Cardiac

Without trust in the shadows, how can one live in the light?  Member of the We Are Adventurers collective.

[theoutcastrogue]

I need people to understand that loyalty is hot because it's a vice, not a virtue.

Being loyal to someone means you'll follow them even when they're wrong. If you only follow them as long as they're right, you're not loyal, you're just being reasonable, and basing your decisions on your own sense of morality. It's bad to follow someone who's wrong, and that's exactly what loyalty demands, by definition.

Of course, millennia of societies featuring

patron/client relationships of all kinds

ruling classes needing legitimacy and some degree of consent from the underclasses (otherwise it's non-stop violence, and that's expensive and dangerous, right?)

warlord arrangements with alliances between them and "favours" to their underlings

related: feudal arrangements with kings, lords, vassals, knights and oaths of fealty

militaries needing to give soldiers incentives that are stronger than self-preservation, and being unable to dangle "personal gain" in front of them full-time

strongmen/monarchs (it's a continuum) needing loyalty to their person, otherwise someone else might take their place

empires needing loyalty to the empire itself, otherwise the population might side with another empire, or go for independence

nation-states needing loyalty to the nation, so that they can effectively oppress, expel, or eliminate everyone else

and gangs (this includes states) needing cohesiveness to protect their turf from other gangs

have produced a GIGANTIC trove of literature, art, law, philosophy etc that paints loyalty as a virtue, often the ultimate virtue.

Some good reasons to accept this at face value momentarily are:

to immerse yourself in fiction and enjoy it

to feel strong feelings

to put yourself in the shoes of the many real people that fell for this in the past, and so to better understand them and the societies that produced them

to put yourself in the shoes of the many real people that are falling for this as we speak, and so to better understand them and be more equipped to argue against this deeply conservative narrative

porn

There are… no good reasons to accept this at face value for longer than that.

Now mind you, I'm not saying "don't be loyal to anyone". I'm not in the business of urging people to be virtuous here. I'm saying, if you are loyal to someone, accept it for what it is and don't pretend you deserve a medal. Own your crimes. Revel in your transgressions, even.

After all, I, too, would help my buddy hide the body. I'm just not pretending that's a good and moral thing.

[heyhoneyfox]

"I'm lying to you but this sentence is technically the truth without context" is such a good trope. Like yes the way that I am spinning these words forms a lies but if you squint I'm actually not lying.

[armthearmour]

A combination Axe-Wheellock Pistol,

OaL: 22.4 in/57 cm

Weight: 4.2 lbs/1900 g

Germany, 1551, housed at the Real Armería, Madrid.

[probablybadrpgideas]

Dungeon room contains barrels of gunpowder, lamp oil, sacks of flour, lard, olive oil, charcoal, dry hay, wood shavings, stacks of paper, jugs of the sticky alchemical "Meletisian fire", just keep going on describing how stupidly flammable the room is. There's no particular payoff. The enemies in the room neither use fire or are vulnerable to it.

­

There will be payoff because no player will be able to resist

[herheim731]

Smoke Cloud

Comms for @EikonicTCG !!

[blumineck]

Or so I thought…

I love learning new things. I hope you find this as interesting as I did!

As always, more content on Patreon

[wearesorcerer]

Magical Trivia

Fireball is the benchmark third-level spell and always has been since D&D has been D&D.

In Chainmail, the wargame to which Dungeons & Dragons was originally a supplement, the Wizard (renamed "magic-user" in OD&D) operated quite a bit differently from how it does now. All of their abilities were essentially at-will, but it depended on whether or not you chose to use the optional Spell Complexity system. This had you roll on a table along complexity rankings (spell levels) to see if your spell took effect, was delayed, or failed. Neither of the Wizard's missiles -- Fire Ball (sic), which operated like a heavy catapult, and Lightning Bolt, which had a specified area and "an attack value equal to a heavy field gun" (i.e., a cannon) -- nor their abilities to see in darkness, become invisible, or affect enemy morale were given a complexity ranking. There were only six spell levels, which was true even in the first D&D rules (in the original boxed set).

When D&D became a thing, all of the Wizard's abilities were made spells and Vancian casting (prepare one spell per spell slot, be unable to cast it again unless it was prepared multiple times) became the standard. Fireball was now a third-level spell, where it has remained since.

And yes, consequently, 5th-level arcanists (or 6th-level Sorcerers in 3rd edition) are quite literally the equivalent of artillery pieces. Magical artillery pieces. Kinda like magical Liopleurodons, but with invisibility, night vision, and other powers.

