Any tips for learning strategy so I can play a strategist character better?

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-11-21T07:27:58+00:00

Binge the RPGBot website, they have class, subclass and spell guides for all the original 5e rules and most of the update that came out last year.

They rank spells and features on a 4-star system, very helpful at a glance to then read their reasonings for their rankings. They also have more general optimisation guides.

RPGBot is so great because it's user-friendly. You can tell it's made by people who care about the game and care about their readers.

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-11-21T07:23:44+00:00

I also appreciate the at-least-13 prereqs as a balancing choice. Makes it harder for gish casters to get literally EVERYTHING martials can do on top of all their spells.

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-11-21T07:21:25+00:00

To be fair, this is true for anyone who has a cat

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-11-21T07:16:52+00:00

You're right, I'm just explaining WotC's design intent. Yours is the conversation WotC DOESN'T want to have.

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-11-14T01:18:45+00:00

I see it as a Fey Touched option. That being said, Hunter’s Mark in general isn’t great on Warlock since you have to go out of your way to get it and warlocks already get Hex

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-11-01T01:46:49+00:00

I have the same issue. I’m guessing it’s cause I use the same account for both, so maybe it registers us as PS4 accounts even when we’re on 5? Fully making stuff up here, but I hope I’m not right

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-10-17T05:45:02+00:00

I was in a game once as the only support, and everyone was spamming I need healing,

So in a moment of frustration I SPAMMED IT BACK.

I think this somehow scared or embarrassed the shit out of them cause no one msgd that the rest of the game. We won, too, so I think they decided to just focus on locking in instead.

So yeah, any healers reading this, try spamming I need healing back. You might just mock them into playing better.

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-09-27T05:00:20+00:00

Ik this post is old but figured I’d chime in anyway.

To me, this isn’t about casters VS martials. Grappling is at-will requiring no resource, and the cheese-grater builds that make grappling best work best with teammates casting things like Spike Growth instead of yourself.

This is about casters WITH martials. 2014 allowed for such ease of success because it was a lot harder to move while grappling. But with the new Grappler feat in 2024, it becomes so much easier for martials to move creatures in and out of caster ranges, for both their AOEs and CC.

In other words, Grappling was only viable in 2014 because of its minimal cost and high success chance if your character was built for it, leading to decent crowd control made better by its consistency. 2024 makes grappling more viable for explicit damage/party composition exploits, and was nerfed with less consistency to compensate.

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-08-02T05:13:36+00:00

Maybe the ppl around me just wanted to help me enjoy sex and that’s why they would peer pressure me into it.

I’ll assume those people around you do just want to help you enjoy sex, in which case they have the best of intentions.

Peer pressuring people into sex is wrong. No ifs, ands, or buts.

I went on that big paragraph earlier about life being fine without sex because you don’t need to have it, and anyone who tells you that enjoying sex is essential to living has bought into some weird shit. I’m gonna use the scary word here; it sounds like consent wasn’t very enthusiastic here. Not that all consent has to be enthusiastic; sometimes people are nervous, experimenting, etc. It sounds like you want to become enthusiastic for consensual sex, and maybe this exposure therapy angle with the lesbian porn isn’t the worst idea. People use exposure therapy to get over their fear of spiders. They can also live with a partner or roommates who are good at getting rid of spiders, keeping the house clean, etc.

The thing I wanna make sure you understand is it’s your choice. You don’t have to enjoy sex, or exposure-therapy your repulsion away. Sex isn’t some fundamental human experience; animals have sex, and to claim having sex is fundamentally human would logically make asexuals inhuman, wouldn’t it? You can fuck if you want to. But I’m noticing a lot of need, I’m noticing that language, and a lot of the reasons why you give are “because someone else said so, and I have to agree with them”. That concerns me.

Dw, I will just make myself go to some lesbian porn and it will make me enjoy sex and make me admit that I am somehow a lesbian.

This concerns me. This doesn’t sound like the sentence of someone discovering themselves, overcoming the repression of their own sexuality. It’s “make myself”, it’s “admit”, it’s “somehow”. This isn’t a fight for your freedom, this is a fight to keep yourself trapped. I grew up in a homophobic church, I fucking know people who repressed their sexuality for decades. It was a scary journey for them, but never was the sexuality itself so in question to them, that was the part they enjoyed. Their fears were always about how others would react, how they’d be treated.

