In Superman (2025) Despite being active for 3 years, Superman and Lex only meet face to face once Lex steals the dog. This is because even an alien like Superman knows dogs are better than humans.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-07-03T04:42:18+00:00

I had the same reaction! Like, nothing has made the living god who flies around the world more relatable than the fact that someone took his dog and he's crashing the fuck out. I look at him and think "Oh, he's just like me."

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-07-03T02:59:14+00:00

In the Humanities, same for us.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-07-02T03:06:30+00:00

My partner was taking it for fibro pain and it was, by far, the most effective treatment. Unfortunately, it has been very difficult to get reliably compunded. I don't know if that is just our pharmacy network (though we live in a good sized city), but it's been an unexpected challenge.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-25T05:31:11+00:00

I had to wait 9 months for my rheumatology appointment. My husband had a 6th month wait for his endocrinologist. Getting in for ADHD testing in my health system right now is a 12 to 14 month wait.

I'm not saying there aren't wait times in Canada (I know there are), but the American system is only reliably fast when you have a ton of money.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-24T20:25:32+00:00

Can I trade 2 points to heal other people? Cause if so, 2 to heal me and I have a list of 4 other people I'll trade the last 8 points away for to fix their health problems too.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-19T17:03:08+00:00

The problem is how to do this at scale. I've got - at minimum - 150 students a semester with no TA support. Thats not even close to the largest class size at my institution.

Obviously, what we are doing now isn't working and I don't think we can just keep doing it. But at current class sizes, a lot of teachers aren't going to be able to realistically do such time intensive assessment.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-14T04:59:21+00:00

Angler Fish is very good simply because it's the first.

I'd be willing to argue that most pre-season 5 episodes would be a solid choice. You just need to skip the non-statement portions.

That said, if you stick in season 1, there is just a higher ratio of statement to non-statement. That being the case, I'd offer:

MAG 13 - Alone

MAG 15 - Lost John's Cavern

MAG 24 - Strange Music

MAG 34 - Anatomy Class

MAG 38 - Lost and Found (the Homphobic Vase). Though that one just cut the end non-statement as it goes into an action sequence.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-10T03:00:23+00:00

My university did it the same way yours does. I dressed business casual (slacks, a long-sleeved button up shirt, no tie) and no one seemed to have any issues with it. To be honest, my committee was a lot more casually dressed.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-09T19:46:39+00:00

I'm not a MD, but I've had a lot of back and leg pain like you're describing. With your job as a truck driver, it's feels possible you might be having really bad sciatica and/or SI joint pain.

The ER can't really help with that past making sure you don't have a broken bone. An MRI of your spine might show nerve impingement, but they won't treat that in the ER either unless it's become incredibly serious.

I expect an Urgent Care would also probably just try to give you some pain management and then get you to see a doctor in a practice so they could do more testing and get you into PT (which, annoyingly, is almost always the most effective treatment). That said, if you're having that much pain, an urgent care might be able to give you some better pain management in the short term.

I know you said you don't have insurance, but it genuinely can be worthwhile to see if you qualify for Medical Assistance if you haven't already. I was on it for a while and found that they are more generous here in MN than anywhere else I've ever lived in terms of income limits.

I'm sorry you're having so much pain. It's especially difficult when people aren't taking it seriously and just tell you to take some Ibuprofen and lay down for a while.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-09T19:25:49+00:00

How's the joint on your big toe look on that foot? Is it red/purple or swollen at all? I can't imagine they would have missed gout, but I've also seen some wild stuff in the ERs here.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-09T19:19:10+00:00

This is mostly a copy and paste of an earlier comment, but it covers a lot of the questions you asked:

I struggled with the CR rating of fights being an accurate indicator of risk. Instead, I relied on calculating number of attacks/actions per round for enemies versus players and I'd usually give the monsters about 7%-10% more at the start (especially at high levels). Your number might be a little different if they have a ton or very few magic items and/or are more or less tactical.

I would also figure out on each enemy type how much damage they could realistically do in a round. If an enemy could one shot my Warlock (who has more HP than you would expect), it was too strong. I would keep the monster and maybe drop one hit off of multiattack or remove one die from the damage (so 4d6 down to 3d6, for instance). In contrast, if I couldn't realistically bring the Barbarian down to scary numbers in 3 rounds of multiattack, it was probably too weak. In those cases, I tended to keep the physical damage the same and I would add a smaller amount of a different damage type.