[koddlet]

personal rules for winter ❄

[dancing-crow]

solid advice

[atomic-clowns]

[rogue-healer]

@wearepaladin

welp that is Certainly An Oath

[xenasaur]

one video game trope I cannot stand is lockpicks being disposable. how bad are you at picking these fucking locks that you're utterly ruining your tools every time

[adora-sword]

It's okay, you can say Elder Scrolls

[themboots]

[thydungeongal]

Running D&D in 2024 is like, the player community collectively convinced each other that dungeon crawls, resource management and attrition are bad, so now everyone runs games where characters can expect to get into one or two fights a day and characters are never stretched for resources, and most Reddit threads about D&D are GMs asking for help challenging their groups because of said ignoring of the resource management aspect and getting told that a good GM could make it work so obviously they must be a bad GM.

[vixensdungeon]

I should start making DM advice videos.

The title: "How to keep your party challenged and engaged"

The thumbnail: "Do this one weird trick!"

The content: "Grind them into paste in your meatgrinder."

[thydungeongal]

"This forgotten method could save your D&D campaign" and the thumbnail has a guy thinking ponderously and the words "Dungeons & Dragons" are on the screen with the word "Dungeons" circled

[vixensdungeon]

With an arrow pointing to it.

[vixensdungeon]

"This forgotten method could save your D&D campaign"

[thydungeongal]

#LITERALLY#the best d&d 5e game i ever ran lasted years and it was a megadungeon#we used encumberance and i made sure vision and light were important#and it was amazing!!! the PCs felt challenged even after breaking into the double-digit levels#people are afraid of numbers and they'll say shit like ''oh but i don't want to play with spreadsheets'' and it's like...#you don't need a spreadsheet for 5e you literally just change numbers on your character sheet. which is why the character sheet has room for#all those numbers. because that's how the game was designed to be played.#if you're not playing d&d with at least SOME dungeons then why are you playing d&d. just play a different game right?

I am kissing these tags mwah mwah mwah

[thydungeongal]

#I don’t like encumberance bc i find it a little frustrating to do it in EXACT numbers however still within reason#i think tbh as long as your players are engaged and having fun that’s what’s important#some rules still are relevant but tbh what’s we play for is for the story so as long as the story is engaging and interesting#(which my last dm did FANTASTICALLY)#then it’s fine to use or not use whatever rules you like. that’s the whole point of the game - you can use or change or add what rules#you want to for your table!!#dnd is just the system and i disagree that you need to have dungeons. dnd is just the system and you can do what you want with it#that’s the beauty of trrpgs and why dnd is so popular imo. dms can change what they want#add in new mechanics that suit their worlds and characters and whatnot

These tags just demonstrate the issue that this post is about: people think D&D is a completely unopinionated game that you can just take whole systems out of without altering the gameplay. But D&D is a game that is opinionated about many things, resource management being one of them, and once you remove the resource management out of it you end up with a worse game with no tension and DMs suddenly having to fix a bunch of new problems that arise out of that, like having to suddenly figure out ways to challenge their party when tracking resources (this includes stuff like spell slots and daily uses of abilities) is no longer an issue except on a per-encounter level.

And honestly "DMs can change anything" is not unique to D&D. If I wanted to run a game that doesn't care about dungeon-crawling and resource management I would much rather run a different game. And I wish people in the D&D playerbase realized this as well, because not only is it bad for their game and its play culture, it also stifles creativity within the hobby.

All of which is to say: if you don't like resource management there are hundreds of games out there that don't care about resource management.

[steamfucksithlord]

This sounds a whole lot like "You're having fun wrong!"

You can totally change any rule you don't like. In D&D, or any other game. You can change the rules in Sorry! if you want. You don't have to play Chutes and Ladders instead.

I've noticed over the years that WotC and Hasbro have changed the game from encouraging players and DMs to change rules they don't like, to severely discouraging them. (I assume this is to sell more minis, and now D&D One subscriptions.) We used to call people like that rules lawyers, and most of us stopped inviting them to our tables.

By all means play another game. I haven't given Hasbro any of my money since 3.5, and I don't intend to start. But don't complain about the way others are playing. The only way to do it wrong is by NOT having fun!

[thydungeongal]

I'm sorry but this is such a pissing on the poor reading comprehension take.

This post is about observations of a play culture where people clearly are not having fun, as attested to by hundreds of GMs trying to run the game in a way it's not optimized towards and suddenly having to do a bunch of work to patch over those newly discovered issues! That's what the first post in this chain is about: people have self-inflicted a playstyle onto themselves which simply does not harmonize with D&D, but because the current play culture of D&D doesn't consider the GM's fun a factor they need to deal with toxic memes like "a good GM can fix it" when they shouldn't, in fact, have to fix things if the game were fit to purpose!

