof, such as the collection of rules that make up a class or subclass. If that class, subclass, spell, made up monster with a specific name and abilities, etc is published in some work that is sold for profit then legal action can occur.

    Anything under creative commons effectively becomes public domain. If it appears in a WotC book, digital content, etc and is not specifically under CC, like say spells and subclasses from any supplement not included in that (such as Xanathar or Tasha), it is copyrighted and WotC can and will sue you if you republish it.