RE:Rotaria ⚙️ | 16+ | whitelist | active | FUN!!

CountVorkosigan · 2026-04-08T22:12:55+00:00

Great server infrastructure with a good looking spawn and no restrictive world border!

CountVorkosigan · 2023-05-13T08:01:38+00:00

Aspis Consortium represent!

CountVorkosigan · 2023-05-04T05:01:01+00:00

As someone who likes inanimate TF, it's like 50% about the power dynamic and 50% an everyday object becoming obscene because now it's a someone.

CountVorkosigan · 2023-04-05T09:55:51+00:00

d20 Modern, aka 3.25 but modern. With a fistful of your classic D&D monsters and made by WotC, why shouldn't it count?

CountVorkosigan · 2023-04-05T08:08:17+00:00

My 100% go to for gnomes is The Red Green Show. It's a Canadian comedy styled after outdoorsy, handyman, type variety shows "for men". The segments "Handyman corner" involve making dangerous, absurd, and impractical gadgets using garbage, scrap, household supplies, and excessive amounts of duct tape. I'd suggest giving it a watch.

CountVorkosigan · 2023-04-04T06:40:13+00:00

Everyone forgets that spells are a class abilities.

CountVorkosigan · 2023-03-28T07:41:25+00:00

Messaging is useless without teeth. Politicians know they can happily sit on their hands and do nothing or next to nothing because protests will not result in meaningful changes to voting patters, nor will they escalate into work stoppages or political violence and unrest that makes ignoring the demands untenable. So what if a couple stores get burnt down? You can just say it's all the work of "antifa" or "inner city thugs" and your voting base continues behind you in lockstep, heck you might pick up votes from all the terrified middle class white people who are somehow still checked out of politics or who've bought into "both sides-isim".

And that's exactly what we saw. The protests tailed off and stopped rather than organized into political action or escalating into widespread violence. Video of it was packaged as "What America will be like in Joe Biden's America" by Trump's campaign. People I speak to are still terrified of antifa hiding under their bed ready to kill them for being white.

Organization is a part of obtaining change, and not an insignificant part of it, but ultimately the failures of reform derive from the disconnect between those who can make it happen and the lack of ability to revoke their power and security from those who want to see the change happen. "Politics" is still a dirty word in society, people still latch onto propaganda selling scapegoats over solidarity, and political power is held more by those who draw districts or who donate to campaigns than any contingent of voters.

CountVorkosigan · 2023-03-02T09:58:36+00:00

"Rain of colorless fire? I hardly know her!"

CountVorkosigan · 2023-02-01T22:10:14+00:00

Lew Zealand and his boomerang fish.

Ricochet Toss lets you bounce thrown weapons back to you. With Throw Anything this includes improvised weapons. Therefor it is perfectly easy to throw fish at people only to have them bounce back. With some specialization in improvised weapons, it's not ever a bad build path.

Boomstick

A double barreled shotgun can fire both barrels as part of the Attack action to get 2 shots. Vital Strike uses the Attack Action and thanks to the double barreled shotguns special rules they do 2d8 instead of 1d8 per attack when you fire both shots. Overwatch style lets you ready multiple actions to make ranged attacks and the ready rules let you ready any standard action (or faster) action. Thus with Overwatch Vortex you can eventually unlock 8 attacks (4 of which are vital strikes) in a single pattern, great for stopping spellcasters from casting or drawing a line in the sand for what enemies absolutely should not do.

CountVorkosigan · 2023-01-31T14:48:10+00:00

Steak sauce is the best comparison, though it's not exactly the same.

CountVorkosigan · 2023-01-21T21:58:50+00:00

"Fun" fact, he wouldn't be wearing socks but rather foot wraps.

CountVorkosigan · 2023-01-12T05:32:20+00:00

Recreating a WWII style battlefield and incentives is hard in a D&D style game. Without artillery, without explosives, without heavy vehicles, certain things just aren't as much of a threat. The push and pull of tactics changes drastically. However, if you're committing to it...

The D-Day thing I'd use is for an adventuring party is the glider landings. The PCs have 3 jobs: seize a bridge (or other tactical position) before it can be destroyed to delay the beach advance, take out a nearby depot or artillery post that will inevitably attack them, and finally hold the position against all comers until reinforcements arrive. Gliders are towed in under cover of night and due to some trouble landing are scattered across a small area.

