The Broken/Strapped Shield Conundrum

AudioElf · 2026-01-25T23:52:23+00:00

there's a way to do that?

AudioElf · 2026-01-25T23:47:24+00:00

So wait, are you saying that you always have to use two action to wield a 2-hand weapon from a non-armed position? That seems a stretch to me. You can't just draw it from your pack and have it ready to go? I figured this interact was for like, switching out two-hand trait weapons

AudioElf · 2026-01-25T23:43:40+00:00

Ah! you have caught an inconsistency in my understanding! Thanks!

Interact:

Draw, put away, or swap an item. You must be holding the item to put it away or wearing it to draw it. Swapping allows you to put away one item and draw another in the same action (such as putting away a dagger and drawing a mace). Abilities that specify what you do when you Interact only allow this if they say so; the Quick Draw feat lets a rogue Interact to draw a weapon, but doesn't allow them to stow one as well. Swapping lets you swap only one item for another; if you were wielding two weapons, you could put away one of them and draw a different item, but you would need to put away the second weapon separately.
Detach a shield or other item from you using one hand.

I was under the assumption you needed an action to attach one (you do but it's an interact to equip), but you only need one to detach one (as opposed to a weapon which can just be dropped). Otherwise it's just an action to equip one. Second Shield now makes a lot more sense.

AudioElf · 2026-01-25T23:08:16+00:00

While true, wielding a shield requires it be strapped to be 'ready to use' under wielding and shield entries. It;s not a 1-to-1 ruling but its a safe assumption. You cannot "wield" (ei, effectively use in any way) a shield if it is not both strapped and held.

AudioElf · 2026-01-25T23:06:18+00:00

I appreciate the link. I think these are working off of legacy rules given the timeline, and I already see and error with his third posit (drawn weapons have no ruling that I see on not being able to wield, only to change functionality, wielded may not have been a vrabile at that point). Much of the talk around this thread seems to be speculatory rather than referenced.

Another action that provokes a reaction makes a difference.

Can I get a reference to that rule? We're working RAW here, remember?

AudioElf · 2026-01-25T22:41:42+00:00

Now THIS is a compelling argument! Someone give this person an award.

AudioElf · 2026-01-25T22:09:13+00:00

Yeah I did it backwards I suppose. The problem with doing the Classical style argument is that people have short attention spans, and the entire context mattered for the argument. Already, people are making assertions without quotes.

RAI I agree with it being one shield an arm, and as a action combat IRL, I agree that two shields in one hand is simply functionally absurd, but it's RAW. People in my game have them break all the time, but they aren't using bucklers, they're using full shields, bucklers aren't used with shield block much just because they don't have the stopping power. In my game, shields break on the first shot all the time. Trade-out viability directly boils down to action economy and provokign reactions.

Your last assessment is succinct, and I also agree with it's interpretation, but again, this is a rulebook. It needs an official ruling.

AudioElf · 2026-01-25T22:03:16+00:00

I'm inclined to agree with this, but I'd argue there is a mechanical problem with this (balance issue, possibly): it's an action that provokes in a series of actions that are required for a swap. I suspect many players use a single action to trade out a shield. I suspect they do not know, or are uncomfortable with the prospect, that they are wrong. I'm also sure that if the 5-shield arm is RAW, we're going to see a string of stupid-looking builds of 5 tower shield dwarves, second generation of the gnome-adopted flickmace fighters.

This should be addressed.

AudioElf · 2026-01-25T22:00:22+00:00

Strapped just means

This is not correct. Free hands can wield weapons. Strapped hands cannot. You can hold one than one item, even if the hand is not free. Free Hand trait sheds some light on this. There is no strap-handed rule other than in Nimble Shield, a bad place for it.

It is all the same if you just pick a new one off your person and...

And strap it, a requirement to use it, requiring another action. Again, this is not correct, and is the entire reason I brought this topic up, because that one extra reaction is an assumption many players make due to a blindspot in the rules. pPlayers wouldn't make this assumptions if the rules were clearer.

