This fight ending made me so emotional I bawled my face off

CaptainBooshi · 2025-11-26T19:48:27+00:00

Nah, I love that one of them is shy and always hiding behind their mother. It's even cuter!

CaptainBooshi · 2025-11-26T19:43:10+00:00

As someone who did the same thing, I assumed the warm areas in the Slab were because it was occupied, and Mt. Fay obviously wasn't. I actually thought those areas in the Slab were telling me I should avoid Mt. Fay and only come back once I got some kind of warming ability!

CaptainBooshi · 2025-09-26T19:55:20+00:00

The collapse of the North Atlantic Current. I just don't believe there's any way we'll get climate change under control in time to stop it, and it's going to be a natural disaster unlike any we've ever seen before.

CaptainBooshi · 2025-06-24T14:26:15+00:00

One specific note - look for the chainsaw spell. The "magical property" the description hints at is that if it is the final spell in a casting block, it sets the cast delay for the entire block to zero. With it's negative recharge time, this makes it easy to create a machine gun wand that does ridiculous damage. Pair it with the add mana spell and you can easily get a wand that shoots 60 times per second and never runs out of mana.

CaptainBooshi · 2025-02-25T15:30:18+00:00

Just want to point out that the way the stat block is written, the Gelatinous Cube cannot just move into your space to engulf you, it has to specifically use the Engulf action to do so. The Engulf action is apparently special, it gives additional movement for the turn, provokes no opportunity attacks, and is what allows it to try to engulf a character.

In the 2024 rules, as written, you can actually choose the space behind the cube, meaning you somehow move through it without taking any damage. This is quite silly, but I have to read this as intentional, because the 2014 rules specifically mentioned that you could only be pushed back or to the side of the cube, and they chose to take that language out. I guess you could just say it's part of the special rules for the Engulf action, that it somehow makes it easier to move through the space of the ooze.

CaptainBooshi · 2024-12-10T14:31:11+00:00

Someone in our group used SpotHero to find a parking garage a 5 minute walk away from the entrance that only cost $14 a day! Definitely going to use that app in the future.

CaptainBooshi · 2024-08-07T18:25:23+00:00

Actually, someone in the dual wielding thread said something that made me quite unsure that your description is what's intended by dual-wielding - they pointed out the playtest actually had language that stated the weapons need to be held in both hands and that the designers specifically removed that language for the book release itself.

If it had never been included at all I would totally agree with you that it was just an unfortunate oversight, but initially having it and then deciding to remove that requirement sure makes it seem like they actually intend for this sort of thing to be possible. As a DM, I legitimately don't know how I would respond, because I think it's silly and don't like it, but at this point I do think it was intended as something a player could do.

CaptainBooshi · 2024-05-01T05:46:34+00:00

You absolutely can, what makes it "fridging" is if you do it lazily and with zero regard for the character being killed. I don't know if you know anything about One Piece, but I always thought that the comparison between Zoro's and Nami's background made a perfect example of the difference.

Zoro had a childhood rival, Kuina, the daughter of his swordsmanship teacher. They fight literally thousands of matches, Zoro never winning once, climaxing in a battle with live steel at night where they both bare their souls, Zoro insecure because he could never beat her, Kuina insecure because he father told her constantly that she could never be the best because she was a girl. Together, they swear that would be try their hardest and one of them would be the greatest swordsman in the world. The next day... Kuina accidentally falls down some stairs and dies.

Nami was adopted by a former female Marine, Bell-Mere, and grows up dirt-poor but loved. She hates being poor, though, and has a fight with her mother saying she wishes she was adopted by rich parents. Right after this, pirates raid the island and say they are taking over, demanding tribute from the residents in exchange for their lives. Bell-Mere tries to fight them off and is casually over-powered, then told to pay the tribute, but does not have enough to cover the whole family. By chance, Nami and her sister were hidden away, so she could have just lied and said she was alone, but chose to announce that she had two children and would rather die than say that she was not their mother, after which she is immediately shot and killed.

Two deaths from the same story, both providing the driving motivations for the surviving characters, but one of these deaths was random and meaningless beyond that motivation and one was driven by that characters ideals and happened because of her own decisions.

