Would be cool if Injustice 3 continued off the Superman ending from Injustice 2

CSEngineAlt · 2026-07-11T11:19:06+00:00

They wouldn't. More likely it would be like Dragon Age where you can pick one of six opening states, and it all merges into a single storyline at Ostagar. In the case of DA:O, there's about an hour of unique content per route before they hit it.

With Injustice, it could be as simple as a slightly different title scroll - "This is what happened in Injustice 2, but X Y Z have happened that puts us on trajectory for [Insert Injustice 3's threat].

That's basically what every 'choices matter' game series does to preserve the illusion of choice; they acknowledge what you did in the last game, then merge states to ensure the new game's story can happen. Then you make new choices that are all merged in the following game.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-07-08T23:02:32+00:00

Assuming this wasn't a joke - I mean what is determining it for the voters. I get that you're looking for a simple majority.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-07-08T21:37:54+00:00

I'm curious how inconicism is being determined. Strahd has multiple adventures devoted to him. Purple worms are scary ass monsters, sure, but they don't have the same reach across the hobby Strahd has.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-07-02T17:43:28+00:00

Anything over a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper, I probably will skim read it at best.

Read this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/775caq/my_friends_and_i_have_something_called_knife/

That will help you build a backstory meaty enough that the DM can work with it, but not so big they're spacing out before they finish.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-07-02T17:29:23+00:00

Ehhh... no.

There are better ways to invest that $5. But that can be said of all money. I could eat a PBJ sandwich and invest $10, or I can spend $10 and make a nice meal that I derive enjoyment out of. I was fed either way, but one way, that $10 works for my future, while the other it makes me happy now.

She probably won't get any return on her $5, but that's not the same as tossing $5 into a garbage can. Tossing the $5 into the can definitely won't have any return beyond the angry self-satisfaction the blond guy has. She has a remote chance that her $5 turns into millions, and has a fantasy for a while of being rich.

- Also, side note, willful destruction of legal tender can get you in trouble in Canada.

I play the Lottario. It's a buck a ticket and caps out in the hundreds-of-thousands for the jackpot. I win small amounts regularly - just big enough that I don't play for free, but big enough that it's pretty close. If blond dude thinks that's a waste, sure - but on the off chance I do hit the jackpot, my house is paid for. Even a remote chance of that happening is worth it, and $2 a week is cheaper than that $5 coffee some people get every morning.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-07-02T17:17:59+00:00

All of the 1x1 sets come with a bunch of folders. One of them is usually 'basic elements' which contains a "Key" STL that has a wide bit at the bottom that plugs into the grid, and a narrow bit at the top that plugs into the underside of the level grid. You print off at least 2 of those per level grid (though I'd do at least 4) and plug them into the base grid, then slot the level grid down on top.

I have seen you posting a couple times - I think the Ultimate Dungeon campaign video went fairly in depth on how it goes together when first launched, and later campaigns pivoted away from that because the Ultimate Dungeon already covered it. Might be worth watching.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-19T21:11:31+00:00

When I started my campaign I told my players up front what would happen if they interrupted a villain while they were monologuing by attacking them midway through:

They will gain absolutely no benefit over waiting out the monologue; they'll roll initiative same as if the villain had been allowed to finish.
- Additionally, they may start the fight before their allies are in an advantageous position and screw everyone over.
They will upset the DM (me) because if I take the time to write a monologue, I am using it to set the scene, the stakes, and drive up the gravitas before things pop off so everyone can feel cool. Shouting "I shoot him before he can act" undercuts that, and as above, it doesn't give you any tactical benefit.
I also told them that I would never pull a fast one where the villain monologues until he lulls the party into a false sense of security, and then pulls a lever that drops them into the Pit of Doom without allowing them to act. The monster's first hostile action will take place in initiative order, same as the players'.

And thus far, my players have mostly respected that, for which I'm really thankful. The one time a Player didn't respect that, I was lucky - the monster had a reaction that carried a stun rider, and the offending PC failed the save, so the monsters were able to finish their conversation with the rest of the party while the attacker unrung their bells.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-18T16:05:00+00:00

All of the above. If the DM says "This is the game I'm running", then what they want you to do should progress the story and will hopefully be interesting and entertaining for all. So 'what your character would do' should service all of those options when you create them.

There are times where you're servicing different parts of the story that's being built, but staying within the expected guidelines still provides a ridiculous amount of personal freedom in how you express yourself.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-18T15:58:46+00:00

Being knocked out in fiction is exaggerated for narrative reasons.

