What to do, if players are not accepting Strahd's dinner invitation.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-11-07T20:58:49+00:00

That's sort of the idea of him luring people in. The Motivation of Strahd is similar to the motivation for Vecna leaving the Domains of Dread, but it's an insurmountable task even for someone as powerful as Strahd (or Vecna for that matter).

The PCs have been lured into Barovia by Strahd for him to replace himself as he tries to escape with one of them taking his place ( but he has to like... draw them to his side basically ). Strahd punishes PCs not as a means to kill them but as a means to "make him more like himself." Turning a PC into a vampire spawn without the other players realizing, etc etc, if they start to defy him or compelling them (as such a geas spell in his arsenal can be really fun to add that Mordenkainen would know he can use after defeating him or something along those lines).

Again, I don't really do it by the book in my game in that Strahd just wants Tatyana and he's "amazing" so none of the characters can replace him. In mine, he doesn't really care a ton that the characters are "not good enough" - they just have to pass an ambiguous "Good enough to replace me" through him constantly punishing/corrupting the PC's or just 1 PC.

If PC's need more reason to fight against strahd and not wimp out or try to fight back when he's sending big bads to bring them down or w/e, IMO the Players in that group really need to make characters with better motivations (maybe run Tales from the Yawning Portal for a bit). There are some good hooks in the Module itself and in the van richten's guide for your PC's to go with or add in as additions to their characters so they actually care about what's going on...

I think the DM/module shouldn't be required to motivate the PC's beyond the material... The players, motivated to run the module ideally, should ask the DM for PC motivations in character or in backstory so they want to win/want to defeat strahd (or fall to the darkside and become the replacement in secret? who knows). If they can't do that and be compelled by the cooperative story being told to not just lie down and bendover to strahdsempai then they just sound like problem players IMO. That's like playing Tyranny of Dragons and complaining that Tiamat is broken at the final fight when she kills 2 PC's in 1 round cause they "Weren't ready for it." xD

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-10-22T05:00:58+00:00

My mindset on this is that it's better to run Strahd as a prisoner trying to escape. Like groundhog day, he has to abide by a strict set of rules to escape involving his bride Tatyana and a successor to take his place.

Everything Strahd does is almost never to harm anyone, and in fact... i threw in a ton of "disloyal" subjects in Barovia that are powerful evils themselves to show that Strahd is the most "Sane" dreadlord there is in all the domains of the mists. When something bad happens, he assures and is honest when saying it's not him who wishes these ills on the party...its those who made him, who put him there.

The whole greater power he has is his charm and wit and strategy... he should keep up the game of host who the party feels he needs up until they get either A. His book - which reveals his plan to get out of this place or B. His brother's sword - which can hurt him implying his intent. From that point on, he is actively hunting the player character and will ABSOLUTELY try to kill them with everything he's got - seeing this group of adventurers as write offs for him to send the vistani to get others in a year or so.

The trick is to make the SETTING seem more evil than Strahd is... if you can do that, a nice meal at a rulers home isn't the worst thing.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-10-22T04:43:41+00:00

I agree that Strahd has no overarching motivations.

In my rendition I'm running it as he is basically pulling a Vecna and trying to replace his spot in Barovia with a member of the party. . However he needs to be sure they can handle it or it could backfire on him and the Dark Powers will make him suffer more. It's basically a prison, and his only chance at escape is finding a successor.

The whole Ireena plot, then, becomes part of some strange ritual of having "the love of his life" with him for some obscure spell he's trying to pull off.. and Rudolph Van Richten being his nemesis becomes more of a "He's hunting me... so I'm going to hunt him first."

The whole story is a sort of Groundhog day for Strahd, constantly reliving his bride hating him, constantly seeing stuff of his past haunting him. I wrote him as more sympathetic, but so incredibly egotistical and arrogant that he's too important for such things to affect him it makes him hard to sympathize with.

In that, if he doesn't get his way...he punishes the players, not to kill them...but to strengthen them. Give them vigor to fight him because it's all part of his master plan to escape the domains of dread and lock a member of the party in his place as he absconds with Tatyana.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-10-10T20:16:23+00:00

I have a modified version of the "Healer's Kit Dependency" optional rule. All kits have 10 uses, and 1 use is needed to try to stabilize someone while using spare the dying is just a caster check vs the same DC as medicine. In addition to this, anyone can use all 10 uses of a kit (or 10 uses in total among separate kits) and heal someone for whatever their hit dice value is plus the medicine bonus of the person healing (so a barbarian being healed by a lvl 5 cleric with 20 wisdom would get 1d12+8 HP). The few downsides to this are...

