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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

Something that Brenna Lee Mulligan does during Death Saving throws rounds, is that he gives players the opportunity to magical & spiritual characters to have a small spirit-journey during their turn, making full skill checks and the like to learn VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION that has earth-shattering consequences, sometimes to the fight the players are currently in.

RAW, he should just be asking Kristen Applebee's character to make a death saving throw. But instead they get to journey to heaven to meet with god, only to find that the dead Archmage principal of the school has cold-clocked god and is currently held up in the big guy's main office, awaiting a return to the Material plane with a free time-stop to grant to the players to help them finish off the big-bad.

Another thing I noticed he does, is that when he wants to get quieter players into the game, thinking they should have an opportunity to spotlight themselves in a scene, is that he will say 'your character sees this. What would you like to do, or what does your character think about this?' This allows a player to explore their character, making a decision that immerses them into the scene, but doesn't force them to perform an action if they don't want to.

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 what the DM wants to do. If you don't put energy into being invested, you're not fulfilling your side of the arrangement at the table.

I have three games running at the moment. I'll post them in order of how novel they are.

Blades in the Dark (BitD)

I run this when there aren't enough people put together for my primary game. I like it, but I think the default setting suffers from Warhammer40k grimdark blandness. There should be more in the book that talks about how to pepper in beautiful moments, and things that the players want to protect and strive for.

Then again, BitD assumes that players want to dispose of their characters, and have them become traumatized in a way that I feel is a poor representation of mental health, but an accurate depiction of toxic genre tropes.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition (PF2e)

PF2e is a smaller game I play with only a few dedicated players. I find that players that do not want to spend a lot of time creating characters and learning the intricacies of the system do not retain interest. Those are absolutely the cost of entry for players. I also find the game is at times slightly easier, but for the most part as difficult to run as 5e, and that most people who say that PF2e fixes everything that D&D5e does poorly was attempting to play 5e like 3.5e, instead of leaning into Rulings-not-rules. Of course the DMG doesn't exactly lay out the Rulings-Not-Rules attitude clearly...

Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition (D&D5e)

This is the game that has been going on for over a decade, porting in from 4th edition.

My most recently started campaign is a fully homebrewed world, based around a rewrite of elven history that puts the axis between high, drow, and wood elves into a spectrum of spiritualism and materialism, with high elves wanting to ascend above the physical world, Drow wanting to help the mortal races (and get mad rich yo), and Wood Elves shooting the moon on the material world and finding spiritualism in nature.

As systems go, I think it is the easiest game for players to pick up and participate in, and that is asks as little of players as possible. It also is not the easiest system for new DMs to get a handle of, although I am hopeful that OneD&D will be fixing most of those issues with a rewrite of the DMG and the various fixes that I think will be making CR a much more useful tool.

On another note, I am mildly concerned that Weapon Mastery is being spread around so much. It is popular, but I felt it would be most appropriate as a feature that is strictly for Warrior Classes, and this makes the distinction of what is or isn't a Warrior fuzzy.

Not that this is a big problem, just mildly concerning.

It also allows WotC the ability to carefully calibrate damage outputs in a way that works with CR in a consistent way, and gives 3rd party developers or homebrewing DMs a consistent rubric to show what kind of boosts are acceptable within the game's math.

Honestly all they have to do is fix the outlier spells, and we're looking at another iteration of D&D with very well honed CR.

I think what you're largely missing is how the damage ceiling has come down due to the removal of many methods that optimizers would use to stack a lot of damage into a single turn.

Given that, the lack of damage increase is either fine, or only slightly sub-par.

Cheers! Thanks for the 'Lazy DM's Guide' books. They have been a gamechanger for my prep.

While this is all well and good, I think the OneD&D playtest provided a great fix on the biggest issue I've had with the mechanic: Remembering it exists.

Simply stating that on an unmodified 20 or 1 that Inspiration is granted is a fantastic way to remind the GM that they should give this out more often. It's gotten to the point that in cases where I would have previously given ad-hoc advantage, I now give inspiration where the player can make use of it if they feel like they want or not.

Also I have adopted those rules for both hero points in PF2e, and my regular D&D5e game. I mean both of them.

How it works....

A player rolls a Natural 1 - They get inspiration to use on a future roll. A player rolls a Natural 20 - They choose another player at the table who gets inspiration.

These two together more or less ensures that there's an amount of inspiration floating around all the time. But this also solves an issue where a hot-streak gets hotter, and someone with luck early on will get more of a spotlight later. By making success something that gives a boon to someone else, you build espirt de corps as everyone celebrates eachothers' successes more, and the spotlight be more likely to move to another player.

As I said before, this system works fantastic in both Pathfinder and D&D. The only downside is that it feels like PCs have an extra layer of plot armor, but that is mitigated by the fact that it wasn't my decision that I made capriciously. Also it makes math rocks a little more 'WEEE'!

[5e] Astral Elf or Eladrin would be perfect to have all the teleportation the Ciri does, as their Fey Step or Astral Step will allow a lot of trivial, non-spellcasting 30 foot teleportations. And bonus: Ciri is part elf!

Additionally Relentless Hex will allow the character to teleport directly to their hexed opponent.

Medium armor is there to represent aesthetics as well. Additionally, Invocations can be learned for Planeshift, teleport, and other flavorful selections to represent Ciri's ability to traverse different worlds entirely. Additionally, turn by turn a hexblade can get by without using magical blasts, just using their sword and various things that boost the damage output.

And while the OneD&D UA for Warlock doesn't have the hexblade class yet, I feel like it would more easily represent Ciri's casual use of magic as well as the depths of magical ability she can sometimes call on.

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!

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

There's an app?

I found some 3rd pary app for Lemmy called Jerboa. It was the first result in the android app store. What's the official app?

Not really this post is burying the lede.

A 5e fighter gets another feature called "action surge" which let's them perform another full attack action once per short rest. This means that each time they get another attack, their damage potential for a single round of combat goes up by two attacks. This makes them about the best focus-damage Nova builds.

Well, outside of conjure animals and paladins because WotC fucked up hard with them (but that is getting fixed in the 2024 revision).

edit: Besides I remember the dead levels of 3.5e.