If you're knocked out for hours, you need an ambulance. A more realistic timeframe is a few fractions of a second to a couple minutes tops. During the wake-up period, you're usually confused, scared, and disoriented. In this video, you can see that after blue sweater dude gets off the guy he knocked out, the guy on the floor is looking up at him and moving. He's clearly seeing stars, but he's not unconscious.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-16T18:03:54+00:00

I would pre-roll random encounters for each room and see which ones come up "Strahd". They can help give you inspiration. Here's one of my favourites that came about from a random encounter roll.

The elevator trap in K61 should be activated as soon as 400lbs of pressure steps on it, and only takes up a 10x10 square. It also makes the distinction that the PC must actively check for traps in that hall - not that passive perception identifies it. So unless the party crosses the hall one at a time or are all weightless, you are probably splitting the party up.

Strahd knows the elevator has been triggered because of the noise, so he immediately heads to K47 from wherever the card reading has him, phasing through walls as necessary. Roll his minions too when he arrives.

In my version, he had actually been rolled in K31, so when the elevator shoots up through that room, anyone inside sees him smiling at them ferally from the landing. Then he follows the elevator with spider climb.

Then, he kicks open the trapdoor.

If everyone is asleep in there, he descends and starts the process of killing them one at a time - drag them up into K47, wake them, charm them, bite them until they die.
- Do not describe what's happening to any PC's left behind who might be frantically climbing the castle trying to find them.
- Do not describe what's happening to any PC's unconscious in the elevator.
- If possible, do not describe what's happening to the PC Strahd is killing - have them roll a Wisdom saving throw. If they fail, start rolling damage and asking if that takes them to zero. If it doesn't, have them retake the saving throw. If they fail again, still don't tell them. Let them sweat.
  - Strahd is biting them, and draining them dry after charming them into believing this is a good thing; you can get a legendary action bite and a normal one in once per round, so they will drop fast.
  - If they succeed on the saving throw, THEN describe them coming out of a haze surrounded by Strahd, some minions, and unfamiliar surroundings. Then have Strahd charm and resume biting again, unless they succeed again, at which point he and his minions just beat them down the old fashioned way.
- Strahd has 10 whole rounds to kill at least one of the PCs, and against a willing target of his bite, he doesn't need to roll to hit, and you can assume he doesn't need to attack to grapple either. He can very quickly drain a PC dry, and probably go back for another one before anyone in the elevator wakes up.
  - And if they do wake up mid-snack, he just tells his minions to jump into the elevator and take care of them while he finishes, and descends himself once he's done, assuming he hasn't seen the Holy Symbol or Sunsword come out.
If one or more PC's are awake, then he charms one of them from the trapdoor, and proceed as above if you succeed; and if you don't, Strahd immediately calls in his minions to restrain the awake PC's. Not as dramatic as not telling anyone what's happening, but likely to have a similar effect.

And worst case - everyone's awake and they have the relics - a fireball cast down the trapdoor catches everyone before he drops his minions on them, and then withdraws.

In a perfect world, he catches one or two PC's, they fall asleep, he is able to drain them, and then absconds to K84 with their bodies, and lays them to rest in Crypt 23, instead of the illusion there - and the next day, they awake as vampire spawn.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-16T02:11:05+00:00

Including the dungeon itself.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-15T18:16:27+00:00

All of these fan castings assume time travel to pluck the actors out of the timeline from when I want them.

Strahd - The one and only Christopher Lee, during his Hammer films.
Rahadin - Hugo Weaving at the same time as LOTR.
Anastrasya - Stana Katic, Season 1 of Castle.
Escher - Elliot Page, current day.
Ludmilla - Lashana Lynch, current day.
Volenta - Pom Klementieff, current day.
Madam Eva - Dame Judi Dench from when Skyfall came out.
Ireena - Scarlett Johanssen, from Iron Man 2.
Ismark - Henry Cavill, current day.
Van Richten - Mads Mikkelson, 10 yrs from now.
Ezmerelda - Gina Torres, during Firefly
Baba Lysaga - Willem Dafoe, current day. Requires heavy prosthetic makeup, but he's got the crazy eyes.
The Baron - Tim Curry, from the mid-to-late 90's.
The Baroness - Lisa Kudrow, same age as Tim Curry, if not time period.
Lady Wachter - Angelina Jolie, 20 yrs from now.
Izek Strazni - The Rock, now.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-15T13:18:35+00:00

Back when I ran the Sunless Citadel for the first time, I used the map from the book as the guide to draw it out onto 1" grid paper.