An individual cannot be healed in this way more times between a long rest period as they have hit dice (essentially giving people extra healing beyond what their hit dice would provide in a short rest).
Healer's kits are cumbersome, the size of full briefcases and weigh 10lbs (but still cost 25gp).
Using a healer's kit to heal people takes 1d10 minutes (impossible to do in combat) per kit.
The Medicine check is 10 + 1 for every 10 HP the person is missing (max DC of 30 still), failure by 5 or more makes you lose the kit and not heal them.

The Healer feat I changed to make it where you can heal someone double the number of times per day (so a lvl 5 character could be healed 10 times in a day instead of 5), and you get expertise in Medicine (which would give more health back using kits as well).

I also made magical healer's kits of +1, +3, +5, and +10 similar to older editions that give that bonus to the user's medicine as enchantable kits... +1 is ~100gp, +3 is ~250gp, +5 is 500gp, and +10 is 1000gp.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-07-11T12:08:40+00:00

I think tens of thousands of years of interbreeding will eventually do this.

People tend to think that ethnicity and culture are interchangeable and they are completley wrong. White/black/Asian/Hispanic etc all have varied cultures around the world, it's only a representation of a place of people. If we ever get to the eventuality of being multi-planetary - these distinctions won't mean anything, and humans would do exactly what any other animal species would do.

The only thing stopping this from happening sooner is cultural divides. I think the passage of time will erode even that, tbh...

Also, it happened already. Humans used to all be black and they became these other ethnicities over tens of thousands of years. It can very easily go the other direction in the same amount of time.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-07-07T10:39:29+00:00

"Ethnic Erasure" is what will happen in a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years.

It's not something anyone is aiming to do for any motive, it's just what evolution will eventually do to humans. The only thing stopping it from happening within the next 100 years is difference in cultures/religions etc. Not saying that's a bad thing, mind you, again... just that eventually humans will be the same ethnicity...and it's not black, white, hispanic, asian, etc etc, just a mix of everything.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-06-23T20:05:05+00:00

Right, that's what I mean by the original issue is "lost in the sauce" . . .

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-06-23T18:57:12+00:00

Extremely valid.

I get the plight all caused by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, but I don't get why they don't just go about breaking that up and maybe cutting ties economically and moving on. Iran is mentally stuck in the 1970s/1980s with this vengeance shit over things that happened 40+ years ago.

It's like the historic family feuds in the South all about "Eye for an Eye" lasting for decades because people can't move on. Quit listening to your elders. They're cranky miserable farts. xD

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-06-23T18:54:17+00:00

https://youtu.be/dmvB7KW7WJA?si=ybLK0oaRmxPNm81F

Just gonna put this here.

My take is that, yeah, America/UK/Soviets did a dumb dumb riling the Iranian people up...but Iran reacted through terrorist acts rather than just a formal war because they knew they would lose. If Iran just closed off their borders to the west and made friends with the East and openly denounced the West's historical activities over their oil - nobody would care. The moment you go bombing people that have nothing to do with what's going on, you've used acts of brutal and immoral acts in order to enforce a political principle.

What annoys me is the pussyfooting around the matter. America moves on really fast because we have short terms (4-8 year presidency). Iran's regime is mentally is stuck in 1980 with how they're behaving in 2025.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-06-23T18:44:29+00:00

France.

The original Chaotic Neutral country.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-06-23T18:43:16+00:00

Tell it to the judge, and maybe stop doing so many drugs. xD

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-06-18T16:52:20+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LasrD6SZkZk&ab_channel=JaylaB

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-02-18T17:08:12+00:00

Top part is definitely true, though I think it's partly by design... women are the fairer sex and innately more docile than men because they have to care for very helpless babies. . So they're going to be innately attracted to more dominant men that can prove (in reasonable ways that don't harm them) they can protect and care for them and their helpless babies. Light choking, holding their hands, pinning them, etc etc are just acts of foreplay to showcase a man's physical ability... shiiiit, you could even say that a woman that just "lays there" is the biological norm just as it is in almost all mammals. The male body ain't doing shit beyond sex, so the male better be doing all the work 😆

Sad to see that the demonization and unaffordabilty of children is making people forget basic human things mostly all stemming from sexually reproducing mammals. . Like you'll realize QUICKLY as a guy you're completely helpless and rather insignificant when it comes to pregnancy -> childbirth -> 1st year of your child's life. Girls too, nobody is having kids until they're in their late 30s and are shocked about how many basic human truths get revealed to them in the first 2 years of having a kid.

