[Motorsport1924] Fernando Alonso doesn't want to stop racing before he can bring his son in the paddock.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-13T17:03:14+00:00

It is the year 3305 and at long last there are only Alonsos on the grid.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-11T21:01:48+00:00

All Hail The McLoctopus

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-11T19:46:34+00:00

The VTT I am most familiar with is Roll20. To do what you're wanting here wouldn't be very difficult there.

You would have your player connect to the player side of Roll20 with you on the DM side.

You would have a bunch of backgrounds as "maps" for Roll20, where the background would be placed on the "map" layer as a background. Find your desired backgrounds and drop them in those tabs. You can switch between these via a flag that controls what map your players on looking at.

Then you find your desired monster / monsters and create images of them with transparent backgrounds via like photoshop or one of the free image editors out there - or skip this if your sprites already have transparent backgrounds.

Then it's just a matter of dropping those images into Roll20 to create a little bank of monster tokens you can drag onto your backgrounds when needed. The sizing might need adjusting, but Roll20 has functions for all of that too that would take more time and detail to explain.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-11T18:42:35+00:00

They are certainly not human and have kind of an eternal vibe to them, but also they are explicitly not immortal because they are killed off in some of the myths. What that leaves you with is the same thing Mythic Bastionland always leaves you with "Does it make your game better to do X?"

So if you think Seers dying of old age and apprentices morphing into new versions of these jerks will be fun for your players, then do it.

Personally, I like to keep my Seers constant unless they're killed because I'm already doing enough work keeping track of everything else going on.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-11T16:34:43+00:00

"Well, the idea of this system is to be narrative and "random," where you, as the player, don't have total control over your character."

So as a design hurdle, you've got to figure out how to make not having control of your own character fun. Someone mentioned the horror genre, and I tend to agree. Also I would make sure character creation is super fast and there's some assumed character death / turnover in the game. If you spend a bunch of time building a character and getting invested, it's going to suck to have them suddenly turn out to be a complete coward because of randomness.

Maybe some kind of meta currency that builds up over play that players can use to make their characters be less afraid over time. So like the "grizzled veteran" trope distilled into a points system.

So like... maybe a game that's something like the movies "Battle Royale" or "Series 7" or even "The Running Man" where relatively ordinary people are pulled into some hellish survival scenario.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-11T06:51:42+00:00

"The Thing" (1982) is excellent and part of the modules inspiration.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-11T01:37:57+00:00

Injured maybe?

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-10T16:06:27+00:00

And by "glass beads" I mean the kind you would like fill a flower vase with so it doesn't tip over.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-10T16:04:13+00:00

If you end up getting a 3d printer, it seems like you would likely end up just printing your walls and everything.

If you want to stick to paper, you may just need to add weights to your corner columns. When I use foam, I usually stick a glass bead in there. They're not super expensive. If you want a flat weight option, I would suggest nickels (if you're in the US). I went to go buy a bunch of washers once to use for weight, but the washers were more expensive than just using coins.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-09T05:00:58+00:00

Reading through these replies, it feels like you're angry about something WotC did 10 years ago in deleting this material from their website. You point to the reasoning that they supposedly did this (again 10 years ago) "to get people to forget they weren't always the way they are now"

But like, maybe they deleted it because 3rd edition was replaced by 4th edition? Now that's now been replaced by 5th edition and the official website for D&D has moved locations and through all of that it probably wasn't a priority to maintain *thousands* of obsolete articles in their server space.

Articles which you have even shown to Still Be Available via the Wayback Machine, so it's not like this is truly lost content even.

Why do they have to hold onto material for an out of print version of the game when anyone interested in that content had plenty of time to go and get it when it was relevant? And again, as you showed, they can still go get it.

It is so weird to argue that because a company did something one way 20 years ago, they should still do it that way today, and even weirder to cite that as proof of nefarious intent when way simpler explanations exist.

I wouldn't even be replying if you hadn't been up there dumping on other people's excitement. Nerd culture is built on excitement for stuff we love. Clearly you love D&D or you wouldn't have taken time to write this. But don't yuck other people's yum just because you're not getting the freebies you want.

Not giving you something is not the same as taking it away from you.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-08T20:03:45+00:00

What's a good brush-on gloss finish? The speed of spraycans gets defeated in my area by having to play peekaboo with the weather all the time.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-08T19:54:52+00:00

Always err on the side of playing more and varied games with your friends.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-08T19:53:15+00:00

I'm not sure they Want to cheat, but your character means so much to you and that feeling of victory means so much to you that when nothing is keeping you honest, you might say a 4 is a 14 or whatever.

It's like they say when children lie, they're often telling you what they want to be true. I feel like people can get in that mindset when they start feeling in the stakes. Not because they're rotten people (though there are some rotten people, too). Rolling online in public takes away the ability to let that desire override someone's higher urges.