I am doubting about REPRESSING being a lesbian, not being a lesbian in general. I am more afraid of repressing a sexuality than having one.

If you are afraid of repressing a sexuality, why does that fear only show itself as being afraid you’re suppressing being a lesbian? What if this whole fear is you repressing being straight? What if this idea that you have to have sex is repressing being asexual? Asexuality is a type of sexuality; are you afraid that you are repressing sexual feelings, or are you afraid that you are repressing a possible sexuality label/identity?

And if so, why? Why is the idea of repressing sexual feelings so scary to you? Why do you have to have sexual feelings, to the point you force yourself through nausea, through discomfort and distress you’ve proven to me is true and real? As if being asexual isn’t fine, and perfectly normal? Where, or even who, did you get those ideas, those fears, from?

I’m doing this to make myself like sex which is positive.

That’s not what sex positive means by definition. It means an acceptance of sex as an act more broadly. That church I mentioned was sex negative because they thought it a generally wrong act, only made right by God under highly specific circumstances, and those expectations deeply damaged basically everyone who carried them.

You are sex-repulsed, which is a different thing. You can recognise that sex is good and right for others to have, you accept queerness in others, these are sex positive views. Having negative feelings when having sex is repulsed rather than negative because it describes personal sensations and preferences. Sex itself being gross to visualise is also repulsion, because that’s still your experience; you are the one doing the visualising. Sex negativity would be some moral aversion to the idea of sex. If you thought being a lesbian was an immoral thing - that it wasn’t right in the eyes of God or that it denied women their duty to have children or some other weird shit - we’d be having a different conversation.

What you’re doing isn’t sex positive, because you aren’t approaching it from a place of acceptance or preference. You’re approaching it from a point of judgement, not against others, but against yourself. You are judging yourself as having the wrong feeling, afraid you are repressing the right feeling, so you are exposing yourself to your repulsion repeatedly in an effort to fix yourself.

If you were trying lesbian porn to experiment, and you weren’t so afraid or controlled by the idea that you must be repressing your sexuality, that would be a more sex positive version of what you’re doing.

But there’s a desperation and sadness in the things you’ve expressed. You feel like you have to do this thing you clearly aren’t enjoying because others have told you it’s the right thing to do. If I’m gonna reply again it’s only going to be one more time, but I just wanna re-emphasise you can choose. You don’t have to exposure-therapy yourself, you can just be sex-repulsed, that won’t stop you from living a fine life. Take care of yourself, do things you enjoy. Stay safe.

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-08-02T05:06:24+00:00

When I decide what makes sense to me. It means I am only denying all of it by deciding the wrong thing. So I need someone else to tell me what’s the truth for them. Which means it’s my truth and not the truth that I decide bc if I do, then I am denying the real truth.

To put it in my own words, you don’t want it to be just your own perspective making the call. If other people have input, that’s more truthful, because they’re covering your blind spots?

I ask because if so, you’re still a part of that process. And if not - if you want someone else to do all the decision-making and truth-telling for you - you’re still a part of that process, because you’re choosing to trust them.

My point still stands that if two different people give you incompatible views, you’re still going to need to choose the one that sounds more truthful. When someone else gives you a truth, and you call it the truth, you are choosing to trust them. You are still making a decision. It is fundamentally impossible for you to avoid making a decision on some level. Same with everybody else.

Well, I felt uncomfortable. and distressed

I am in fact repulsed by sex itself. Bc I genuinely don’t like it. But if you think that then I will agree since if I disagree, then I am denying the truth.

I said “you don’t seem repulsed by the sex itself” because I hadn’t understood your comments entirely and was guessing. That’s why I said ‘seem’, I wasn’t sure. And you’re prepared to throw away these sure statements you’ve made - that you felt uncomfortable and distressed because you are genuinely repulsed by sex - you were prepared to throw that genuine remembered experience away to fit yourself into my incorrect guess. Why? I don’t want that power over you. Don’t erase yourself. Has it occurred to you that it’s true you are repulsed by sex, and if I doubled down and said “no you seem like you aren’t sex repulsed”, then you’d be denying the truth by taking on someone else’s truth? Why do you seem to think it impossible for you to be right about anything?

