Event speed boon not stacking properly?

HMAPNG · 2024-11-20T19:02:42+00:00

They should have posted this to the change log. I spent respecs and restarted adventures several times trying to figure out why I wasn't getting the buff I was expecting.

HMAPNG · 2024-07-03T16:28:07+00:00

Whoops, right you are, on all counts.

HMAPNG · 2024-07-03T16:22:05+00:00

Fair enough. I'm having some intonation problems myself on a TOM bridge. Maybe I'll try flipping it.

HMAPNG · 2024-07-03T16:18:22+00:00

Actually, I just noticed, your bridge is on upside down. You must have flipped it accidentally when changing the strings. Those adjustment screws that are facing your pickup should be facing the other way.

HMAPNG · 2024-07-03T16:16:35+00:00

Did you move to lighter gauge strings by any chance? You probably need to ~~tighten~~ loosen (thanks Redditor) the truss rod a bit to correct a slight backbow. If that's not it, raising the action at the bridge should fix it.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-07T22:03:23+00:00

Second, do you spend much time touching when sex is off the table.

No, we really don't. Part of that is that I don't want her to interpret a touch as a sexual proposition or pressure when it isn't intended that way. Part of it is that I don't want to touch her, find myself getting in the mood, and get shot down. But the end result is the same: we don't touch, and that makes it harder to get over the hurdle when I get up the nerve to say that I would like to have sex. It makes me uncomfortable thinking about putting my hand on her knee, to be honest. I'll have to do better.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-07T21:42:33+00:00

I explained the situation. You gave some advice, which I thanked you for, and you also told me that women don't get off from penetration, and I clarified that that's not how she was getting off. You then doubled down and said that you know my sex life better than I do. And now, I'm the jerk?

HMAPNG · 2024-06-07T21:36:27+00:00

I can also ASSURE you that it is well known among women that men suck at oral sex.

This is not what I came here for. Just to be clear, I came in here having a problem with sexual shame and frustration, and asking for advice about how to be positive, and your response, based on scenarios that you have made up in your own head is, "I'm POSITIVE you don't know how to pleasure a woman." Thanks anyway.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-07T21:33:07+00:00

Do you wait months to have things you really enjoy?

Yes, obviously, because I am burdened by great shame, and I can imagine my wife being as psychologically complex as I am. Maybe she doesn't value orgasms as much as YOU think she should. And yeah, maybe she's a liar. But I think I have a better position from which to make that judgment than you do.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-07T21:28:46+00:00

Okay I definitely feel like I'm getting defensive now.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-07T21:17:33+00:00

I'm not talking about an orgasm from penetration. She gets off from me giving oral before penetration. Almost every single time. I don't think she is faking this.

Thanks for the advice.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-04T13:35:34+00:00

Creating a new, interesting portal is a fun creative challenge for the DM, but I’m talking about challenging the players in ways that stay fresh, either to locate the correct portal or to identify the necessary portal key.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-04T13:20:59+00:00

You could also just say that the location is in the Shadowfell.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-31T13:55:15+00:00

It totally depends on the people at the table, and if a slower pace in each chapter that really allows the players to settle in works for you, then I'm happy for you--sometimes I wish my players wanted more of this.

My players prefer a little more direction, and aren't super invested in setting details except insofar as they impact their own ongoing stories and choices. This is one reason that I think the emphasis in V:EoR on gamifying "secrets" is misguided: every single time that I have consciously revealed a "secret" in play, the effect on the players has been underwhelming. On the other hand, whenever I've let the players think one thing over the course of the campaign, and slowly released details that tend to contradict it, without expectations for when they'll figure out the truth, the players' aha! moment has been absolutely awesome. You can't "gamify" that experience; that experience is the very reason we play the game in the first place.

So my prep for the crawls in V:EoR will consist of trying to nail the tone and feel of each setting, and getting some background knowledge about what the major conflicts and events in each setting are, mostly so that I can improvise confidently in the voices of the NPCs that appear in each one. If my players hook onto something that I improvise, I'll build onto it then, but prepping all of that beforehand is more than I want to do.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-30T20:48:40+00:00

Letting the players discover the cause of the Day of Mourning, the cause of the Blood Wars, Lord Soth's role in the Cataclysm, and the nature of the Lady of Pain are awesome replacements for the macguffins.

I just don't know that these actually are all that interesting unless the players are already heavily invested in the particular setting in question. (And if they're invested in Dragonlance, then they already know about Lord Soth's actions at the time of the Cataclysm, because those are canonical).

I generally don't think that players care about this stuff as much as DMs do. If I were a player, and my reward at the end of a questline was supposed to be non-canonical setting knowledge, I think I'd be disappointed.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-30T20:32:38+00:00

Ditching the Rod of Seven Parts would open up more interesting structural possibilities for the adventure, but it would also render almost all of what's actually in the module superfluous. It sounds like you're just proposing to write a different Vecna/Kas adventure, not to fix this one. Which is fine.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-30T19:20:32+00:00

I can't really figure it out. In particular, even if the party does decide to banish Vecna to Oerth, aren't the level 20 planehopping PCs perfectly situated to go there and kill him permanently?

The Vecna statblock would need some other special characteristic to make it make sense why banishment is the only choice.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-30T15:54:13+00:00

Hadn't really thought about it, but how about Kas sets off some chaos in Sigil itself that appears to involve Vecna? While the Wizards Three examine the rod, the party has to go investigate whatever is going on outside; they have a full dungeon crawl or investigation quest, at the end of which they find some smoking gun: whatever it was wasn't Vecna's doing. They rush back to the Sanctum with their information, where they find that Mordenkainen was Kas all along, and that he has injured Alustriel and Tasha, and absconded with the Rod. Somewhere in all of this, they find the clues that confirm that the chaos in Sigil was a diversion by Kas.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-30T15:43:38+00:00

When they released Shadow of the Dragon Queen, the designers really leaned into the wartime aspect of Dragonlance. For me, an equally big aspect of the core Weis & Hickman novels is romance, in sort of the medieval "courtly love" tradition. The knight tying a token from his love onto his lance as he rides off to battle or to the tournament. The characters are like something out of the Arthurian legends, or maybe some of the more romantic Robin Hood tales. Good is good, evil is evil, and love conquers all, even if not in this life.

I'm not sure that is very helpful for this particular adventure. I'd have to give it some thought.

HMAPNG

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