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if i look back, i am lost
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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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$LAYYYTER
Today's Document
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
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todays bird
we're not kids anymore.
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@i-suggest-dnd4e
My favorite way to run D&D 5e is pretty simple and relies on a very small set of house rules:
Replace the Player's Handbook with the D&D 4e PHB
Replace the Dungeon Master's Guide with the D&D 4e DMG
Replace the Monster Manual with the D&D 4e MM
I want to try something like DnD, but I'm not into fantasy setting, so I would like to know about GURPS. Is it hard to learn and play?
GURPS has a fair bit of modularity from what I hear. It can be easier or harder depending on what setting and rules you're using. But as far as "hard to learn and play" goes, in my opinion the first TTRPG you play is going to be the hardest to learn. You will develop a number of skills that transfer over to other games, like knowing how to make an attribute or skill check, navigating character creation, or sharing time at the table with other folks. Some TTRPGs are going to have more to learn, or their rulebooks are poorly edited messes, but those fundamental skills will still make it easier to learn them.
Regardless of what game you start learning with, I hope you enjoy it! And don't listen to anyone who says D&D can do any type of setting or genre: they're simply wrong.
you must read the rulebook
It is ASTOUNDING to me how often this is the answer to any RPG rules question. For any game. It makes me feel like I'm in customer service again. "Did you read the rulebook?" No. of course not.
I blame D&D 5 for this. The hyper aggressively enforced multimedia gate to ttrpgs suddenly deciding to make their player guide's rules for two of their own self-purported pillars of play "ask the DM" and then publishing a DM guide where 80% of the pages are long rambles ending in "you're the DM, figure it out" has done a horrendous amount of damage to the hobby.
I promise you, most games do, in fact, teach you how to play in the rules. Most games do have answers to game questions in the book. Reading the book will guide you in how to play. The vast majority, even. It really is just the multi-billion toy company charging $250 for a game that doesn't work out of the box.
Having to sit on my hands every time I see a DnD post because 90% of the time it's like, well DnD actually had this at one point but it was called 4e and I got insulted by complete strangers in real life multiple times for liking it
"I like dnd 5e but combat takes forever/martials are underpowered, so I've homebrewed a fix-" 4e. You want to play 4e. Do yourself a favor and try 4e.
The children yearn for Nentir Vale.
"But nobody wants to learn it." then you learn how to run it. The broad strokes aren't that different from 5e, there's just more addition.
How To Be: Gideon Nav (in 4e D&D)
In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:
This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character
This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise
While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible
The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.
Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
What a bozo!
First things first, before we go past the fold (as we normally do), I need to lay out a quick spoiler warning. I’m going to mention things about Gideon Nav, the protagonist of Gideon the Ninth and a factor in the subsequent stories Harrow the Ninth and Nona The Ninth.
What I’m going to discuss is what I consider establishing details; that is, it’s hardly really meaningful for me to tell you that Gideon Nav is a tall woman with red hair and a sword, even if, strictly speaking, those are things revealed in the later chapters of the book. I don’t intend to spoil anything meaningfully deep about why things are the way they are for Gideon, so you can read this if you want.
Keep reading
Made some power cards for a DnD4e avenger (early paragon) I've missed doing these.
D&D Idea
All classes as "casters". Magic is split between Internal Magic (martials and sorcerers) and External Magic (most old caster classes). External uses slots like now. Internal uses a mana point like system.
I have a suggestion.
little utenanthy happy pride lesbians
Thinking of creating my own D&D campaign
I have a suggestion.
Please!
I suggest using the D&D Fourth Edition rules. While it's a bit more complex than 5e, the upshot is that a lot of DM-side stuff is quite a bit easier, like creating encounters exactly as challenging as you desire. In addition, many players who have come to be frustrated with or tired of 5e may find some of the 4e changes that were controversial at the time to be welcome and innovative.
Thinking of creating my own D&D campaign
I have a suggestion.
You wanna know what makes me sick to my stomach? People who think D&D involves the players against the DM. Anyone who has actually played any D&D knows that it is the players against the players. The DM is just a catalyst.
They’ll focus the story on one player a bit more than the others, they’ll encourage the problem players with points of inspiration, and they’ll make the players fight over magic items.
And then, when the players hate each other just enough, the bbeg tells them they have to sacrifice one of themselves.
The players, consumed by their hatred, will be so focused on arguing about why this person and that person should be sacrificed, that they fail to notice how vulnerable the bbeg is in that moment.