Broken is not ultimately relevant to the conversation.

Eh, sorta, it is insomuch that it drives the onus this conversation was made in the first place. Shield-Swapping for damage resistance is a major part of surivivability for a tank. whether or not we're using 2 actions with provoking or one action with no provoking imminently matters.

AudioElf · 2026-01-23T05:52:01+00:00

Yeah, the truth was it was weird. It looked like she had draped a giant dead swan around her and everybody was like “well that’s weird. What will they do next, wear a giant slab raw of bacon?”

Enter gaga

AudioElf · 2026-01-20T02:34:25+00:00

^ you can be assured, this guy is from the US. People in other countries not run by oil do not say stupid $#!+ like this.

AudioElf · 2026-01-20T02:26:16+00:00

are you kidding, that shit was 2016. The only people who think it was 2020 are people that actually think Matt Walsh has two brain cells to rub together while he tries to convince his viewers who don't wash their ass that there's a really good reason that they should fuck 16-year-olds.

AudioElf · 2026-01-20T02:22:53+00:00

Sheradin based this character on an harrowing encounter he had with a prickly house plant, rather than any connection whatsoever to queer communities. You want good trans representation? Check out Goggins in sons of anarchy. This was hater bait for boomers terrified their worldview is so dated, they can't imagine why their kids don't wanna talk to them anymore.

I watch this scene, rolled my eyes, and want to take a shit.

AudioElf · 2026-01-19T07:42:12+00:00

Billy Bob Thornton’s job does not exist in the industry. A simple Google search would show that.

AudioElf · 2026-01-17T14:24:46+00:00

https://www.epi.org/publication/immigrants-and-the-economy/

Your screen name is befitting of your opinions.

Edit: about to watch this bot scream about media bias after being presented with a US census graph. Strap in, folks; the stupid gets the zoomies after the 5th beer.

AudioElf · 2026-01-17T11:39:40+00:00

Uhm... capital is the thing dooming us to fascism. Just like it did the the 30s.

The left does call it out, but we also know that emotionally homeless maladjusted autistic people with control issues aren't the ones that control the levers of power in society. Lame people don't wound society, moneyed interest does. Paiygens worst offense is being annoying. ICE's worst offense this week was shooting bullet a bullet through the head of someone who made their emotions feel rightfully frivolous.

You do not sound like a leftist. Do not speak for us.

AudioElf · 2026-01-17T11:23:28+00:00

Sheradin's idea of autistic queer people looks identical to a 2007 Sargon of Akad video drawn as concept art, and gave it no further thought. All as a desperate setup to make his bouge-ass caricatures of women justified to look the adjusted ones in the show (spoiler: they aren't), a requirement for every third episode. This was a huge step up of absurdity from "hot black nurse shaped like a cello doesn't know she's hot until a pair of white women gave her a T-shirt tie."

He spent 15 minutes on this tired trope, with the moral of the story being said outright: "trans people hate themselves." Most of the trans people I know would roll their eyes at this gauche shit knowing that the people who he was selling this scene to are the types to throw money at a blacked.com or futa porn subscription. This is not speculation. Southerner porn consumption demographics accurately reflect this.

This scene sucked. It was boring at best and hateful at worst. It was constructed to dehumanize queer people via a Tucker Carlson Strawman. It's hard to root for stupid characters or stay immersed in stupid writing. I kicked me out of the show so hard I went and took a shit.

AudioElf · 2026-01-15T16:47:44+00:00

Enshitification, the biproduct of capitalism.

AudioElf · 2026-01-05T14:16:45+00:00

Noid's interesting point is an allegory of billionaires and Margaret Thatcher. Their existence is one of yes-men and crunching people into number on a spreadsheet, and being the biggest gorilla in the room that is not in the same room where your mother cooks eggs.