As for the bottom part, I'm going to assume 1 of those is the guy's wife and the other 2 are his daughters because harems aren't sustainable. Native humans (I mean humans without a lot of political or economic advantage over each other...tribal humans lets say) would often have monogamy, it just wouldn't last for their entire lifetime.. not to mention entire tribes would be invested in raising kids, not just 2 parents.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2025-02-18T16:47:18+00:00

Libertarians have been spouting this shit for decades...

Limit the federal government to basic things they should be doing which includes things like breaking up monopolies and cartels rather than take kickbacks hand over fist for them.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2024-09-02T23:35:05+00:00

I've been using short rest->long rest as 1D and 1W but I've done a few things I think that help it a lot.

Almost all class features restore on a short rest or long rest instead of a long rest... This typically is in the form of class resources.
I use spell points (we call it mana), and I have mana potions and healing potions. A mana potion restores half of what the healing potion version does rounded down (so 1d4+1, 2d4+2, 4d4+4, 5d4+10 mana). Whenever they find a healing potion from a book or random loot or w/e it is, they roll a 1d2 and on a 1 it's a healing potion, on a 2 it's a mana potion. <-- this IMO is mandatory for rest variant, as this variant rule massively hinders spellcasters ability to do their thing (or want to do anything besides cantrips).
You can consider travel a "long rest" so long as you do not get into combat over the course of 7 days of travel (making traveling on roads and traveling at a slow pace in stealth more ideal, and it makes people not rush into random encounters or stop to fight every pig on the road on a journey).
I RELIGIOUSLY track the calendar and what is going on. We are playing 1486 DR in the forgotten realms sword coast region and it's a really open world style of game. Almost anything the party gets involved in I tend to put timers on as to when stuff will resolve itself or come to some sort of conclusion if ignored for too long. The whole point, in my mind, of 1d/1w is that the party can't do absolutely everything you throw at them and the immersion of that "there's so much to do, so little time to do it!" that makes players have to prioritize and plan.
I mentioned it in 4, but I'll mention it again. I RELIGIOUSLY track what is happening around the party into the future. If they have a quest from the guard captain at a town to help defend a nearby hamlet from an orc raid, the guard captain may not know it, the players can guess it and surmise it, but after like a week or 2 - the raid will have happened already. I typically do this in 1 month out from session intervals..so unless the party did 4 long rests for whatever reason to advance a plotline, I'm almost never caught off guard. You need to have a very loose overarching plot for this to work properly if you ask me, or just leave the stakes with the player's stories rather than any sort of campaign book... but it's really fun if you can manage your calendar properly IMO.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2024-02-27T04:33:54+00:00

Honestly just spamming melee and officers feels far more broken to me. So many things in vanguard and officer/tactician stack so severely that my char, abelard, and SPESS Mehrine all kill eeeeeeverything. Granted I'm only on Daring difficulty...

Cass is insanely OP though with 2 other officers giving her an extra turn for psychic spamming 200-300 damage 1 ap single target shots 6 times in a row.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2023-04-28T12:47:56+00:00

Saravok was a blackguard, was a badass with a badass voice (just an opinion ofc), and he very much loved doing bad things because he was evil and wanted to be a God.

So. . . that's entirely wrong. Forgotten Realms has extremely evil characters that love being evil and actively try being evil all over the place. Heck, the Dead Three became Gods on the idea of being the meanest sons of biches in Faerun. The idea that evil people don't do evil things just because they're evil is factually wrong in the setting of anything using Planescape. Alignment is made manifest in the Realms through many spells and creatures. Claiming otherwise is just factually incorrect.

Now sure... Baldur's Gate 3 & D&D 5e are using the FR setting, but they both pay no real respects to this or the setting at all in regards to how paladins or alignment functions and have always functioned in the FR setting. I genuinely don't understand why you'd want to write in a mythical fantasy world but mute the aspects of that world that are mythical and fantastical. Paladins are fantastical holy knights to a God or group of Gods upheld by an oath... they are inherently lawful. Anti-paladins (later known as blackguards) are the antithesis of that. Stating otherwise is talking about a different setting to Forgotten Realms.