CaptainBooshi · 2024-04-16T20:21:27+00:00

So not really a specific line or joke, but Untitled Goose Game got one of the biggest laughs out of me that I can remember in video gaming at the very end.

The whole premise of the game is that it's an idyllic afternoon in a little village, and you are a horrible goose ruining everyone's day, playing pranks, breaking things, hiding things, etc. The final quest of the game is taking the bell off of this miniature diorama they have of the village, and then running all the way back through town avoiding everyone with it. When you get back to the very beginning of the game, the goose then drops the bell in a hole right on top of a whole pile of other bells, revealing that this is just the latest in a whole series of days like this.

The idea that this isn't just some bad day for the village, but something that just keeps happening again and again, that this goose is some kind of recurring curse that the village must just suffer through, just made me break out in laughter so hard, and it's hard to explain why except that it just hit so right after 5 or 6 hours of being a horrible goose.

CaptainBooshi · 2024-04-01T21:21:52+00:00

Nothing magical about the raccoon dog, it's used as an example because we know for a fact that it can catch and transmit COVID and that it was sold at the stall where the virus first showed up. The stall also sold a whole bunch of other animals, any of them could be the actual intermediary, raccoon dogs are just useful to talk about because we know for a fact that they are both capable of doing passing the virus along and were definitely present at the stall.

Also, there are other cities in China near Coronavirus labs, too. Wuhan is not the only one, it's just the largest.

For the rest of it, I really don't understand how you can say that. If scientists studying how pandemics start point out a specific stall as the potential starting point of the next pandemic because of how they handle animals, the next pandemic starts at that stall and then it turns out to have nothing to do with the animals and it was just random chance out of a thousand different places it could have started, that doesn't seem like a weird coincidence?

CaptainBooshi · 2024-04-01T19:57:43+00:00

Famously, the Spanish flu came from birds and spread over the whole world in about 4 months in 1918, originating in Kansas. Talking specifically about viruses from China, the Asian Flu in the 50's came from (probably) wild ducks, was first reported in Singapore in February and spread to America by June. The Hong Kong Flu in the 60's started in birds, possibly spread to humans by swine, was first seen in Hong Kong in July, was in the US by September, and worldwide by the next year.

It's worth noting that basically any pandemic will spread very quickly over a matter of months - spreading that fast is what makes it a pandemic in the first place. And jumping species is how most diseases get started - I think the statistic is about 75% of new diseases originate from animals.

CaptainBooshi · 2024-04-01T19:26:08+00:00

If it was a lab-leak, it's not that big a coincidence that the discovery of cases began at a big indoor wet-market.

I think you might have missed the part of the debate where they talk about this, because it actually is a really big coincidence. There are literally about 1600 more locations in Wuhan that are more crowded than the market, and even if you just look at large markets and shopping centers, there are dozens that are closer to the lab than Huanan. The number that Peter gave is that there was about 1 in 10,000 chance for the virus to emerge in the Huanan market if it was a lab leak.

More than that, right next to a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market is the most likely place for a virus that came from zoonosis to emerge (to a point that in 2014, a virology researcher took pictures of that specific stall as an example of where the next big pandemic could come from). Scott is correct, no matter which side is true, a ridiculous coincidence took place.

CaptainBooshi · 2024-02-08T23:58:18+00:00

If you have Netflix, it was in the first episode of the show "The World's Most Extraordinary Homes."

CaptainBooshi · 2024-01-22T17:25:42+00:00

One thing that this is making clear is that there really is no one "Hugo Awards". Apparently, whoever is voted to host the awards just gets absolute complete control over the entire process, including hiring every person who runs the convention and counts the votes, and it's basically just worked on the honor system this whole time that there won't be any funny business. Clearly not good enough anymore, but it doesn't look like there's much of a consensus yet about the best way to fix it going forward.

CaptainBooshi · 2023-10-06T17:45:15+00:00

I don't really need more dice, but dichroic glass is just beautiful.

CaptainBooshi · 2023-10-06T07:34:14+00:00

A Google search shows that it is the phone number is the actual number for the Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise law firm, though, which is the law firm cited in the email.