So yes, this post is about people who clearly are, by your definition, having fun wrong while playing D&D, because they have made the job of running the game way too stressful for themselves! And the purpose of this post is to say "You don't have to run the game like that. You can just take the game at its own word and let the game take the reins. That way you, the GM, will also have to do less game design on the fly."

[thydungeongal]

Also while this old post is going across the dash: the idea that WotC is somehow trying to discourage people from changing the rules they don't like is demonstrably false. The current culture of play of D&D is very much based around the idea that the latest edition of D&D very much gives explicit license to people to change the rules they don't like and treats this as a somehow unique feature. Meanwhile the emergent player culture of the game sees the license to change the rules of the game as their first line of defense against any criticisms of sloppy game design or lack of clear design goals. WotC and the D&D community both cultivate the idea that it's okay to change any rules you don't like and the fact that you can means that any issues you have with the game are your fault.

[thydungeongal]

Also also: someone in the tags was like "sometimes people really don't want to play a dungeon crawl and it feels unfair to jump one on them, so what do I do" and my personal suggestion is that you run something other than the dungeon game for them. Seriously, if you take D&D out of the dungeon it gets uncomfortable. There are hundreds of fantasy games out there and while many of them do feature dungeons a lot of them are much more conducive to non-dungeon-related gameplay than the dungeon game.

[thydungeongal]

#i do think 5e is capable of running a political game though#i wouldnt know ive GMed

D&D 5e is capable of running a political game in the sense that the game won't actively prevent you from doing so, but this is the absolute bare minimum in terms of actually having support for running a political game. In the context of a political game D&D characters can fall back on a bare bones social skill system and if your gameplay is mostly politicking you will have to suspend disbelief for the fact that the player characters will be largely growing in terms of combat effectiveness. In these ways, yes, you can absolutely run a political game in D&D 5e, but the game itself will end up doing very little of the heavy lifting and such gameplay will ultimately end up being something where the group (and most likely the GM) does most of the work to make it function at all.

You know what D&D 5e does have lots of mechanical support for so that the group won't have to do most of the work? Fighting monsters in dungeons. There are other games that will serve you much better if you want to run a political game.

Like, due to the nature of the possibility space in TTRPGs, there is very little that TTRPGs can actually prevent you from doing. I could run a dungeon crawl in Monsterhearts. It would be extremely silly and shortsighted of me to do so when games that much better support that playstyle exist and if I were to argue "I do think Monsterhearts is capable of running a dungeon crawl" people would think it's a really weird statement to make. This statement, however, is taken as gospel by many D&D player when applied to D&D's supposed flexibility, which is, I'm sorry to say, mostly a marketing lie.

[duran-duran-less-official]

D&D players are still out here in 2025 metaphorically trying to run every possible video game as a DLC for Bloons Tower Defence.

EDIT: found the post

[we-are-barbarian]

This is also the thing that causes the dreaded "martial-caster gap" that you hear so much about in D&D spaces. Statistically, according to multiple polls I have found, most groups (some polls suggest anywhere from 75-90%) are in 4 encounters or less in a day, which drastically changes the power level of a spell caster that is designed to have their resources stretched over 8 encounters in a day. 8 encounters.

No no, hang on, I don't think you read that with enough emphasis.

8 encounters in a day. That's what WOTC balanced the game around.

I'm not here to tell anyone their fun is wrong. But as previously stated by @thydungeongal, if you aren't playing the game the way it's designed and that causes problems and affects your fun at the table, then you probably shouldn't be playing that system. D&D is not designed to be the end all be all, it is marketed to be the end all be all. But the way that most of us (this I don't have statistics for, this is more a vibe-check from the community) play is broad-sweeping narratives focused around the feel of epic fantasy, not slogs through resource-wasting encounters day in and out. D&D is explicitly not designed to do that. But we treat it like it's the only game there is.

Try other games. Daggerheart and Draw Steel just dropped and both of them look incredible. I also think both of them handle the epic fantasy narrative better than D&D does, but I haven't had a chance to try either one yet so bear with me. I fall victim to this too, since I have pretty much only played D&D and Pathfinder 1E. I haven't even played PF2E, though I do think it looks like fun. We owe it to ourselves to try other games that will help us fit in with the stories we want to tell and the style we want to play, but we never actually do because D&D has such a chokehold on the market. Go try something new and see if you like it. And if you're going to play D&D, maybe try playing it the way it's intended if you want to challenge your players?

[theoutcastrogue]

@we-are-barbarian the 5e DMG (2014) suggested 6 to 8 "medium or hard" encounters per adventuring day, and had an XP budget thingy to calculate totals.

Needless to say, nobody noticed this section and nobody played like that. It was completely ignored. I think the 5.5 design team was aware that despite the DMG's advice, most people did like 2 or 3 encounters per day, but I can't fathom how that factored in their design process.