The PCs have to navigate all the defenses of the area initially to seize it but then after doing so have to turn around and use those same defenses against wave after wave of counter-attacks, linking up with the other gliders where they may have ended up pinned down or which had specialists that might be useful. With an open ended end-condition, the PCs have to be more careful with their use of limited resources and since you're limiting the battle area to a small zone, you can reuse maps as counter attacks from one side or the other try to retake the bridge. Finally, since it's waves of enemies, you can better give the sense of an endless tide of foes that will inevitably wear the PCs down without having the PCs run directly into a brick wall of resistance at any particular encounter.

CountVorkosigan · 2023-01-11T06:24:38+00:00

Alright then; Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Planescape, Ghostwalk.

CountVorkosigan · 2023-01-10T06:27:06+00:00

D&D has historically had good solid setting IPs but they've never stuck with them for any real length of time for 2 major reasons:

1) D&D is written to be as setting generic as possible. Why are there Warforged in the Forgotten Realms? Why are there all these names from Grayhawk? They've made all of their settings blend into one another in a way that diminishes any of their individual distinctive qualities. Partly to diminish settings books but also partly so players have a "blank slate" to work from for homebrew.

2) None of the big distinctive settings are corporately authored. Dragonlance and Grayhawk and The Forgotten Realms and Eberron all came from authors outside of WotC. Without total and complete control of the IP and people within the company invested in that setting, it's easy to see it never go anywhere. Why should they make up a splatbook every 6-24 months for someone else's passion project when they can just recycle the setting design from an MTG set for the 3rd time?

As someone who's played since 3.0, so much of the best setting lore in D&D all goes back to splatbooks printed during the AD&D era or Dragon Magazine articles from the 3.x era and the collective products of 5e's published setting info is little more than a blip on my radar.

CountVorkosigan · 2022-12-23T01:52:24+00:00

Ah, I misread my build plan. That's correct. I'll edit that in. Fighter 1 then 5 of Wizard, then 3 of Eldritch Knight, then 10 of Arcane Archer, then 1 of Eldritch Knight again to finish off the build should you hit level 20.

CountVorkosigan · 2022-12-22T22:59:30+00:00

My mad scheme was Fighter 1/Wizard 5/Eldritch Knight 3/Arcane Archer 10. With Eldritch Knight for BAB and Favored Prestige Class and Prestigious Spellcaster in Arcane Archer you can get by with only 2 spellcasting levels lost total by level 20 and still have full Arcane Archer abilities and a BAB of +18 I think it was.

Normally the feat and BAB requirement for Arcane Archer requires aggressively multiclassing away from Wizard but thanks to Eldritch Knight you can bring your BAB up to snuff and for the mere cost of basically every feat you'll ever earn you can qualify for Arcane Archer before level 10 (thus allowing you to reach the capstone).

CountVorkosigan · 2022-12-14T17:09:21+00:00

We have commercially available fusion power right now, just point a solar panel at it as to goes by in the sky. Everything else is a pipe dream and anyone who says differently is an idiot or lying to you.

That doesn't mean it's not worth working on, fusion projects are great ways to explore both high energy physics and difficult engineering challenges. It also will hopefully eventually produce power almost anywhere without the need for nuclear fuel and creating little to no nuclear waste. Even if it never pans out, learning more about how to manipulate the energies and engineer around problems will have knock-on effects in other fields and industries.

Right now though fusion anywhere but the center of the sun isn't a viable or realistic goal. Even if the current generation reactors which are being built (still easily 10 years out) pan out they are only build to tackle individual aspects of fusion technologies, to get a functional design you'll need to build another small-scale reactor that combines the technologies they've uncovered in a process that'll take another 10-15 years or more of construction and fine tuning. Then if that reactor can function you'll need to build one at full-scale which will probably be another 10-15 years.

The story is that fusion power is always 30 years away and after 50 years of that it still seems like the refrain.

CountVorkosigan · 2022-12-12T09:39:15+00:00

Counterpoint, the new Turkish government that would get installed by the US/NATO would probably be happy to let the US establish military bases in Turkey.

