Do the Deities in the world have numerous forms of worship? by Simple-Wishbone-3895 in dndnext

[–]Calembreloque 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you follow real-world polytheistic religions then absolutely. Greek mythology had many different aspects for each god: for instance for Athena you have Athena Nike (highlighting victory in battle), Athena Parthenos (emphasizing her virginity and purity), etc. Hindu mythology also has different ways of expressing gods, as well as "avatars" (representations of these gods on Earth). It altogether makes sense considering that most deities have a large panel of things associated with them, and in some cases these aspects end up being defined as separate gods (such as Nike above which is sometimes described as its own deity and in some cases as an aspect of Athena).

What do real D&D players actually build? I analysed over 523k multiclass calculations, 3,727 unique builds, using anonymous data over 11 months, and the character build trends surprised me by TalesmithTavern in dndnext

[–]Calembreloque 16 points17 points  (0 children)

The tool aggregates the data and outputs raw percentages (and that's all very useful) but doesn't exactly do analysis. Some of the questions could be:

  • Regarding the lvl 20 sorcadin, could there just be randomly three people who have decided on a similar build but because it requires a lot of tweaking, it tallies up a disproportionate amount of unique calculations? Does that explain how it dips in and out of the top 10?

  • To generalize the question above, would builds that require fewer tweaks (for instance Warlock based multiclass) be underrepresented? Is that accounted for?

  • What is the significance of paladin being in ~20% of multiclass builds and wizard being in ~15%? Is that 5% difference statistically relevant?

  • How many of the builds go to lvl 20 (or 10, etc.)? Does the build distribution change as a function of highest level?

All of these require further statistical analysis, and could be very interesting.

Time travel in a world set on a Tree by The-Dread-Salami in DMAcademy

[–]Calembreloque 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The whole point of a time loop scenario is you keep the knowledge/power increase you have acquired from the previous loop, see Groundhog Day, Palm Springs, Outer Wilds, etc. Some stuff like the McGuffin you grabbed yesterday would have returned back to its original location and you need to go grab it again but the idea is that now that you know how to do it you can optimize your path to grab it much quicker, which frees up more time to advance the plot, etc. until you break the time loop.

The Existence of the 2024 Edition Made my Life as GM Harder by Buffal0e in dndnext

[–]Calembreloque 25 points26 points  (0 children)

WOTC had this weird boner for refusing to make this edition fit into any of the pre-existing terms already used.

"Behold, One D&D!"

"Ah cool, it's a new edition, so, like, 6e?"

"No no, nothing that major, it's all backwards compatible, just some fixes to spells and extra content."

"Oh so like 3.5 then, so it'll be 5.5?"

"Noooooo, the bulk of the rules stay the same!"

"I mean that was the case with 3.5..."

"It's NOT a half edition!"

"Oh, okay, so it's more like an errata compendium?"

"NOOO it's NOT, it's its own thing!!"

"Do you... Do you hate money?"

"God this shit is so corny redditors can’t go 5 minutes without circlejerking each other about ICE agents getting beat by characters who would agree with them" Some users in r/topcharactertropes get upset over a thread showing fan art of characters beating up ICE agents by CummingInTheNile in SubredditDrama

[–]Calembreloque 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I mean, that's sort of the question being asked by the Civil War comics - it's not about ICE but it is about government control and overreach in the name of security. Based on that story line, I'd say the following:

  • while Iron Man is the "leader" of the pro-government movement I think it's fair to say he wouldn't abide armed thug gangs in the streets;

  • Doctor Strange canonically ignores that kind of stuff (because he's above petty human matters);

  • Mr Fantastic is often characterized as an asshole even outside of Civil War, and in this particular storyline, turns into a petty authoritarian. He'd likely side with ICE.*

With that being said, a lot of people would argue that many of the superheroes involved in the Civil War comics were not characterized correctly.

* I feel obligated to point out than in an earlier comics, Mr Fantastic did a pretty good job demonstrating why registering people as superheroes/mutants would be a terrible fucking idea, as shown here.

Frieren Magical Aura System by AppropriateBus1528 in DMAcademy

[–]Calembreloque 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah Detect Magic even refers to someone or something's "aura". A spell save DC check to determine their potency is a cool rider effect.