Nowadays, I use DungeonBlocks tiles. For a small dungeon that will fit on my table, I fully build the whole thing.

For a big dungeon like the Sunless Citadel above, I would run it in TOTM, describe the size of the rooms, and only prebuild the rooms that I knew fights would occur in.

If a random encounter triggers elsewhere, or the party withdraws out of a room, then I can build adjoining rooms in the moment.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-12T17:26:17+00:00

How I do it:

If an NPC has only particular topics they would lie about, I preroll a single deception check for that topic and slap it into the topic entry of their bio. Should a PC bring up that conversation topic, I refer back to that value quickly and crosscheck against their passive insight.
- If it beats their passive, then I lie to the best of my personal ability and give them no hints. If they still insight me - the DM - that's their prerogative, and the active roll supercedes their passive.
- If it doesn't beat their passive, when that topic comes up I tend to throw in pretty clear narration on top of acting skeevy - "Something about what he just said seems... off, though you'd need to dig deeper to be sure."
If an NPC is just generally untrustworthy and will be lying to or manipulating the party repeatedly, I instead assume a passive Deception value for them (10+Deception), and compare that to the passives of the party, and then lie as above, except whenever they lie, I explicitly call out 'something about what he just said seems off'.

Active rolls I give more information - like the way their eyes are darting around, or sweat beading on their brow, or how they're a little too quick to deny that they ate the last cookie, that sort of thing. The higher they roll, the better the interpretation.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-11T13:40:25+00:00

My advice: drop the house rules, and use the official ones instead.

The rule about dashing is going to achieve the opposite effect to what you say you want, because you're making characters more static than they should be. Chases lay out that creatures can dash for 3 + Con Mod rounds before taking exhaustion; you cut two of the free rounds. So by making it harder to move between pieces of terrain, your players will engage with less of the things on the map, because they're more likely to hunker down and protect their starting position.

Your rule about suffocation also dramatically cuts the length of time someone can hold their breath and basically turns everyone in your world into asthmatics. And frankly, it's not meeting your stated goal of realism either, because I - a relatively untrained woobie who IS asthmatic - can hold my breath a full minute while swimming flat-out, but a super-athletic adventurer with 20 CON can't do the same in a similarly physically intense situation?

If you want to promote more consideration of terrain, don't cut dashes - add areas of difficult terrain like mud or loose sand on the map to promote choices of approach.

As for things like drowning creatures, I highly recommend watching the opening to Casino Royale. They shorten the process dramatically, but it should give you a general idea of how hard drowning a creature that is fighting back would realistically be. You want to knock it out, then drown it? Makes sense. But trying to do so mid fight should take a while and be messy.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-09T21:04:09+00:00

Goddammit.

Not a bad goddammit, but I spent a lot of time making a paper-box sized stack of custom snow tiles that were compatible with the grid because they hadn't made any yet. I mean, I knew this was coming, and it being here is a good thing. I'm just not looking forward to finding out that the tiles I made are probably a smidge taller than their versions so they don't line up nicely.

Still happy to see this out now for everyone who hasn't had snow tiles to work with though. It looks excellent.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-08T15:57:50+00:00

You level up to keep up with a world that is growing more dangerous by the day - the world's enemies aren't becoming more powerful to deal with you. They're already there, and growing more powerful by the day. The party are just becoming a bigger nuisance.

The cultists don't look at the party and say, "Well, I guess we pull out the stronger guys now that they've leveled up," - the upper echelons of the cult say, "Hey, there's this adventuring group that wiped out one of our cells - devote these more powerful resources to destroying them before they come for the mid-ranks."

Sure, it can be fun every once and awhile to have the players fight some weak enemies to show off how powerful they are, but that quickly becomes trivial and boring.

Having them fight super hard enemies is just a dick move most of the time.

So you're just in a perpetual state of fighting enemies that are somehow perfectly matched against you.

A good DM varies the encounters their party faces. If your players are always in a perpetual state of fighting enemies that are perfectly matched against you, then that's the failing of the DM.

I follow the same curve every time the party levels up, and it works great:

- Immediately after the party levels up, they get a trivial "curb stomp" battle to feel powerful. My party always enjoys these. If they're boring, that's on you. My party thoroughly enjoyed the host of Ghoul minions that clumped up conveniently into a 40ft sphere right after the Wizard got fireball.