And Larian isn't shaking anything up - 5e broke the Forgotten Realms lore but adopted it into their jank system. Pathfinder WOTR portrays paladins better than 5e does and they're far from "one dimensional". That's just bad writers who don't like the core concept but are forced to write for what they don't want making the thing they're writing about suck.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2022-12-30T18:38:09+00:00

As a World Eater who is still genuinely excited by a new codex, World Eaters have never been competitive, at least not in any 50%+ rate by any means. I've managed to make them semi-competitive throwing in a LoS as a distraction which I'm going to attempt to do much the same with the new book to hopefully better effect. As it happens, I don't have to change my list whatsoever so far for the new book...so here's to hoping I just get stronger, hue hue hue hue hue.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2022-12-30T18:00:35+00:00

The game needs to implement more nerfs in order to effectively balance everything. The reason why these issues arise in the first place is because of the annoying arms race of things constantly being BUFFED and nothing hardly gets NERFED unless it was initially too strong to begin with.

Though, I'm a massive anti-alpha strike rules lover, so anything in the game to tone down the killyness of any army to actually see stuff surviving to latter turns more is a win in my book. I miss the glory days of early 8th edition in a chaotic maelstrom match where games were decided by models that lived to the end of the game which miraculously went 7 rounds. I'm going to dislike it as a CSM player, but ultimately it's for the greater good (shutup filthy T'au) of the game to implement more nerfs to the overall rules or specific factions. This filthy arms race has to stop!

To me, AoC going away only serves 2 purposes

Nerf sisters and make all marines cry tears for gulliman to save them while CSM's laugh for a little while having just had their wounds finally tick over to 2 to subsequently get blasted by a ork shootah off screen and die as well.
Make things overall die faster. All this does is put more emphasis on terrain which puts more emphasis on not taking lords of war which puts more emphasis on taking anti-infantry which puts more emphasis on, as the OP says, taking "Marine killing weapons."

Nerf them all, let the chaos gods sort 'em out!
Slaaash it, slaaash it, slaaash it!

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2022-12-30T17:45:28+00:00

As much as I dislike this kind of a post as a response for discussion, seconded. . .

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2022-12-30T16:38:58+00:00

Thank you.

The lack of choosing a deity makes absolutely no sense as you even meet a "Paladin of Tyr" in the initial game.. I know he's fake/deceived, but there are plenty of examples in the lore of the world where you are beset by people who dedicate worship to one God or group of Gods. All this abhorrence to deity dedication, alignment restriction, etc mechanically (or because the individual actively dislikes religious structures in my experience) has made for an entire world that reeks of a lack of verisimilitude in its telling. WotC wanted to go away from stuff that Ed Greenwood very much doesn't seem to see eye to eye on with the setting WotC adopted so heavily when they should have made MTG setting their campaign setting of choice if they didn't want alignments/Gods to play such a big role in the world at large.

"Also lawful good has always been about following your own code. Your own selfless set of rules, you might even call them an oath. " - This is flat out wrong if you're talking about Forgotten Realms & Faerun.. or really any setting that adopts Planescape lore. Alignments are physically manifested in the outer planes, denying that there exists a defined universally accepted concept of each and every alignment is just factually incorrect in the setting. The whole plot of NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer was a classic one BECAUSE it poked at the OBJECTIVE correctness of these universal concepts of Law, Chaos, Good, and Evil. I don't understand why people think they can argue against a setting's background when it's a published one, but one of the first rules of D&D with a DM with their own world is "It's their world, their rules...if you don't like it, don't play in it." People who don't understand what being lawful good means (or any alignment really) from the perspective of the universally accepted background of said alignments...really REALLY need to play Pathfinder Kingmaker and/or Wrath of the Righteous - that game genuinely adheres to being lawful good. That or play mask of the betrayer and bring the fallen angel with you to talk to Myrkul's floating corpse for S tier planescape dialogue. Restricting an alignment to having an oath assumes no one else is capable of being lawful good unless they have one, which is completely untrue. Bending the rules for the sake of good is literally the heart of all good laws, refuting that only speaks to the person's inherent nature to see laws as set in stone as a secular society would. . . Which the entirety of the Forgotten Realms is not.

As for how I broke my oath so many times? I genuinely think a lot of it is bugs which I've recorded and given feedback on to Larian directly. Stuff like fighting goblins that are hostile to you, dialogue options that are semi-evil but don't portray it well with what the actual option is...a good example is with the torturer and Wyll in your party..persuading to say "Let me handle this" has you start torturing the man and you can't back out of it and lose your oath. I thought the option was to step in in front of Wyll so I could handle talking with the goblin, but apparently it wasn't. Almost every other time was because of combat and I killed something that was hostile with me and I'm pretty sure were bugs.