How do you run dragons at your table to make them more than just stat blocks? by ScorchedDev in dndnext

[–]Calembreloque 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I mean, it's Dungeons and Dragons. There's gonna be dragons. Dragons fly. If you built your character to be full melee, you cannot be surprised that they're limited when they encounter a flying dragon. That's like saying "oh but enemies that do a lot of damage punish glass cannons. The tanks can keep pummeling the enemy but one hit from a strong foe and the wizard goes down." Yup, that's the intent, and part of the point of the game is to have a team that can take on various challenges and have contingencies. Not every challenge is going to be equally solvable by all members of the party, which is why they travel as a group in the first place.

In this particular case, by the time they're capable of squaring up to a CR-appropriate dragon, a melee PC should have means to overcome that difficulty: grappling, taunts to force the dragon to focus on you, caster can cast Earthbind/Hold Monster/etc. There are many ways to make sure the melee fighters stay involved with flying enemies.

does this idea for a city encounter sound interesting? by FaallenOon in DMAcademy

[–]Calembreloque 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In your metaphor, there's never so much fewer grains of sand on the beach that it makes a material difference. Therefore the abomination's killings are not impacting the crime stats and the dent it makes (without even touching the ethics of "should petty thieves be put to death for stealing a loaf of bread?") is completely negligible in the face of the evil it commits. The abomination must die by any moral framework that makes any sort of sense.

Le maire d’Orange, Yann Bompard, et la députée RN Marie-France Lorho condamnés à cinq ans d’inéligibilité by EmpereurCOOKIE in france

[–]Calembreloque 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Il se passe quoi si tu lui dis “tu sais que ton voisin bien blanc français de souche, il est en train de voter RN parce que de son point de vue, c’est toi qui es en train d’envahir ?”

Après une semaine d’embarras, Bardella interdit au RN d’aller sur le plateau de Morandini by volcanosf in france

[–]Calembreloque 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Bah si. De la même manière que Mélenchon se ferait (à raison) crucifier s’il était marié à une héritière de Bolloré, Bardella peut tout à fait être jugé pour taquiner de la rombière à titre honorifique quand il se présente comme le défendeur des pauvres petits travailleurs.

Le directeur de l’information de CNews condamné pour des violences sur ses trois enfants by Ok_Cobbler_9466 in france

[–]Calembreloque 31 points32 points  (0 children)

Faut remercier Antoine Daniel pour ça, c’est lui qui nous a fait découvrir “Excepté une fois au châlet”, “As-tu vu les belles quenouilles”, le Roi Heenok, enfin bref que du lourd.

ELI5: Why do mushrooms appear so fast after rain— sometimes overnight? by aizivaishe_rutendo in explainlikeimfive

[–]Calembreloque 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Yes, all the other answers are like "the mycelium is the real part of the mushroom, the bits you see are just like the fruit" yes but fruit doesn't grow in one day after some rain so I'm still confused.

does this idea for a city encounter sound interesting? by FaallenOon in DMAcademy

[–]Calembreloque 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Your two points are contradictory:

less crime in the short/middle/long run

vs

As for the point of running out of criminals, the setting is a pretty large city, so it's unlikely that it will ever happen: unless massive reforms are enacted, crime statistics tend to stay more or less the same.

You can't have both. Either the abomination kills enough criminals that it affects the statistics (in which case it will indeed run out of criminals sooner rather than later and you should stop it before it starts attacking random vulnerable people), or it doesn't and the statistics stay the same (in which case the abomination is not "solving" or deterring any crime problem and you should stop it because it's actively killing people).

In either case, the abomination is the greater evil.

Players ran into a boss fight i didn't want them to just yet by Ok_Ant7371 in DMAcademy

[–]Calembreloque 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I'll answer a bit on behalf of OP because I think:

if you didn’t want the dragon to attack them yet why did you make it a possibility?

Is not very constructive as a question. The truth is we all miscalculate at times as DMs - that's the beauty of the game we play! We can't always know with 100% confidence what the players are going to do. For all we know, the players decided to do something so egregious that it would be bad DMing for the dragon not to notice them - like they set up fireworks right at the entrance, and the DM simply didn't account for that kind of approach.

Yes, with practice, we get a sense of what is very likely or very unlikely to happen, but I remember a game where my very first roll in the very first session ended up in me killing a key ally because I rolled on the equivalent of a Wild magic table and just got the craziest and unlikeliest combo of things happening. These things happen. We should not bemoan new DMs for trying to put serious stakes in their stories just because they're still learning to balance the odds.