All I know is that the 2024 DMG gives zero guidelines on the adventuring day, or the frequency of rests. Despite the fact that long rests still reset all the players' (innate) resources, the DM isn't asked to consider anything "per day", neither encounters nor XPs. To put it another way, resource management is no longer officially supported. Your DM can make it happen, but without any help from this edition.

[moonauu]

He late for work

[catchymemes]

[diplododocus]

I love when people credit artists. This is French circus artist and choreographer Yoann Bourgeois, probably in Tentatives d'approche d'un point de suspension at hangar Y in Meudon a few days ago. Most of his work is an exploration of balance and equilibrium, he has several variations around the stairs/trampoline thing (fugue-trampoline, this one, cavale, l'art de la fugue…)

[barbariankingdom]

(via Home / X)

[aboleth-eye]

Original Artist: Oleg Yudin [ArtStation site]

Credit Artists! It is stupid easy to do!

[blumineck]

Testing D&D acrobatic combat!

(Turns out doing this stuff under time pressure is HARD)

Outtakes on Patreon

[theoutcastrogue]

D&D 5e is bad for this. In 2014 the skill system was half-baked: there were no mechanics or DCs for even the most bog-standard skill uses, and the DM was expected to wing it every time and decide action economy, DC/contested check, and possibly what conditions grant advantage/disadvantage. Good news for experienced DMs who knew what they were doing and already had Opinions on how to run things! They basically had a blank slate to do what they want. Bad news for everybody else.

In 2024 the skill system was basically abandoned. They simply scrapped the section that explained what skills even do (2014 managed that at least, though they never explained how rolls are resolved). It's a mess, and I'm still livid.

Now, Cunning Action allows you to Dash, Disengage, or Hide as a bonus action. This doesn't appear to help with Acrobatics, does it?

The 2024 Acrobatics skill is defined (I'm using the term very liberally) as "Stay on your feet in a tricky situation, or perform an acrobatic stunt". What type of action is it when it's not reactive? We don't know. What's the DC? We don't know. Is it part of movement? We don't know. Can you combine it with an attack action, or any other action? We don't know. Can a successful Acrobatics check grant you some sort of benefit in combat? We are strictly in homebrew/houserule territory, and there's no rules framework nor a set of guidelines that can help DMs decide that.

So with rules as written, Rogues can combine an attack with an acrobatics check as much as anyone else: they can't, unless your DM thinks they could. Maybe the DM will rule you can do it as part of your movement – regular move, or action (Dash), or bonus action (rogue's Cunning Action: Dash, or monk's Step of the Wind: Dash). It's not unreasonable and I recommend it. Or maybe the DM will rule it's an action. We don't know.

For reference, here's ALL the instances that tell us how the Acrobatics skill can actually be used in game in D&D 5.5:

action, DC = grapple's DC (typically 8+grappler's STR+grappler's proficieny bonus), to escape a grapple (PHB)

action, DC 18, to escape a chain (PHB)

part of Utilize action, DC 15 to catch a grappling hook at a ledge (PHB)

reaction, DC 15, to half the dmg from falling into water (PHB)

no action in itself, DC 10, to avoid landing Prone if you Long Jump to Difficult Terrain (PHB)

action, DC 15, to escape a Rope of Entanglement (DMG)

action, DC 12, to escape Webs (DMG)

no action mentioned (presumably part of movement?), DC 12, to leap between platforms in The Lost Library of Lethchauntos adventure (Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerûn)

And that's it. The system can't help you further. Go forth and improvise, cooperating with your DM, or pick another system. If you really like 5e and want to tweak it, check out Tales of the Valiant and Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition (aka A5E). If nothing else, you can crib ideas for your own houserules. Or, if you like the nitty gritty stuff, try D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder (either edition) – you'll lose bounded accuracy and you'll have a lot more bookkeeping, but it's a tradeoff for much more accurate simulation. Whatever floats your boat. :)

[theoutcastrogue]

Favourite polysyllabic synonym of "steal"

pilfer

purloin

appropriate

liberate

pickpocket

snaffle

gaffle

nobble

cozen

swindle

Voting ended onDec 18, 2025

[theoutcastrogue]

Favourite monosyllabic synonym of "steal" (just pick a vowel)

/æ/ bag, snag, nab, blag, jack, scam, snatch

/ʌ/ scrump

/iː/ fleece, thieve, sneak, cheat, heave

/ɪ/ filch, pinch, snitch, lift, grift, nick, pick, nip, whip, crib, prig

/ɒ/ glom, flog, cop

/əʊ/ bone

/uː/ (or /ʊ/) mooch, loot, boost, hook

/aɪ/ swipe, heist, kipe

Voting ended onDec 12, 2025