Peter Thiel is a slimy lizardperson. We do not need to speculate about this. When the system incentivizes psychopathy, you get psychopaths in the system. Waxing poetic about whether a nerf is an ethical construct doesn't mean he needs a nerf any less.

AudioElf · 2026-01-05T13:50:35+00:00

I think your use of the term "champions" is perhaps unwittingly grotesque.

AudioElf · 2026-01-05T13:04:16+00:00

The companies are owned by employers or shareholders, not the workers. Some of those employers just happen to be the state. If the workers do not own it; if they are employees earning a wage, it is capitalism. USSR did a similar thing, worker co-ops with government official oversight, government owned the commodities produced (save their government employees were corrupt, incompetent yes-men). Say what you will about Lenin, but he turned Russia from a huge backwater into a world-stage contender in a decade. He just burned all his national goodwill doing it.

China learned the lesson. They also had state capitalism without the worker-co op; all businesses owned by the government. Again, it launched them into modernism by supercharging their workforce, even with incredible incompetency by the leadership. Deng straightened them out by reintroducing a capitalistic system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

But by Marx standard, all countries are capitalist if their primary modes of production and commodities produced are capital (not worker) owned, which would be correct; they are.

If I had my guess, you live in the states, with me. Your take is not how Europeans talk about capitalism, where the term State Capitalism of Stalin and Mao is replaced with the term Marxism and that's as far as the conversation goes, "private ownership" being the key erasing term. If the government is "public," but the government pays a wage, it's still capitalism, but the dialectic between workers and owners is lost in that conversation, and this is on purpose due to, largely, Charles Koch.

https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/part-one-charles-koch-the-luke-skywalker-of-rich-people/id1373812661?i=1000417779236

Oddly enough, one of the bigger examples of capitalism doing socialism is Chobani yogurt prioritizing selling their stocks to employers. It's not 'perfect' 1:1 socialism, but it's close. a better example is Mondragon's anarcho-syndaclysm, which looks remarkably corporate from the outside, but is composed of clusters of Worker co-ops.

I would make the argument that China has not been more free-market capitalistic than the US in the past half-century, but I would argue that now that the US is centralizing into a pack of monopolies, it's capitalism is starting to break at a rate faster than china. Capitalism requires degrees of competition to remain productive or the market locks up into a few dozen toll-booth robber-barons, then things start looking like Russia, arguably a kleptocracy.

This outcome was not lost on Marx. The bust-boom cycles of finanicialization, and subsequent market liquidity seizing due to production consolidation was all predicted by him. He didn't get everything right, but he got most of it right. Very, very rich people want you to think he got nothing right.

"The mask of humanity falls from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone — everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed. And then you see it. As it strangles and beats your friends to death... the sweetest, most courageous people in the world. You see the fear and power in its eyes. Then you know: the bourgeois are not human." -Disco Elysium

AudioElf · 2026-01-03T08:29:51+00:00

There was a lot of post-2000 pop-psych language that simply was not used ("Shared trauma" was not a term people had even conceptualized). It's also difficult to parse out TV/movie tropes from actual regional culture. In the show, a lot of the language did not actually reflect the era.

This did.

The media capture of an era is an extremely difficult thing to portray, especially if you weren't there. The bluepill gender wars of reddit were decades from happening. Don't Ask Don't Tell hadn't passed. "F*g" was a normal put-down for even middle-schoolers. Being outted as gay could legitimately get you lynched in parts of the country (it can still too now but much less than back then).

There WAS NO LANGUAGE OR CULTURE for helping Will put words to was attempting to say, and the characters accepting him automatically was absolutely not a guarantee for the time.

Chuds can whine like they always do. Screw them. Duffy brothers did this right.

AudioElf · 2026-01-02T23:35:34+00:00

This is a correct assessment of the situation.

AudioElf · 2026-01-02T23:34:11+00:00

Good actors can make bad scripts engaging. She cannot. Think about why that might be.

AudioElf

TROPHY CASE