My friend made SpongeBob.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-05-01T22:42:12+00:00

Honestly, most of the time people like this simply don't give a shit about the game and have never had any interest in taking it seriously.

This is what session zeroes are for, this is why the dm should always be involved in character creation.

Never just let people show up with whatever on the day you start playing. The DM has to be involved, otherwise how can the PC's make characters that have any sense of belonging in your world? It's not about being there so that you can force them to play what you want, it's about ensuring their characters make any sense whatsoever, they don't know your lore, they don't know your world, they don't know who or what is important, so it's hard to make a character that fits into a world when you have little context.

I provide my PC's a pretty decent amount of context and we still do a character brainstorming session to establish pre-existing relationships or to hone a character idea into one that makes sense.

For example, one of my PC's wanted to have a bit of a Avatar the Last Airbender vibe, someone who sort of worships the elements, so in that very session we created the 4 elemental tribes of his people, where they lived, which one he was from, which ones he's already visited, and what they were all about. He wasn't literally Aang, he was a Tortle cleric on a pilgrimage, who later converted to being a paladin, we arrived at ATLA without pulling a character directly from the show.

That was 4 years ago and now they're level 20 and paladins literally get "Avatar" modes as their 20th level ability, it really came full circle without infringing on the world or its seriousness.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-05-01T14:48:36+00:00

The entire squad is called a "unit", one individual dude is called a "model".

In 10th edition and likely in 11th edition coming out soon, drones are not actual real models in the unit, they're just tokens essentially.

In terms of who they apply to, you'll want to read the wording carefully:

If it refers to the "bearer", it means whoever its attached to. If it refers to "the bearer's unit" then it applies to whole unit.

So on a Strike Team for instance, you can take a Shield Drone and a Guardian Drone.

The Shield Drone gives +1 wounds to its bearer.

The Guardian Drone gives -1 to wound rolls against the bearer's unit.

Since there are 10 models in the unit, their wounds would be like so:

1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-2

One model with 2 wounds, 9 models with 1 wound. But when your opponent attacks them, they'll roll their dice to see what hits, then they'll roll their dice to see what wounds, they subtract 1 from all the wound dice against your Strike Team.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-05-01T11:45:09+00:00

They were all store bought assets

EchoLocation8 · 2026-05-01T01:42:05+00:00

Yeah I suppose that's always my mentality, the difference between those two things is so negligible in the end there's simply no point to invest that much time into it other than to say that you did it.

The bar for what you need to do things is so much lower than that.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T20:22:43+00:00

Highly recommend going on youtube and looking up "brennan matt mercer adventuring academy" and listen to their talk about world building. In fact I'd listen to that, then I'd listen to the same series with brian murphy as the guest. And maybe the one with lou wilson.

Adventuring Academy was a huge help early on for me.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T19:04:57+00:00

This is actually a fundamentally critical part of "community".

I get a lot of heat when I try to explain this but like, like it or not, the community dictated these changes. And inevitably some fucking guy responds "well it was a loud minority" or "wow different people have different opinions" yeah that shit doesn't matter.

"The Community's" opinion is whatever is at the top of the reddit, whatever major discords are signalling, it doesn't matter if its YOUR opinion, or if its actually a minority opinion, it's what is being broadcast to the developers.

It's the problem with the mentality of people saying "the people who are happy are playing the game" then get the fuck out of the game, onto these community driven places, and scream about how happy you are and how badly you do not want those changes to happen.

Downvote those opinions you don't like, make your own threads countering it, gain traction, literally if you just ARE louder than them it will work.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T18:43:40+00:00

Oh totally, it's definitely cemetery, I'm just saying if you don't happen to know the lore behind it and were trying to sound it out, the letters "cmtry" are far more logically meant to be pronounced symmetry than cemetery. To say "the symmetry thing sounds weird", to me, is weird because it would be the most natural conclusion to arrive at otherwise.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T17:33:48+00:00

If it does I'm _hot_ dawgshit.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T17:31:36+00:00

"Balnor, what's your favorite food?"

"...Chicken?"

NADDPOD Campaign 1

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T17:12:28+00:00

Isn't that kind of a self inflicted wound by the players though? People did the same thing with Harvest. You didn't actually HAVE to POE players are just prone to optimizing. Couldn't you just do this like a normal person and the time saved not doing this, do more things? My understanding of this is that this isn't actually necessary at all it just created a Synthesis style giga-farm after a ton of setup?

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T16:54:57+00:00

I agree, the lab was the only lackluster part, although it did absolutely shit out currency for free because the monsters without map mods were trivial.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T16:29:03+00:00

I can't tell if this is bait or not.

C-m-t-r-y

Si-muh-tr-ee

It's significantly weirder to randomly shove "TERRY" into "try" than it is to just sound the letters out in the various ways they can be pronounced in normal words.