And so, instead of stabbing the villain, they stab each other. Usually in-game, but if the DM is really good at their job, they will do it in real life.
THAT, is what D&D is all about.
This is a novelty account that made to suggest D&D4e, but that game definitely wants players to work together. Instead I'll point out that there are games where the rules and setting do a lot more to encourage and facilitate PC vs PC conflict than any edition of D&D.
Have you played Paranoia? In a dystopic setting where Friend Computer rules, it is treasonous to be an undeclared mutant or be in a secret society. Naturally, every PC is a mutant and in a different secret society, tasked with working together and watching each other for when they betray Friend Computer.
I have been informed I missed the joke that this post was actually about Nordic Larp, my bad!
You wanna know what makes me sick to my stomach? People who think D&D involves the players against the DM. Anyone who has actually played any D&D knows that it is the players against the players. The DM is just a catalyst.
They’ll focus the story on one player a bit more than the others, they’ll encourage the problem players with points of inspiration, and they’ll make the players fight over magic items.
And then, when the players hate each other just enough, the bbeg tells them they have to sacrifice one of themselves.
The players, consumed by their hatred, will be so focused on arguing about why this person and that person should be sacrificed, that they fail to notice how vulnerable the bbeg is in that moment.
And so, instead of stabbing the villain, they stab each other. Usually in-game, but if the DM is really good at their job, they will do it in real life.
THAT, is what D&D is all about.
This is a novelty account that made to suggest D&D4e, but that game definitely wants players to work together. Instead I'll point out that there are games where the rules and setting do a lot more to encourage and facilitate PC vs PC conflict than any edition of D&D.
Have you played Paranoia? In a dystopic setting where Friend Computer rules, it is treasonous to be an undeclared mutant or be in a secret society. Naturally, every PC is a mutant and in a different secret society, tasked with working together and watching each other for when they betray Friend Computer.
also i went to see the dnd movie!! it’s actually pretty good although as someone who loves playing druid i too would like to wildshape 7 times a day and turn into an owlbear
also Doric is basically Keyleth but with like. more confidence, right? red head, antler/horn things? she’s Keyleth. i love her
"although as someone who loves playing druid i too would like to wildshape 7 times a day and turn into an owlbear"
I have a suggestion.
I don't much like Pathfinder, but I do really like its elaboration of what to do with downtime and space carved out for the more domestic side of TTRPGs.
My character and one of my close friends' characters in our Pathfinder campaign were identical twin (drow) sisters and I'd spontaneously implied our like... 124th birthdays were coming up, and the DM promptly scheduled it in. My wizard spent every downtime part of every session secretly crafting a tea set for her sister's birthday with her ridiculously high crafting stat (their family had a whole tea tradition in ~the lore that her sister was the one to keep up while my wizard was off being a flake for 30 years). I think her sister even ended up using the tea set for some plot-related purpose but the fun part was crafting the pot and the cups and finding places to hide them where my character's twin wouldn't find them.
(We later switched to 5e 2024 and it was a massive relief tbh because Pathfinder wizards suck, or at least did at the time. But I did like the Pathfinder downtime.)
I have a suggestion.
4e D&D And Mental Load
A not uncommon complaint about 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons is the way that the game’s systems created a lot of mental load. If you’re not familiar with mental load, it’s the idea that when you interact with something, there is stuff happening inside your brain that are about maintaining the state you’re currently in. Some things we do in order to make mental load very easy.
Almost all cars in the world control almost the same way because a system that makes it so cars work consistently is really good for letting drivers transfer the skills of driving from car to car and not have to be too concerned about the individual peculiarities of them. The whole point of the way we’ve set up driving is that it’s meant to be a system where you can focus on important things like making the correct moves in relationship to the other very fast moving objects and yourself.
Oh, and every single person who put a touch screen inside a car as a part of the interface deserves to be dragged out into the street and pelted with sticks.
I don’t think that mental load is an unsolvable problem when it comes to design. I think there are some things that become very good at making so that their mental load is almost invisible. Donald Norman in the book The Design of Everyday Things talks about the significance of a set of traits for any given design, which include things like its feedback and its discoverability.
You have interacted with a lot of doors and if you’re of a particular age you’ve interacted with a lot of door knobs and not even noticed that door knobs are almost non-existent now. Instead, levers are much more common as ways to interact with doors because levers are more accessible for more people and door knobs aren’t. You probably didn’t notice this transition over time because the kinds of things you were interacting with were being done in a way that were so convenient and so smooth and so reliable and consistent across all sources that you wound up forgetting about most of the doors you’ve interacted with.