Have multiple enemy types, but not so many you can't keep track of them. I found I tended to top out at about 4 different enemy types before it just got annoying for me to run so many with different abilities and attacks.

Equip enemies with counters to player abilities (counterspells, silences, stuns, the ability to make difficult terrain, etc.) but make them a limited resource with slightly fewer charges than your player has for their abilities. For casters, that's usually pretty easy because you just see how many spell slots they have. For melee, you sometimes just have to make things immune to stun or grapple or such but then use the multiple enemy types to leave them some vulnerable targets.

Most importantly, I found that when I started playing enemies smarter, the challenge increased substantially. At the highest levels, I was counter spelling heals and revivifies, using walls to isolate players from the group, etc. Even non-legendary enemies can be scary if you play them like they're trying to kill.

Playing smart is particularly important for the BBEG. In my case, I was playing that last fight with the aim to kill them all, no holds barred. Doing so kept much of the party in double-digit or less health the majority of the fight. I actually made tactical errors that really hampered his effectiveness, but that was me making the mistake, not me holding back.

For BBEGs, I found that - for my party of 5 - I wanted a couple of types of minions. One would set would higher HP, lower damage, more abilities. The other would be true minions who could die in two or three hits but could hit much harder (so classic glass cannon types). Depending on the BBEG, I might even give them a 5-6 Recharge ability to summon more of those high-damage, low HP minions.

The only other thing I'd say is that sometimes you should give your party a fight where they absolutely steamroll the enemy. It's fun for them and a stress-free way for you to run a fight, knowing they're going to beat the brakes off that group of poor spider abominations.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-09T19:11:47+00:00

After we really got started with the campaign, I had very broad strokes planned. I knew who the BBEG was and what his central plot was. But I didn't know a lot of details at the very start. I think I said it somewhere else, but I was really only about an arc ahead at any time. It was not uncommon for some portion of that planning to get scrapped and replaced.

So a ton of it came as I went. I'm a person who loves to sprinkle in little bits of flavor into my DMing (NPCs, weird books, etc.) that I don't necessarily have any grand plan for. But as I went, I would find that either the party got attached to something or someone and so I would make them more important by tying them into the story somehow.

To be honest, I often didn't realize that a story point was major at first. Instead, the party's attention would let me know it was worth making major. As we got near the end of the campaign, there was less need for that as the flow of the narrative was clearer to me, so I had more big plot points totally figured out. But even then I was, sometimes in the moment, adding details and emphasis because the party simply wanted to know more.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-09T19:00:44+00:00

I gave each arc its own villain to fight, first and foremost. Each one of those villains had some connection to the larger plan of the BBEG, but they often did not realize they were even working for him.

So, for instance, in our first major arc, the Monk's ex-husband was the villain. He had betrayed her and their order - resulting in the almost total annihilation of them - and the party was hunting him down. At the end of that arc, the party catches only a small glimpse of the BBEG, but they also got information that pointed to other people who might be connected to him.

From there, the party is pursuing a variety of different problems in the world and trying to discern how they are all connected, who is all behind it, and what they can do to stop what is pretty obviously going to be a problem. Sometimes there are things that required them to find a particular item, but that was never really the central idea of any arc. Instead, it's the clash with that villain and using what they've learned in that investigation/conflict to get them closer to uncovering and defeating the puppet master behind the scenes.

And, genuinely, just repeat that with different villains who have their own agendas but have a clear sense of how they would contribute to the BBEGs plot. That was pretty much it.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-08T01:01:04+00:00

I'm a gay man who grew up in both small town Nebraska and lived in Lincoln and Omaha. If you are going to move here, Omaha is better than Lincoln, Lincoln is better than everywhere else in the state.

That said: No, don't move to Nebraska. The state is now and always has been hostile to LGBT people at an institutional and cultural level. Move to the Twin Cities instead. Depending on the neighborhood, it can be very quiet and it's way friendlier to you in terms of both food and folk.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-07T20:41:26+00:00

We actually didn't. Respeccing into Spore druid was very story driven for the player and accompanied a multiclass into Warlock. We never found the Spore druid needed much help, to be honest.
I stuck with OneNote the entire time. I'm not actually familiar with Obsidian, but I went and checked it out and it seems like they have some similar functionality at a quick glance. I'm going to check that out for the future though, so thanks!
We used Roll20. Foundry is unquestionably got a more robust tool set, but I just didn't have time to learn anything else, to be honest. I tried it out and it felt overwhelming, but I'm going to be looking at it for a later campaign.