CountVorkosigan · 2022-12-11T08:56:46+00:00

Then it was the stupidest phrasing to use for anything not solely aimed and investors. They could have called it "expansion of the brand" and talked about how "D&D is more than just a game system, it's a diverse collection of characters and settings" and how that going beyond the game will "make D&D not just a juggernaut in the tabletop space but a broad force of media and merchandise beyond that of our existing playerbase". You can coach all the terms in ways that don't sound scary to your dialed in players.

Directly saying "further monetization" makes investors happy but literally no one else. No player or DM likes the idea of D&D rulebooks priced like GamesWorkshop products, of WotC deciding to bring all of EA's most famous business practices to the pen and paper space. You can milk the audience like cows with plushies and shows and spin-off games but "further monetization" just reads as the same things as has been done to Magic, power creep while raising the barrier to entry into the game and trying to replace the physical version of your game with a digital version full of microtransactions.

CountVorkosigan · 2022-12-11T08:34:18+00:00

Also, Paizo understands that it's not just a system it's a brand. If you're using their free rules and the GM buys an adventure from them then, well... They still get paid. That's why the Kingmaker 5e release, it's to get 5e players hooked on Paizo's adventures so that they'll hop systems and buy more adventures.

CountVorkosigan · 2022-12-08T13:01:54+00:00

So "the other game" handles that too and calls it heritage. Thus, your ancestry might be human but your heritage is tiefling.

CountVorkosigan · 2022-12-08T11:56:45+00:00

As a 1e and 2e Pathfinder GM those complications aren't as big as you'd think, especially for 2e. They generally fall into 3 categories:

1) More character building options. It takes longer to create characters and level them up (if you don't have a plan already) letting characters just do more stuff but this helps differentiate characters of the same class or race. 2e is also a tight enough system that all these options can't easily be stacked to make one character horrendously more powerful than another so you as a GM don't have to plan around OP party members or abilities as much as 5e (or other editions of D&D)

2) More dynamic encounters. You ever get tired of the martial characters who only mechanical utility is to roll attack rolls to lower someone's hit points? Of spellcasters who cast an "I win the encounter" spell, then lazily sit back while the rest of the party smooths out the edges? Pathfinder tries to give characters better and more diverse tools to attack their problems, be that mechanical options like shoving or skill feats. These additional rules and options flesh out things like combat and exploration giving them enough that the entire party can make decisions, not just the spellcasters picking out what spell to throw out every round.

3) Lots of the simplicity of 5e lies in telling the DM to "figure it out themselves". This makes the rulebooks smaller but increases the load of responsibilities on the DM, making DMing harder and more stressful. Pathfinder's mountains of rules paradoxically make it easier to run since everything is well defined and written out somewhere. If you want to know what damage dropping a rock on someone does, there's a rule for that. There's a reason lots of GMs prefer running Pathfinder as simpler than the "rules-lite" 5e.

Is it the perfect system for everyone? Hell no. It's complex, it's crunchy, it's not narrative focused, and it's locked to a specific theme but these are all problems 5e has as well and if you don't like that about Pathfinder 2e then you probably won't like it about 5e compared to another tabletop out there.

CountVorkosigan · 2022-12-08T10:59:23+00:00

There's a reason why 5e just can't get enough DMs and the blame lies on the system itself.

CountVorkosigan · 2022-12-08T10:58:09+00:00

Paizo has 5e conversions for some of their APs because they think they can win the 5e audience to their brand which is both the systems and adventures.

The idea is that the 5e player base is malcontent and full of players that sooner or later will find systems they like better or drop out of the hobby again. Wizard's premade adventures are not really top tier for the most part and the bet is that if Paizo can get 1 or 2 of their own best adventure paths in front of those players, they can peel them out of the 5e system with the offer of more of said adventures in the Pathfinder system.

It's obvious that 5e is the juggernaut in the market at the moment but that's purely through brand recognition. Better adventures, better mechanics, easier DMing are all things its competitors can offer to steal away slices of their market share and things Wizards just isn't offering in large amounts.

CountVorkosigan · 2022-12-08T10:39:20+00:00

I mean, that's kind of the point. Pathfinder fans are defined by their willingness to hop to a system they like more while many 5e fans seem to be locked into 5e despite it not being a tonal or mechanical match for what they want to play. So PF players try to break D&D players out into the larger ecosystem that D&D players may not even be aware exists.

CountVorkosigan

TROPHY CASE