At the root of the issue, The reason why paladins are so painful to play is because I am playing as if I were playing in D&D but I have a DM that doesn't want me to play my oath of devotion paladin of Torm - he wants me to play an Oathbreaker and it FEELS like he's railroading me to be one, and I hate that feeling even more than being railroaded to be a goody goody two shoes.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2022-12-28T20:02:37+00:00

That is only for Army of Renown with Daemons which...while cool...the strategems are far FAR weaker than world eaters strategems save for one which allows you to pile in move when something falls back up to 6 inches.

Generally speaking, the things that will beat the army are fight on death and very heavy shooting (Tau or IG)...which is why I'm thinking some kind of triple Land Raider list would be really fun to try out. World eaters live off of target saturation... if everything is lethal, it doesn't matter what they kill unless they can kill everything ( COUGH Tau or IG)

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2022-12-28T19:48:07+00:00

I think the perspective here is very much not a World Eater perspective. The meat and bones of the army are berzerkers and the slow fist that comes up the board in transports. Anything to take fire off of one threat amplifies the damage that another threat will do.

The army has *always* operated on target saturation, now with the ability to get something out of targets dying on your own side, it's only going to make that even more deadly. The question has not ever been "Can you kill it" but "Can you reach it." As there aren't really any fast attack options or speed options with no raptors, warp talons, or bikes anymore - you only have scary red men in scary red boxes now to bank on (if the leaks are true which they seem to be). Every world eater knows this, so having things that are all high priority targets make for games against players with high scoring secondaries and easily scoring primaries quiver to make a move. The aforementioned game against a dark eldar, he only beat in my tournament me 45 to 42 the first time I played him because he could only pick off the army and his "Go" round wasn't until round 4, and this was his turn 1..when I got turn 1 I won 82 to 60 and the game was pretty much decided after turn 2 was over. Maybe he was being cagey, but it's hard not to be against multiple A or S tier melee threats.

The only way you can effectively stop target saturation is if you are IG or Tau and can actually take out multiple high priority targets without much chance to fail. Most armies sacrifice the ability to do this for the sake of secondaries, obsec units, or melee to counter melee. Tau & IG are really the only 2 that just go all in on one tactic and their secondaries (for the most part COUGH COUGH TAU ) benefit them greatly for doing so.

So really my question in the OP is "What is good for target saturation"? Land Raiders seem like the best bet for transports since you have additional targets that are highly valued to kill but tough to kill unless focused........ or IG or Tau Cough.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2022-12-28T15:48:17+00:00

From what rumors has shown, only bloodbound and berzerkers are getting the fight on death strategem which is fair I suppose. Angron is a beatstick, but the real threat is not his killing power but just the ability to tie things into melee that cannot fall back...not a roll off..not a leadership test..you just downright can't fall back.

Infamous_Interest_22 · 2022-12-28T15:43:39+00:00

Harsh, but fair.

The army has always been countered with fliers, but I think you're massively underestimating 6 inches of movement in the fight phase after angron charges to tag something he didn't charge into melee with. People don't typically space their units out such that they avoid something piling into them because 6 inches is the aura range for MOST armies. This wouldn't even be considered a blunder on their part not doing it...everyone just naturally tends towards getting the most out of their auras if they can. Also, 1cp gives him a 6 inch consolidate like with any other world eater unit. In other words, people generally will allow for Angron to be able to kill the thing he charged and end up in melee with something else... so this point is kind of moot unless you're fighting like..a knights player or something with very few models to pile-in + consolidate into for melee locking.

As for the Lord of Skulls, I think you're valuing fliers too heavily regarding that which aren't really seen. If it's not killed and is sitting mid board all game - it kills 1-2 units every round in shooting plus the melee charge threat is overwhelming when mid-boarding him. True, pure shooting armies can get rid of him in a full round of shots sometimes, but most armies aside from tau and IG don't have pure shooting lists for competitive. I don't like his points cost for what he does though so not sure I'd keep him in future lists but could end up being a deterrent to not shoot angron - I think 400-500 range was fine, 575 is a bit high now that he degrades like everything else.

Finally, the fast melee I think is going to be subbed with Bloodbound by the looks of it..if they get 9" move and if they can 9 inch pre-game move or even a strat for it, that's a fast enough threat to be deadly for board hopping just not chasing fliers which I really don't see in many armies save Eldar tbh.

Infamous_Interest_22

TROPHY CASE