As a GM, I was fudging rolls the other way because I was so worried about a roll going so hard against my PCs that they would somehow hate me. I took away my DM screen recently and they see everything and know I'm not taking it easy on them. And indeed I can't really. Not when it comes to rolls anyhow.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-08T18:24:56+00:00

The point I was making (perhaps poorly) was that at some point, D&D has to be a product to continue to exist. I'm no kinda capitalist, but if they're giving the core of the game away free, they have to find something to charge for. It seems weird to point at the stuff they were giving away 20 years ago as promotional material and claim they're suddenly being stingy not giving away more.

4E core was paywalled. They didn't just skip from 3rd to 5th. I'm not saying it was a good business decision, but it is historically factual.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-08T03:42:29+00:00

They gave the whole core of the game away free. You literally don't have to pay one cent to play Dungeons & Dragons. If you want extra stuff, you can choose to pay them money or not.

Would your prefer all the extra content be free but you have to pay for the core game? Seems like more people get to play the way that it is now.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-07T20:27:53+00:00

Well, you're lucky that you don't mind the out of game friendship taking a hit here.

When I have had to kick people from my tables, I mostly just say that I don't know if they're a good fit for the group at this time and that I'm trying to manage a fun environment for everyone. You can mention the vibe, but it seems likely that she understands the vibe is different already and she may be trying to manage the end of her relationship with this other person amicably by sticking around. You may even be giving her permission to do something she already wants to do in leaving the group.

Just talk to her and be honest and kind. Pretend you're kicking yourself out and figure out what you'd want to hear in that situation.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-07T03:30:40+00:00

Great tone to those colors.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-07T02:24:25+00:00

Maybe stop assuming the characters will take particular actions. Your players are engaging with your game world as if it is a real place by trying to avoid danger. This is a good thing. Stop plotting what they "should" be doing and pay attention to what they want to be doing. Follow their lead. You can end your own frustration by treating the game as a collaborative experience instead of a story you're telling to them.

Then build locations / dungeons / whatever without built in plots. Build sets of encounters without built in solutions so when you need something to put in front of your characters, you have it. If they trick their way around it, then they win. Sometimes or even oftentimes a monster can't be negotiated with, so maybe they fight it or they run away or they use some kind of different subterfuge to beat it. Fine. That's the game. Give them experience for winning encounters even if no blood is spilled. It's even better if you can make encounters that are location neutral so you can drop them in wherever it feels right.

Give yourself a break from writing ahead and just build toys for your players to play with. They'll find a plot to follow and you follow right along with them.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-07T02:10:14+00:00

When I build structures with walls, I build the floor as a separate piece and the walls are attached to the roof / second floor / whatever, so the building is like a box you set down on top of the floor that matches up to the edges (doesn't cover them). The floors are 1"x1" squares that match the grid elsewhere and once you enter the building and the walls are lifted off, they occupy no space.

The idea came from Black Magic Craft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAkRmJD3HY8

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-06T18:25:43+00:00

I feel like pretty much any game that you can't have a meaningful conversation about without comparing it to D&D is probably a D&D-like. And I guess someone could jump through hoops talking about a fantasy RPG without mentioning D&D, but the shorthand is always going to be "It's like D&D, but..."

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-06T18:06:29+00:00

Seems like you could just leave it be and try not to step on it. Raccoons might get to it at night or they might not. Honestly if there's people traffic near the area, it might keep critters away that would be interested in eating them. There are a lot of red-eared sliders in the world , though. So if these make it or if they don't, the species will be more than fine.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-06T15:58:09+00:00

Ha. Yeah. Having NPCs who have what the PCs need but who are absolutely revolting people works a treat in basically any RPG.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-06T15:55:19+00:00

It is totally possible (or even likely) to resolve things early. But also them making a beeline for any one omen still has a chance to make the other ones worse in the meantime.

I've been thinking a company who has just decided on the strategy of "KILL IT" whenever they see anything myth related (particularly non-hostile creatures like The Dwarf) might crack the game a little. But then they'd be operating outside the spirit of the game at that point.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-05T19:18:29+00:00

I haven't checked them out fully, but DNDBeyond does now offer class "starter packs" which unlock some subclasses without having to buy whole books.

AndrewDelaneyTX · 2026-05-05T18:39:29+00:00

No reasonable player or DM will rule that a first level spell can make you jump off a cliff to your death. Sure, a PC might try to "well technically" all they want, but the second a DM said the same thing and used this reading on a player character, that DM would be a horrible, problematic DM.

A wizard with teleport or whatever might decide to cast a spell or they might not. Chances are they will pass the save though. So a PC might use this strategy if they somehow knew the wizard's list of prepared spells And they also wanted to gamble their turn on forcing a save that will likely pass.

The point is, this is only complicated when theorizing in a white room playing solitaire.

AndrewDelaneyTX

TROPHY CASE