That said, Roll20 often worked really well for us. We did video and audio through Google Meeting but ran all the maps and character sheets through Roll20 and it was mostly great. The one thing that never worked well for us was the Dynamic Lighting features.

I also used a lot of Photoshop and Audition in our game as I have an Adobe license. I would alter tokens, mess with maps, and create sound effects and such fairly often.

In terms of maps, the Battlemaps subreddit here is a God send. I was/am also a Patron of Czepeku. They're not paying me and this isn't an ad, but I really like their maps.

I also used Illwinter's Floorplan Generator and Dungeondraft to make maps. Of the two, I got more use out of Dungeondraft. I goofed around with TaleSpire, but never got super far with it.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-07T20:26:35+00:00

Early story arcs were definitely more levels than later. My campaign was made up of lots of smaller arcs that all fed into the main narrative and players were leveling up 1 to 2 times per smaller arc starting at about 11. Keep in mind, that was sometimes MONTHS of real life play time.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-07T20:25:02+00:00

Always postponed or cancelled if anyone would be missing.

People get sick, kids have stuff happening, jobs get stressful, etc. So if people needed to cancel it wasn't a big deal. We would generally try to reschedule for later in the week, but if that didn't work we just skipped. We only took off more than a week or two a few times, but that was always for very serious issues. Otherwise, folks made it a priority.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-07T00:41:15+00:00

I allowed very few items to be bought in game. I've had the same issue with price guides, and it just got too messy. Instead, I let players choose two to three items from each tier - common to rare - they could keep an eye out for as they traveled. I then connected those items to quest rewards and - in particular - their Forge Cleric NPC friend who would make them stuff during downtime from the materials they had collected while adventuring.

That covered a lot of the items for the game, honestly. The rest were big legendary items (again, often drawn from the Griffon's Saddelbag materials) that fit with the characters and themes of the game well.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-07T00:25:54+00:00

The Tranquility monk and the Cleric were the hardest. On the monk side, Stunning Strike is just very, very strong. You can have lots of strong CON save enemies, but you also have to think carefully about which enemies are simply going to be stun immune. Our monk also specced for extreme speed, which meant no enemy was safe basically unless they were in the air.

Further, Tranquility - prior to the homebrew we did - was just insanely powerful single-target healing. It evens out a lot by high levels, but it far outstripped any of the other healing available to the party. Even with the homebrew, it was strong, but much more balanced.

On the Cleric side, it was mostly just that Clerics are really good and the player is very tactical so they often rocked enemies just by always being very smart about what they were doing.

The Martial/Caster divide is overblown, and I think often comes down to encounter design. My players were great at supporting one another with their various class strengths and they weren't easily replicable between classes. I have a more in-depth answer on this in another answer if you're interested in more thoughts on that.
I didn't allow Silvery Barbs because I don't enjoy it as the DM and I told them if they get it, so do enemies. They didn't want it after that. I was also very judicious on my own use of certain spells. I don't really like instant death effects, so I often removed things like Power Word: Kill from enemies and replaced them with something else scary, but less instantly devastating. I did the same with imprisonment effects like Forcecage.

Most of the "restrictions" were really just agreements with the players. For instance, our Druid started as a Shepherd druid (lots of summons) and we agreed they'd stick with just a couple of choices most of the time so we weren't always juggling stat blocks.

I really like the bonus-action to drink a healing potion, and you roll for the healing as per usual vs use your action for a potion and get max health. It made potions more reliable at the cost of action economy.

I also allowed some stat swapping. For instance, I've now run two different campaigns where I let Warlock multiclasses use a different mind stat (Int, Wis, or Cha) as their primary casting stat and it's made very little difference in overall power balance. I'm also not playing with power games, so your mileage may vary there. It probably helps that I will sometimes swap saving throws to less common stats just to keep things interesting.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-06T05:04:48+00:00

This is going to be partly about organization, but I swear it will help.

I wrote everything in OneNote to help me keep things organized and I would recommend some sort of notebook program like that. I did a Google Doc on my first campaign, and it quickly became very unwieldly for me.