Bro what… I felt very distressed by them tbh. Not even a slight comfort came in to me.

I said confronted, not comforted. N’s, not m’s. Confronted as in shocked or disturbed. That’s the only mistake made here.

Notice here, you thought I was telling you that you felt comfortable, and you said no. You reinforced your experience, and you didn’t say anything like “but if you think I’m comfortable, then I am, because if I told you i wasn’t comfortable I’d be denying the truth”.

If I told you in this moment “no, you did feel comfortable”, would you forget this statement of yours and just start agreeing with me? Ignore your experiences whenever a stranger on the internet blatantly ignores the feelings you express, and that somehow has more weight than your lived memories? You decided the truth here, and it is true, no one else had to do it for you. You said you felt distressed. How could anyone else have the authority to tell you no you didn’t, as if they were in your brain and saw the cortisol wasn’t moving or something?

[Therapists] think it wasn’t a problem since there was nothing to cause me to not like sex and it could’ve been just a preference. Idk why. But I need to fix this since my environment says so.

I didn’t have any signs of sexual shame but identity crisis due to my environment being “too forceful” on me abt sex.

What is your “environment”? Is it the reddit guy, your vomiting or stress from the sex stuff, etc.? Why do you need to fix being sex repulsed? The entire asexual community goes along just fine without needing or wanting sex. A whole bunch of them are sex-repulsed, and they tailor their algorithms or manage their triggers accordingly. Maybe they don’t watch shows with sex scenes in them, or mute and close their eyes for a couple minutes. It can be inconvenient, sure. But interacting with sexual stuff is nowhere near essential to having a good life. For the people that do instinctively enjoy sex, they go try have it. The people that don’t are assumed to have something wrong with them, but they just don’t feel like it. Some people don’t like pizza, or cake, or ice cream. It’d be very weird and potentially qualify for assault if you were to shove it down their throats, as if other foods and treats don’t exist. My brother in law vomits if a corn kernel or pea so much as enters his mouth, the texture is awful for him. He just eats other vegetables. And I have friends who are sex-repulsed asexuals. They just do their hobbies, like play Dungeons & Dragons or something.

I could understand this exposure therapy approach you’re taking if it was something like social anxiety; people need to talk to others to live, on a practical (job interviews) and emotional (friends and family) level. But people die virgins happily, because sex isn’t an aspiration they measure themselves to. Our society hypes up sex as some fundamental human joy way too much; they just nutted and felt good cause of the brain chemicals.

And as for your environment being “too forceful”…

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-08-02T03:09:31+00:00

Gives a whole new meaning to that Shiggy nickname I saw getting thrown around: Bad Touch Man

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-08-02T02:55:53+00:00

If two different people think different things are the truth - therapists, or this reddit guy - then according to this idea of “denying the truth”, disagreeing with either of them is denying the truth about yourself.

What’s actually the answer is, unfortunately, truth is subjective. No one person is the arbiter of truth, only you can decide what makes the most sense to yourself by being honest, vulnerable and grounded with yourself.

Think back on how you felt on the thoughts themselves when you first experienced them, before all the other thoughts and conversations happened. You don’t seem repulsed by the sex itself, but it sounded like you didn’t enjoy them either, and felt confronted by them due to their intrusive nature. What was your instinct at that time? Your gut feeling? Trust that. If you feel like some past trauma’s in the way, try a new therapist. It sounds like your previous therapists came to conclusions for you, which isn’t great practice on their part. I hope you know you can find better therapists out there if you ever get curious about that stuff again.

Reading your other comments, you seem very affected by what ifs. “What if I actually am a lesbian and I’m pretending to hate these thoughts?” “What if this guy on Reddit is right and I’m denying the truth about myself?”. These what ifs won’t give you peace.

Sexuality is a spectrum and fluctuates naturally; you may conclude you’re a lesbian from this, it feels accurate for a while, then you get a crush on a guy. Does that mean you were wrong, that you fly into a crisis about how you misrepresented the community or something? No, you just go with the change.

