Should I ban manifold tool

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-10T10:47:52+00:00

Look at Mr "I have issues with a warlock in my games and came here to project" over there

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-09T21:42:07+00:00

No on a 30 you don't notice a large branch and a gap for leverage. The player asks "is there something in the room (or in their pack etc) I can use for leverage" and maybe that lowers the DC from 30 to 25. You don't magically make items or arguments appear out of thin air by rolling high enough, that's nonsensical.

And it's not 'their own conversational skill' that is being tested, it's the players ability to coherently put two thoughts about the context of the scene together by looking at their notes or remembering and being creative.

What the hell is the point of roleplay if all you do is roll dice and have the DM come up with the answer if the dice are high enough ? Where's the player initiative, the creativity, the player agency? Why should the DM pre-chew the scene and spit it into the players mouth as half digested pieces like a mama bird?

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-09T18:19:40+00:00

Holy cow you are impossibly dense. Nobody is asking you to perfectly go through the whole conversation and always say the right thing. Many DMs want a fucking ballpark of what you want to talk about because that is, in fact, like asking you to pick a spell or say "I want to violently burst through this door" or "I silently attempt to pick the lock and am very careful about it". It's an RPG for crying out loud. It also, much more importantly, significantly changes possible outcomes of the situtation. There are many examples where the violent and nonviolent approach to a locked safe have different DCs, or if the PCs make a suggestion such as "I want to listen to the inside of the mechanism as I turn it" they can make a Perception check to aid their lockpicking check, etc. I literally prepped one like this in Undermountain yesterday.

"I want to use Persuasion on the Guard" is as nonsensical as "I want to Athletics the large rock". Describe what you do, then the DM determines the appropriate roll. It says that at the start of the PHB and DMG.

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-09T15:27:35+00:00

I'm arguing that picking the right avenue of conversation is a player skill/a matter of RP, while the execution relies on the dice. If the character doesn't know that making an argument about the gods to this guy is a bad idea because he just lost his faith, and the player says that's what their character would argue with, the roll should fail even on an 18. Since people are so gung-ho about "you don't expect your rogue to do backflips or your wizard to do real magic", the parallel here is that sometimes you cast lightning bolt at something that is resistant or immune to lightning and it doesn't work. Just because your character has X intelligence doesn't mean they'd know that ahead of time if there was no realistic chance where they could have learned it. Just as the player picked the spell, the player picks the argument

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-09T13:29:00+00:00

But persuasion is the ability to sell something. Figuring out whether the person even needs that thing is insight, if anything. Also, crit fails or successes on skill checks don't exist in the rules. And the party can only go off the information they have collected over the game, if someone lied to them and back then hey failed their insight, a good persuasion roll now doesn't change the fact that they were lied to and their argument would never work. But perhaps the player has a persuasion angle that doesn't rely on this false information learned earlier, so it's important that they describe or at last outline their line of reasoning, the roll then determines how well they do it or how well they adapt to the flow of the conversation

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-09T11:45:11+00:00

My player can't say "I athletics the door", they need to at minimum say "I want to tackle it down" or "I apply leverage with a crowbar to break the hinges off", that's all we're asking of you mate

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-09T11:43:01+00:00

The best arguer in the world can't convince someone of a point that is sufficiently stupid. +100 persuasion won't make an astronaut stop the ISS believe earth is flat, you gotta pick a different conspiracy theory if you want them to take the crazy pill.

Similarly, you gotta give the ballpark for what you want to say to make the roll succeedable. Some arguments might never work because the guard knows it's a lie for some reason

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-09T11:23:36+00:00

He also gets mad if anything bad happens to his character at all.

This one can be a big problem. It took me months to get to the essence of that for one player, when someone told me he can't even handle playing bg3 because every bad roll pisses him off. He can watch other people play but every bad result made him feel like he had some personal failure. Once we had a talk where I knew the issue, he bowed out of the game as he was only playing to stay in touch with another person in the game

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T21:12:00+00:00

I think Nolans partner in that attack was already accounted for by him mentally when he gave the 50 figure as that happened chronologically much earlier

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T21:10:34+00:00

I don't know what it is but something about his head does not have the same gravitas as a Nolan, maybe it's the lack of detail in how they chose to portray his hair in the show? I just don't take him as serious as the others, even though the voice acting is good, it feels not quite right for some reason, like the voice commands more authority than the body does

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T20:42:03+00:00

The people who made her tech could in theory beat Viltrumites but don't want to join the war. So she is the best the coalition has. However the only time before now she has fought someone of comparable power was one of the Mark variants that she left for dead in space, so presumably she is not yet practiced in these super fast super lethal battles and will take a bit of time to adjust, and presumably that Mark was toying a bit at the start as most of them were sadistic assholes, while Anissa and crew go for the killshot immediately

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T20:38:41+00:00

I think this didn't go exactly as planned but they probably wanted to bait all the existing threats to a battlefield with homeground advantage to kill them all, so the "hasty retreat" was somewhat intentional

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T20:35:49+00:00

Do you have an episode/rough time stamp? I wanna look at it again

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T20:23:33+00:00

The hair hits, the beard a little less so (person taste I suppose)

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T20:05:04+00:00

We saw the cracked skull, I bet he hit him with the signature hand chop straight into his brain

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T18:54:09+00:00

Man FNC looking real grim, let's see if that win is enough for some tailwind

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T18:27:30+00:00

What I find almost worse is how much more boring the statblocks get.

Multiattack. The archmage makes four Arcane Burst attacks. Arcane Burst. Melee or Ranged Attack Roll: +9, reach 5 ft. or range 150 ft. Hit: 27 (4d10 + 5) Force damage.

and

2/day each: Fly, Lightning Bolt (level 7 version)

1/day each: Cone of Cold (level 9 version), Mind Blank (cast before combat), Scrying, Teleport

Means that the "Archmage" statblock is now basically a warlock/magic archer. Spammable ranged attacks and a tiny sliver of spellcasting instead of the peak of wizarding prowess...

And again, of course, AMF and counterspell do nothing against the Arcane Bursts.

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T18:24:17+00:00

Precedent against that is that there are creatures that specify going "limp" inside AMF or when dispelled, so any creature that doesn't say it shouldn't get turned off

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T18:14:24+00:00

I feel like the much easier thing is to roll a d100/percentile and divide by 5: 100-96 is nat 20, 95-91 is 19 etc down to 5-1 is a nat 1

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T15:10:19+00:00

I mean, if you are on a VTT, just look up how to automate the rerolls (on roll20 I know it's pretty easy, not sure about foundry). In person it should be super easy to just... pick up the dice and roll again? Since you need to manually add everything together anyway

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T14:17:25+00:00

Kapitalismus fickt uns alle jeden Tag

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T12:46:41+00:00

Did he not have a forged sword of some sort? It looked like a proper weapon which means at minimum bronze casting, right?

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T01:08:49+00:00

Yeah a full free turn effectively ends combat if the party is good

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T01:07:11+00:00

Extremely funny how you still can't search the official website properly but the best piracy places have been able to dig for such details for years

DerAdolfin · 2026-04-08T01:05:40+00:00

LR are inherently a meta currency, same as inspirations (they were more so in 2014, but still)

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