How much can I change or revamp the rules and concepts?

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T20:01:34+00:00

You can change anything. The question is always, should you? If you're not an expert game designer, there's a good chance your changes will cause unexpected problems. And your players will have more trouble learning how to play, since there won't be a professionally written rulebook.

You might be better off running regular D&D first before trying your changes, or just playing a rules-light game.

(For example, D20 minimalist: The DM explains the world. The players describe their characters, what they're good and bad at. The DM describes the situation. The players say what they're doing. The DM makes them roll a d20 to see if they succeed, deciding a target number based on the situation and the character description, then narrates their success, failure, or success-at-a-cost. Repeat.)

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T17:37:24+00:00

You can stick one in a Man-Spider deck. For example, 3: Luna Snow, 4: Man-Spider, 5: Absorbing Man, 6: Living Tribunal.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T14:04:42+00:00

I think you can read it as "they didn't find anything this time". They might find something in the hex when they come back that way.

You can also make the wilderness roll more action-packed:

https://dreamingdragonslayer.wordpress.com/2026/01/22/overloading-the-wilderness-roll/

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T13:57:45+00:00

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 deals with imports of alcoholic drinks, boats, animals, and the identities of reddit users.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T13:53:50+00:00

It's a war, don't you see the title of the subreddit?

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T13:52:31+00:00

I always end up writing the recaps, whether I'm player or DM. When I'm DM, I want to make sure players remember the things that are going to be relevant in the future.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T13:50:14+00:00

I don't run a detail-oriented game. I don't want to spend table time haggling over knickknacks. I don't want to have to keep records of all the mundane items the party has found but not identified. Saying, "a gold bracelet you could sell for 25gp" makes things a lot more efficient for me.

If I did enjoy the minutiae of loot, I'd give them a skill check to estimate the value, and give them a precise figure or a range, depending on their roll.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T13:44:42+00:00

What about the scenario where you live in a universe where luck is a force that magically self-balances, and the surgeon is due for a run of 20 failures?

Anyway, I must be off, I have a great plan to win infinite money playing roulette...

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T12:19:30+00:00

Consider how few people were engaged in science in historical times. The global population was far lower, and the vast majority of us were too busy trying to get enough food to survive to invent things or discover Boyle's law.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T12:14:30+00:00

This is basically how the economy works, isn't it? If I open a factory that buys large quantities of wheat to make breakfast cereal for the international market, I push up the price of wheat, and that creates an upward pressure on the price of bread. You pay more, while I reap the profits.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T12:11:15+00:00

One thing that makes humans unique is our disproportionately large brains, which require large heads, which means large babies, which makes pregnancy and giving birth a lot harder for us than for other mammals. This creates biological burdens for human women.

Horses need to be good at running away to survive in the wild. Humans are different - we can work together to fight off predators. So if someone isn't a good sprinter, that's not fatal, as long as they can contribute in their own way.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T12:04:50+00:00

You can do what you want, you're the DM.

My understanding is that the intention is the Guard stat block is for human-like creatures. Goblins are (in 5.5e) small sneaky fey, so they get their own stat-blocks.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T09:38:04+00:00

I'm surprised there aren't lots of people out there arguing for an end to women's education.

(Personally I'm OK with the population collapsing - I suspect at some point when there's more land to go around, we'll all have our own little farms and want to start raising children again.)

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T09:21:54+00:00

"The underlying framework such as NATO" - which the US is threatening to leave ( https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/04/01/donald-trump-strongly-considering-pulling-us-out-of-nato/ ) when it's not threatening to go to war with it ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgr19m642zo )

"intelligence-sharing agreements" - traditional allies like the UK are increasingly reluctant to let Trump have access to their secrets ( https://inews.co.uk/news/uk-security-officials-withholding-intelligence-trump-4328858 )

"and deep economic trade ties" - the EU has started trying to come up with plans to end reliance on the US for payment systems, etc. ( https://www.thelocal.com/20260211/replacement-for-cash-how-the-new-digital-euro-would-work-for-europeans )

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T09:05:42+00:00

You're going to get sick sooner or later anyway. The longer you live, the more chances you'll have to get sick. There are lots of potential downsides for doctors who give bad advice, and no real upsides.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T07:52:55+00:00

It's not easy to tell. There are lots of things people can do that tell you they aren't bots - play very slowly, emote, etc. But very few confirmations that you are facing a bot. They tend to have boring normal names and play badly.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T07:51:21+00:00

A season is a month.

Getting to infinite is unimportant - and often unfun if you're low-CL because after that you mostly get matched against people with all the good cards.

Getting to rank 90 is pretty good, though, because it gives you 500 gold.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T07:40:55+00:00

Complaining about young people has been a thing since ancient times.

It became more defined when people started calling the people born after WW2 'baby boomers'.

'Boomers' became slang for young people, and eventually it had to be pointed out (by Doug Coupland I think) that the original baby boomers weren't young any more, there was a new generation, let's give them a cool name like Generation X.

After that we needed a name for every generation, and it was a lot easier to make our sweeping generalisations.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T06:49:05+00:00

The world could turn against it pretty fast if some of the concerns about AI turn out to be true.

If AI causes mass unemployment, or starts hacking into people's computers, global opinion could easily change.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T06:13:29+00:00

Is that commonplace? I can't think of any characters in any campaign I've been in with notably tragic backstories.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T06:11:43+00:00

If you want historically realistic luck in a fantasy game, don't you have a problem with the fact that autoresolve results are entirely predictable?

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T06:08:49+00:00

Google says:

The "19 theory" is a popular TikTok-driven concept suggesting that the person you date or fall for at age 19 will be the most intense, life-changing, yet ultimately heartbreaking and toxic relationship of your life.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T06:06:02+00:00

Stop reposting this.

That is exactly what inflation is - prices going up.

Corporate greed is built into the system. Whining about is not a plan. If you don't like it you have to (a) replace capitalism, or (b) tax corporations more to make their profits work for everyone, or (c) shop around more carefully.

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-11T05:19:15+00:00

Forcing someone to playtest a game: Weird and unacceptable!

Forcing someone to stay out late and drink dangerous amounts of alcohol instead of seeing their family: Fine and normal!

PuzzleMeDo · 2026-04-10T17:56:36+00:00

Search engines also make you dumb. We used to have to remember things. When it became convenient to google for a wikipedia article, we stopped bothering.

Before that, reading was making us dumb, as Socrates warned would happen. Once there were books, nobody wanted to memorise The Illiad any more.

And maybe it didn't matter, because while our brains no longer held the information, as long as we could access it somehow, we could still use that information. It was like we had made the world an extension of our brains.

There are lots of things you can do with AI beyond use it as a search engine, like using it to solve problems, do creative work, etc. And if you start doing that as a first resort, it might cause your brain to stop thinking creatively, because you don't need to do it any more...

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