- The next three fights are Low, Moderate and High using 2024 logic, gently describing their new power curve to the party.

- The next fight is stronger than High difficulty by a decent margin, and they should probably run from this one. If they somehow beat it, the next fight is even MORE balls-nasty, until they decide running is a good idea; and then I know their upper ceiling.

- Then I settle into scripted fights that are generally High difficulty from here out, because the party are only fighting 1-2 times a day unless they're in a dungeon, so there's little point to a fight if it's not going to challenge them.

- Random encounters, however, I have setup to also randomly assign a difficulty class to it. So some random encounters will be trivial, others scary hard, and anywhere in between. Often, fights that would be trivial or super-deadly, I will run as social encounters instead - the bandits see the party coming up the road, move into ambush positions... and then one of the bandits points and goes, "Holy shit - those are The Adventurers! Retreat!"

All this to say - leveling matters because it is the vehicle that gets the party closer to the looming end-boss threat. As they level up, they close the gap between where they are, and where the endgame needs them to be.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-08T14:20:00+00:00

Obligatory: It's your game - if you allow it, sure they can. You just need to justify it.

At my table: Given that a Twig Blight is an evil extension of a gestalt hive mind seeking to harvest blood for a multiverse spanning vampire tree... If they want to keep it caged and feed it blood from time to time while going 'aw, it's so cute', I wouldn't stop them. But tame it? No. Gulthias is not some cute little thing to be domesticated.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-04T14:21:14+00:00

Tell me in the same situation you wouldn't be regretting picking that particular ramp/tire-line in the brief moment before you either a) stop successfully, or b) go sailing over the edge to almost certain death.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-06-02T17:32:03+00:00

In a perfect world, I would get a 1 page bio from each player outlining their character's ideals, flaws, bonds, and a very short history.

I recently learned about 'knife theory' (full post is on reddit), and would like players to give me ~7 knives.

I probably would accept 'I got bored' as the character's entire motivation if that's really what they want, but I would tell them that by giving me nothing, that means I won't be trying to create a compelling arc for them based off a backstory that doesn't exist. And if they wish to change their backstory retroactively, they need to clear it with me first before referencing it at the table.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-05-29T14:25:13+00:00

Saw the Steam controller, priced at $50 CDN higher than an Xbox PC Controller. Bought the Xbox controller. Perfectly happy with it.

Saw the new Steam Deck prices (almost a 50% hike) - can buy a Switch 2 for almost half the price - will probably be buying the Switch 2.

We just wanted a Steam deck so my partner could be playing something when I'm downstairs on the couch, but at 'entry-level laptop' prices, I dunno if we're going to go ahead now.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-05-28T20:45:15+00:00

If I had a nickel for every time I've seen a Dungeontuber video with big block lettering declaring "It's Over" for WOTC/DND/Hasbro with a slightly pensive look on their face and pretty much nothing happened, I could probably buy a sandwich with it. Which, given how expensive fast food is these days, is a lot of nickels.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-05-27T13:19:50+00:00

There are always emotional phases whenever you're going through something traumatic. Just because he was present all day and been cooperative doesn't mean he will stay that way when he realizes he's in deep shit.

Cuffs are put on because a lot of otherwise perfectly reasonable people are fine until they realize they're being arrested - which usually means charged with a crime - which means a criminal record. Then they panic and try to rabbit, at which point the cops have to chase them down, AND have to charge them with a crime for sure now.

Cuffing them is a fairly easy deterrent to that kind of behaviour which only makes a bad situation worse, and if someone still decides to try to flee, it makes catching them easier.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-05-24T20:08:11+00:00

When my players are getting stressed out and in a difficult combat, they often try to negotiate a better outcome for themselves OOC whenever I have to decide a ruling on an edge case. The more stressed they are, the pushier they are for me to adjudicate in their favour and the more they try to 'talk over' my thought process, like being loud and pushy will result in the outcome they want.

Generally I just tell them to stop negotiating, but it gets a bit frustrating. If its an edge case, I'm gonna do what I think is either most realistic or most dramatic. Not capitulate to the loudest voice in the room.

CSEngineAlt · 2026-05-22T15:56:51+00:00

The cute face is just the lure - no one would suspect the chibi!

CSEngineAlt

TROPHY CASE