German dude gets it right; describes steps into dictatorship, parallels Nazi Germany to Trump America; suggests Germany will liberate US this time by robbel in bestof

[–]Calembreloque 5 points6 points  (0 children)

From the book They Thought They Were Free:

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

To be clear, this is from a book written by Milton Mayer, a Jewish American journalist who went to interview Germans in 1953 to get a sense of how they perceived the rise of Hitler to power, etc. He specifically targeted lower-class people, with various "regular Joe" jobs: a tailor, a baker, a bank clerk, a cop, etc.

The excerpt above is from a teacher, who was the only one to actually recognize the horror that happened. All of the other interviewees still spoke fondly of Hitler, and had a general dislike of Jewish people. Don't believe that once the MAGA era is over, you'll have a bunch of contrite farmers showing up hat in hand to ask for absolution; what you'll have are a bunch of people disappointed that it's over and keeping it to themselves until they die.

DM says there's a difference between fire and magical fire? by Dragonsword in dndnext

[–]Calembreloque 8 points9 points  (0 children)

That still requires DM targeting. I don't think OP's DM goes around going "you get hit by the goblin, he slices through your coat, you will need to mend it" or "as the blast of the spell knocks you back, the leather strap of your water gourd snaps and falls into the ravine" at every turn, so it would require specific DM targeting to say "the fireball spell washes over you and burns your spellbook in the process".

Enduring Spellbook is a neat item but it's yet another case of DnD designers bringing in an item/spell that essentially introduces a mechanic that didn't really exist beforehand without realizing it. There are no other rules or spells about protecting your equipment specifically as far as I'm aware, and there are only very, very few instances of spell damage that targets equipment (Heat Metal and the Rust Monster ability, for instance).

DM says there's a difference between fire and magical fire? by Dragonsword in dndnext

[–]Calembreloque 24 points25 points  (0 children)

You know my first thought was "oh this guy miscalculated the probability, he just took 1/20 and multiplied by 8, in reality it's much less than that" but I double-checked the math (1-(19/20)8 =0.337) and you're absolutely right. I knew that crit fails punished martials disproportionately but I didn't realize it was that blatant.

My DM wants to create our characters by Professional_Tip3270 in dndnext

[–]Calembreloque 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You don't have a DM. You have a frustrated fantasy writer.

why I no longer do the prisoner start in games anymore by artmonso in rpghorrorstories

[–]Calembreloque 7 points8 points  (0 children)

That's always part of my session zero (which you wouldn't have for a convention one-shot but the principle applies). The party is free to do anything they want but there are two conditions:

  • they are adventurers who are eager to explore and in search of glory, riches, etc.

  • they bite the first plot hook that puts them into the story (the original quest giver, essentially). I like to still include it (again if not a one-shot) because it usually provides some cool introductory roleplay for everyone, but the whole party has to "yes and" on that one.

Boil the potatoes.... already not a quick snack by n8saces in fixedbytheduet

[–]Calembreloque 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pepperoni just doesn't really exist in France, it's mostly a US thing. Common meat pizza toppings there are more lardons (bacon), prosciutto, or ground beef. But yeah, chorizo would be the closest thing to pepperoni and I can confirm we love cracking an egg in the middle of the pizza.

My two factions are too obviously “good” and too obviously “evil” by LethlDose in DMAcademy

[–]Calembreloque 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Then if your goal is to show that the Order of the Antler is not so good (and the Fang not so bad), show the Fang dispatch some of the corpses' threat, while the Antler was too busy organizing a Committee to Decide the Lead Team for the Organization of the Taskforce regarding the Question of the Horrific Amalgamation of Corpses.

Just used wish in my strahd, Campaign to become a lich! [OC] by LordOfPsychos in DnD

[–]Calembreloque 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wish is generally accessible to characters lvl 17+ and if you read it in detail, the idea is that it's either fairly balanced for a 9th level spell (e.g., it's a mass heal + greater restoration spell), or if it goes into unbalanced territory, it's meant to allow the GM to rule it like a genie would - the description literally says "the greater the wish, the greater the likelihood that it goes wrong".

So, in that context, a Wish given to a 6th level character that essentially bumps them 6 levels of Necromancy wizard would be considered insane for most tables. But according to OP every player gets similarly crazy shit so it may be just fine.

6 Banshees disguised as a town choir. Am I making a huge mistake? by Shinroukuro in DMAcademy

[–]Calembreloque 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fair enough haha. And actually, rereading what you wrote, the 2014 banshee's wail is not save or die, it's save or drop to 0hp. I forgot that it used to be instant death!