Quick, think about it: What’s your front doorknob look like? Or door lever.
If you can remember even its colour you’re probably doing better than most. The nature of very familiar objects and systems that you’re meant to interact with is that peculiarities are rare and the way that we interact with them is meant to be entirely low mental load.
Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition is a more mental load-y game than I understand many people consider games like 3rd edition to be. I don’t think this is wrong, but I do think the question follows upon that: is it worth it?
I’ve talked with people, friends even, about playing 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons, and one of the things that comes up is the idea that the fighter character doesn’t want to make a choice between a bunch of things, they just want to hit a guy. And I find that example – obviously, anyone talking about their individual experiences of playing the game is being honest. No one’s faking how they feel about the thing. But they might be understating or overstating the problem by giving a slightly malformed version of it. Because, yeah, the fighter can just hit a guy. You have attacks that are just hit a guy. You always have an attack that’s just hit a guy. But many people in this conversation don’t think that they should do that. And the reason why you shouldn’t do that is because 4th edition presents you with a lot of desirable options.
The real thing to consider is that most of these systems are there to give you a good choice in different situations. And that means that it’s not a matter of hitting a guy, it’s a matter of the best hitting of a guy.
This is a real problem that 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons has, and it is one of the reasons why I become such an avid min-maxer of my characters. See, the thing is, I, generally speaking, always have a plan A for every turn when I’m playing Dungeons & Dragons. There’s stuff I know I always want to do. I have priorities, and that priority means that I can look at any one of my powers, and I know I don’t need to think about that right now because it’s not important unless this other situation comes up. Similarly, there are some powers that I want to fire off every single chance I get. But the thing is, this is a skill. This is a thing I have developed over time and with practice. I don’t need a virtual tabletop to maintain this and I don’t need playing cards. I can do this with pencil and paper. But again, it’s a skill and that’s where the question of “is it worth it” comes up.
If you’re playing a first level fourth edition character, I think it’s very easy to get in the habit of working out what you want to do. The nature of these abilities, however, is a lot like a video game controller the first time you’ve been handed it. There’s a lot of times where I’ll notice people just try each button individually without necessarily being confident what they do. And the game doesn’t have necessarily a good platform to do that in. Players don’t get feedback from what their actions do in the way that you do for the instantaneous use in a video game.
What’s more, you can miss, so you might have a first level character with a first level encounter attack, fire it off to see what it does so you can get familiar with it, and your first use of it doesn’t do anything. That sucks, and that can definitely add to a feeling of frustration. None of this is to say that any of the complaints about the mental load of 4th edition is wrong.
Rather, I bring all these things up because the result of that in 4th edition is that you have the first game system where fighters have as much control and agency on the battlefield as wizards, where damage dealing is not exclusively the domain of magical characters, and where everyone is invested in making sure that the whole group succeeds, that interactions between players are more important than individual actions. I know it’s mental load. I know it’s work. But I find it so much more satisfying than the alternative.
The alternative, based on my memory of 3rd edition, is watching as the most optimized player obliterate something with a single spell, or from watching Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition Let’s Plays, watching the fighter flail and do nothing until a wizard solves the problem.
Combat in the newer edition looks terrible. I can’t work out why it seems so dull and I don’t know why the numbers seem so consistently low, but broadly speaking I feel like characters in 5th edition don’t have a lot of agency once fights start and you have to rely on the idea that the dungeon master has given you the right numbers that you’re supposed to interact with. And that the things that you’re doing don’t necessarily give you a lot of opportunity. Also, players don’t tend to work together very much. There’s a lot of splitting up and diversifying your position, which I feel is just a little bit of a bummer.
So, fourth edition. Lots of mental load. Probably. That’s probably a very fair claim. And I think anyone teaching the system should take that in mind when they want to try and share it with people and do things to help. The Essentials classes are not my favourite classes by any means, but they all work reasonably well. Except the Assassin. Fuck the Assassin.
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
So, dnd tonight. Anyone got any ideas how to emotionally traumatize my players?
I have a suggestion.
Do tell
Many folks who play D&D only know of its 4th Edition via second- or third-hand flak from folks who hate it. You could announce you're converting the campaign to 4e and put them through the emotional wringer as they go through the work to convert their characters to this edition, then pleasantly surprise them when the game is still quite fun to play!