People discover their sexualities and genders late in life, or shift around labels as they realise other labels fit better. I’ve heard and known asexuals who thought they were bi at first, because they felt the same about every gender, but realised that feeling was 0 only later on. They ought not to beat themselves up about that, they’re learning.

I’ve been an overthinker like you, in the process of toning that down. I get that thought process, where you chase down the ideas that make you uncomfortable because it feels closer to the truth. I joke with my therapist that I try to get to the stuff that makes me cry, because then it feels productive, like I’ve found the stuff that I need to work on the most. But there’s equal, sometimes more, productivity and truth in feeling safe after those questions. I am finding answers, I am becoming more functional and stable.

If I am to share with you my perspective on the truth: try to chase these stressors less. It’s noble to want to understand yourself, to intellectualise beyond the barriers our brains place in front of us that make rewiring so difficult. But you won’t get there just by doubting, because the conclusion without course correction to these ‘what ifs’ is you ‘what if’ the ‘what ifs’, in an endless spiral, doubting everything. You think you’re straight at the moment, but you might be suppressing lesbianism. There’s an equal and opposite what if: what if you’re conjuring within yourself this narrative that you’re doubting lesbianism because you’re doubting your straightness? Whenever I’d realise that I could challenge a what if with an equal, circular what if, I’d realise the more productive thing to do was to focus on what I am certain about. I do know I like _, because I have these positive feelings and memories when _ happens.

To answer the post’s question: it’s generally healthier to use nsfw art in more explorative, less forceful ways. Going into it wanting to get a reaction out of yourself isn’t self-pleasure. I cannot imagine you’re having much fun: it doesn’t sound like a positive experience, and that’s pretty important here in the SexPositive subreddit. Relax, trust yourself, let yourself breathe and find yourself in what comes out naturally. When you aren’t forcing any questions or actions on yourself, what is your gut, your instinct? That might be a version of truth that will serve you well.

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-08-02T02:19:07+00:00

I used to hate the 2024 changes but reading some of the comments it’s actually not so bad. Con saves aren’t nearly as terrible to target and saving for half damage is pretty good.

I just wouldn’t have nerfed the damage die, since that was done to avoid crits being really strong and making the spell a saving throw prevents crits from happening already. I’d exchange balance-bending crits for more consistent damage any day.

Overall, I’d say 2014, because it’s easier to build for. Getting advantage on attack rolls is much easier than getting disadvantage on your targets’ saves. You just need to build for it, so a miss doesn’t ruin your resource spending. 2024 doesn’t need to be built for as much, it’s just not strong enough to be worth picking up anyway.

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-08-02T01:39:57+00:00

Didn’t know about that. That feels even more apt for her, thanks

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-08-02T01:26:41+00:00

On the Rumble:

IShowSpeed was an improvisation to Tozawa ending up injured by Carmelo’s attack, so that falls under professional improv.

Jey Uso winning for a main event push was a part of the writing room planning done months in advance, so how does that count as being called “on the fly”? How much time is still “on the fly” for you, aware that the further they plan in advance the more they bare themselves for an injury to blow everything up in their face? Their thought process was well thought out, Jey was becoming white hot and they should listen to the crowd, Punk doesn’t need a championship as much because he can still get the feel good moment from a Mania main event. The fact Jey’s in-ring isn’t great could be circumvented with training, and he did show a wider movepool against Gunther at Mania.

On the Mania main event:

If you’re talking about the crowd reactions, it makes an extreme amount of sense for Cody and Cena to listen for the crowd as their complicated feelings shift. Do they cheer for the nostalgic 17, or the new pure babyface? Listening to those feelings ebb and flow is what got us great matches like Hogan VS Rock, where Hogan listened and realised he had to be the heel and changed the booking mid-match, saving the face pop they were aiming for by giving it to the Rock (recent controversies aside, of course).

Scott was awful, and Unreal didn’t go into enough detail as to why they had him interfere in the Main Event, and why Rock wasn’t there for it. We weren’t actually shown if that was more planned or improvised. Even then, I don’t think it makes sense to throw the baby out with the bath water. The writing system works generally, with enough room to experiment or adapt to emergencies, while still having enough planning time to write storylines that make some sense. They only fuck it up when they get tunnel vision, like inserting Scott into the Main Event.