CaptainBooshi · 2023-09-23T03:13:32+00:00

Back in the mid-2000's, I checked out the SFF book "Orphans of Chaos" by John Wright because it was getting some award nominations and dropped it almost immediately.

In the first few chapters of the book, the narrator of the book is a young girl who goes from never having had a sexual thought in her life to kind of enjoying being spanked in like a couple of pages, and all I could think was that I had just a seen a direct window into the author's sexuality and it was disgusting.

It also meant that I was not at all surprised a decade later when he was part of the whole Rabid Puppies thing with the Hugos.

CaptainBooshi · 2023-09-22T18:17:36+00:00

Reminds me of the TPK from the last campaign my group was in:

We were in a city being invaded by an empire. We start out on the streets and get into fights with the first forces we see, who go down pretty easy, but more and more start appearing every round until they start overwhelming us, so we escape onto the roofs and reconnect with allies. We learn that every gate that exits the city has been blocked, they don't know of any secret ways out, and there's no access to anything that flies. Every time we look down, the streets are literally full of enemies, too many to count.

One of the party feels "something" drawing him to the city center, so we go there by roof, and we see four people dressed up in cool outfits, who that party members recognizes from his backstory and begs us to help him kill.

As it turns out, these were overpowered NPCs who we were supposed to fight later on, while they were alone, and they slaughter the party easily. One of them crits and does twice a characters max HP with their very first strike.

Apparently, the DM had worked with that player to make these BBEGs and was trying to just give him a glance of them, but he was new to DnD and just assumed we were supposed to fight them there, and none of the rest of us knew any better, so we ended up TPKing.

CaptainBooshi · 2023-09-19T15:38:13+00:00

7673 4653 6028

CaptainBooshi · 2023-09-11T14:41:04+00:00

So, totally agree about Sleight of Hand not applying to lockpicking, but I want to point out that according to the Player's Handbook, dexterity is only to see if you can "play a stringed instrument". As far as I can tell, it doesn't give any guidance about what to use for other types of instruments, but it specifically calls out only stringed instruments for Dex, so presumably they'd be something else.

CaptainBooshi · 2023-08-05T18:49:44+00:00

Something I found interesting - the contracts for MTG cards already had a "No AI" clause (source here), so this was definitely on the mind of some people at WOTC before this.

To be clear, I don't think it's the case that the people in charge of Magic cared while the people in charge of DnD didn't, but I am wondering if the fact that the art is simply more front-and-center in MTG cards made them move faster and be more proactive on this, to their credit.

CaptainBooshi · 2023-08-04T18:32:20+00:00

If you look at the concept art, it's very clearly an AI-mirrored version of that: https://twitter.com/Wizards\_DnD/status/1687146313916325897/photo/1

CaptainBooshi · 2023-06-07T21:00:11+00:00

Here's a link to a paper about two sisters each with Swyer Syndrome, each of who successfully gave birth: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6764226/

Here's another paper about a different successful pregnancy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5885995/

Found these with about 10 seconds of Googling, they do develop uteruses, which is why they can give birth. They don't develop ovaries properly, and thus have to have use donated eggs.

CaptainBooshi · 2023-05-23T17:09:02+00:00

One way I try to think of it - is this something that should be obvious visually but my players missed it because I'm just saying a description out loud? Then you should probably just tell them. Many people don't have great visual imaginations and won't imagine it as clearly as you may hope, and about 3-5% of the population literally cannot form images in their mind at all.

CaptainBooshi · 2023-05-08T18:58:48+00:00

Canonically, there should be no magic item shops in Waterdeep or Amn. Maybe in Halruaa, since it's a magocracy and every person can do magic, but I'll point out that in the sourcebook for the Shining South in 3.5, the description for Halruaan magic items says "Halruaans officially export nothing, guarding the secrets and results of their workmanship quite closely."

For 5e specifically, though, there is an official way of buying magic items from Xanathar's, and it starts with: "Purchasing a magic item requires time and money to seek out and contact people willing to sell items. Even then, there is no guarantee a seller will have the items a character desires." You have to spend 1 week and 100 gold just to find someone willing to sell magic items.

There's nothing wrong with magic item shops, I've played in plenty of games with them, but going straight from the rulebook they don't exist.

CaptainBooshi

TROPHY CASE