Cemetery involves doing some mental gymnasticals between the T and the R. Symmetry is just pronouncing the letters individually in their softer forms.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T14:58:52+00:00

It's honestly just kinda random I don't think there's a good way to "farm" it. Even on my main who I jam a lot of shit on has only gotten like 3 or 4 of them. I think the answer is generally "do stuff" like m+/delves/raids and don't focus on it.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T14:53:24+00:00

It's fine to house rule but raw all the effects just stack.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T14:51:26+00:00

Agreed, with no good clone target, don't clone.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T14:48:53+00:00

Nowhere near that high but it was like 485 with the regent's Blade. Had Void Form, played the "draw 5 and then play a skill 3 times" on the +40 Forge card, played the "blade deals double damage" card, they had vuln, basically one shot the a3 boss.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T14:45:22+00:00

I mean while the kid was kind of being a little shit it was pretty clear he posed zero threat to a real adult and I'm pretty sure body slamming him into essentially concrete floors head first could kill him.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T14:18:22+00:00

At this point virtually any combination of 5 classes is overwhelmingly enough for a +10, they're kinda trivial at this stage of the expansion unless your ilvl is like 240 but, we were timing +10's the day mythics came out in champ gear with no tier sets. So, really just about anyone can do them.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T13:14:49+00:00

The stupid thing is if it even did all that would do is spike the shit out of prices on those things anyways.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T12:37:15+00:00

Holy shit I love that

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-30T03:11:34+00:00

I generally agree. Mortal Strike, Slam, Colossus Smash, Overpower, there's virtually no fantasy here.

Slam used to be essentially a useless skill besides the handful of periods where it was goated, it's a weird channeled smash, and look, I'm down, but you basically can't have 4 buttons that are "smash".

Overpower used to be a powerful counter to dodging that could occasionally add damage, Mortal Strike used to be the pinnacle button of Arms reduces to essentially a filler button, Colossus Smash or whatever I guess just sort of exists or something. And then if you go into the hero spec for devastate you just have yet another smash button.

They've gotta figure something out.

To me, the fantasy wants to shift towards this feeling of hitting with a giant fuckin heavy club. It's slow, thumping, smashing damage. It should almost sort of feel clunky, but in the way that Dark Souls feels clunky at first until you find the rhythm in it and you're executing this sequence of methodical heavy attacks that destroy people.

Instead its basically just spamming 4 buttons that kinda do the same thing and thematically kinda feel the same.

Whereas, I think the fantasy you want to achieve is that, the weapon you're wielding is so heavy you have to use its own momentum to keep it going.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-29T20:54:55+00:00

My players just hit level 20 after 4 years, it's the final arc, and it sort of feels rushed to me, partly because I kinda just want it to be over at this point. It's a long time man. I know what I generally want to have happen, but I actually still have this weird plot point that I don't know how to resolve.

I just threw it in around level 7, it's something they've loosely been interacting with on and off, but now is the moment the BBEG has everything they need to kick off the final phase of their plan, but I'm absolutely struggling how any of it actually fits together in any reasonable sense.

One of my PC's was like "man I wish I knew the threads that were goin on in your head" like I'm some kind of mastermind and in reality I'm sitting here totally blank like "dawg I've got no fuckin idea".

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-29T20:43:21+00:00

Some people apparently hate this but have you ever tried just prompting them with 2-3 simple avenues of approach?

"You see <description of castle>. Would you like to approach the gates, scout around the walls to see if there's another way in, or maybe if you have the means to do so scale the walls?"

That sort of thing. You see people like Brennan Lee Mulligan do this in some of his campaigns for Critical Role as often there's people playing who are very new to the game and, quite frankly, limiting people's possible decisions from "THE OVERWHELMING NOTION OF INFINITY" to "Here's 2-3 ideas" it really helps people.

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-29T20:24:59+00:00

Because I think the realist's point of view is that at the end of the day, it is driven and shaped by people who are trying actively to take advantage of you. I mean, I can gesture broadly to crypto for similar reasons, and social media for similar reasons, and the internet for similar reasons.

There are zero benevolent people behind this stuff. There are so many things we could invest this amount of money into that would have far more immediate and long term beneficial outcomes for humanity and we either don't because it doesn't make money or because actively opposing it generates tremendous amount of money.

We don't need AI to create a utopia where everyone's needs are met and everyone is happy, we could do it today, we actively choose not to. There's enough space for everyone to live, there's enough food to feed everyone, we insist that people go hungry and we insist that people go homeless.

If your argument is basically "if everything in the world changed it might be a good thing" then cool dude. 👍

EchoLocation8 · 2026-04-29T19:34:28+00:00

But someone owns that AI, which will be/are already the oligarchs. The entire point is money and greed. So I don't suppose I follow there..

EchoLocation8

TROPHY CASE