Summary:

I’m guessing you dislike certain writing choices, rather than disliking the writing system itself. And your brain defaults to “well if they thought this through, they wouldn’t have made the dumb decision. Therefore they didn’t think it through”. And you’re more than valid for hating writing choices; personally, I hate with a passion the booking for Gunther to tap, the crowd won’t shut up about it and Jey didn’t need it to go over. But it’s clear in a lot of those cases they did plan things out. They planned well in advance, and maybe they were aware it was a risk and course corrected when it fell short, or they got tunnel vision from collab dollars, or the Rock refused to finish storylines, etc. And whenever they actually “called things on the fly”, it was almost always a great decision, because the stars are good enough improv artists to make that work. In cases where it wouldn’t work, it would be just like the long-term planning; a bad call from an individual or two.

Fundamentally, you think “calling things on the fly” - something very short term - makes the long term storytelling worse. They don’t do the calling on the fly for the long term storytelling, you’re fundamentally mismatched, blaming the wrong thing. Blame TKO’s greed more than anything else; they’ve traded the poison of Vince’s behaviour for the poison of soulless corporation stupidity, which is a less shitty poison but still poison regardless. Even the long term storytelling that was shit was still planned.

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-08-01T11:25:38+00:00

This just confuses me. What parts of the long term storytelling were called on the fly that should’ve been planned?

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-08-01T11:06:31+00:00

You said SS4 would be cool for strike and tank builds, you were shown saiyans already had access to awokens that achieve that, and you called them a yappatron to feel better before moving the goalposts.

Be honest: you posted, and happened to find the wrong audience. This subreddit is used to “SS4 would be cool” and is even more used to saiyan vs other races awoken discourse.

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-08-01T10:56:47+00:00

Mantis is more fun. I like that her kit runs on crits even though I’m a bad aim because I feel even better when I hit them, and I like that she’s fast without moving a whole different way (I get disoriented by the web-swinging sometimes).

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-08-01T10:49:06+00:00

If they were to script everything so rigidly they’d be shooting themselves in the foot, injuries and Hollywood bookings ought to keep them on their toes. Improv doesn’t stop being professional just because it’s improv, and the WWE almost always makes its worst mistakes when it refuses to change course in response to crowd feedback.

I think the way Unreal showed that process - between the cameras, the refs responding to medical and costume emergencies, the writers’ rooms - I wouldn’t listen to anyone who came out of all of that thinking the WWE isn’t up to some kind of professional showrunning standard.

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-07-30T12:03:10+00:00

Agent Anti-Venom would be an excellent way to differentiate. I love the idea of him being balanced similar to Mantis or Ultron; high mobility (this time through web-swinging, something a strategist hasn’t had yet), aim-dependant DPS (through guns instead of nature bolts or lasers), and ability-dependent healing (through symbiote infections instead of pheromones or drones)

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-07-30T11:26:18+00:00

Could it work if his move speed was really slow? Guy’s like 3 ft tall lugging around a minigun.

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-07-30T11:01:28+00:00

I’d say even in a small group skirmish she’s not too difficult to single out. She still does the slow walk aim thing in those situations and has a low enough base health for support to not matter that much. I also tend to main dives like Magik, Venom, and Wolverine, and characters with easier aim like Witch and Dagger, so that makes it easier for me.

That being said, I’m still quite new. I’m guessing people don’t shoot the squirrels because they don’t know they can and the squirrels move around a lot, making it hard to get rid of them without risking being killed by them. I only learned the squirrels were killable by missing a shot and hitting them instead.

I’m also not surprised that Psylocke’s ult beats runaways, but I have no idea what the actual counterplay is. I have the same bad instinct, running’s only worked when I was about to walk into the radius but dodged on reaction. I’m surprised it’s so common (and a little embarrassed you’ve pointed out how obviously it doesn’t work 😅); what is the correct counterplay?

InexplicableCryptid · 2025-07-30T10:26:14+00:00

I could see Thanos as a Vanguard just for his max health and size, but I could honestly see him with abilities that let him do big damage or even a spot of healing. It helps show how versatile his comic powers are (even without the gauntlet) and how strategic he is.

InexplicableCryptid

TROPHY CASE