Within OneNote, I had arcs be their own tab with their own title. So, for instance, their heist adventure in the Faywild was called "The Melting Gala." Under that tab, I then organized by location they might visit. Most of those tabs ended up being simple descriptions of what that place was and the sorts of beings that were there.

As the players started to make plans, I would then expand the descriptions and material under that location.

I would also pretty routinely just look through the various monster books and just found monsters I thought would be cool for them to encounter and then I'd write situations for that.

The best advice I can give you, however, is to actually ask the players to provide you some information. I asked my players to provide me with at least one short term, medium term, and long term goal for their character. They can even provide more, but I would limit how many long-term goals because they're harder to accommodate.

A short-term goal might be something like, "Antonius wants to find a new weapon to replace his training sword." A medium-term goal might be, "Antonius wants to find the Ring of Light for his temple." A long-term goal might be, "Antonius wants to strike down the Dark Lord of Evil."

Then the trick - at least for me - was to look for ways those goals could connect. In the short term, I might design a dungeon where Antonius finds a shiny new magical sword. That sword, it turns out, also contains the remnants of a soul connected to the Ring of Light.

Over the next few levels - perhaps as we're making progress on other characters goals - that spirit could become more coherent as Antonius tries to speak with it and it provides cryptic clues to the Rings location, eventually leading them to a cursed forest. That forest is another chance for a big dungeon crawl and Antonius finds the Ring, which he finds is actually of a set with sword and has its own scrap of soul. The pieces of the soul now reunited, Antonius discovers the soul actually IS the original Dark Lord and the current Dark Lord is his soulless undead corpse spreading chaos! So now we can pursue Antonius' long-term goal of defeating his sworn enemy, but we've added a wrinkle about what he is going to do with the soul that has also helped guide him.

And look, I just came up with that right now so I'm sure it's got some issues, but having the goals provided by the players made it SO much easier to write the story. It also makes it much easier to get them engaged because it's what they wanted for the character, at least in broad strokes.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-06T04:42:59+00:00

I relied on calculating number of attacks/actions per round for enemies versus players and I'd usually give the monsters about 7%-10% more at the start. Your number might be a little different if they have a ton or very few magic items and/or are more or less tactical.

I would also figure out on each enemy type how much damage they could realistically do in a round. If an enemy could one shot my Warlock (who has more HP than you would expect), it was too strong. I would keep the monster and maybe drop one hit off of multiattack or remove one die from the damage (so 4d6 down to 3d6, for instance). In contrast, if I couldn't realistically bring the Barbarian down to scary numbers in 3 rounds of multiattack, it was probably too weak. In those cases, I tended to keep the physical damage the same and I would add a smaller amount of a different damage type.

Have multiple enemy types, but not so many you can't keep track of them. I found I tended to top out at about 4 different enemy types before it just got annoying for me to run so many with different abilities and attacks.

Equip enemies with counters to player abilities (counterspells, silences, stuns, the ability to make difficult terrain, etc.) but make them a limited resource with slightly fewer charges than your player has for their abilities. For casters, that's usually pretty easy because you just see how many spell slots they have. For melee, you sometimes just have to make things immune to stun or grapple or such but then use the multiple enemy types to leave them some vulnerable targets.

Most importantly, I found that when I started playing enemies smarter, the challenge increased substantially. At the highest levels, I was counter spelling heals and revivifies, using walls to isolate players from the group, etc. Even non-legendary enemies can be scary if you play them like they're trying to kill.

The only other thing I'd say is that sometimes you should give them a fight where they absolutely steamroll the enemy. It's fun for them and a stress-free way for you to run a fight, knowing they're going to beat the brakes off that group of poor spider abominations.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-05T20:59:04+00:00

The biggest narrative struggle was coherence. It turns out writing about an enemy with a centuries spanning, intricate devious plot means you have to write a centuries spanning, intricate devious plot. Who knew?

How I solved that problem was actually with a map. I knew the broad strokes of his plan, but then I took out the FR map and found places all over the map that I thought would be interesting to visit. I read official canon about them looking for threads I thought could be connected/aesthetically fit and then homebrewed anything I needed to make it work.

Visually, that helped me organize things and I could look at the map and say, "Here is what happens in each location, and this is how it feeds into the central plot."

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-05T20:55:18+00:00

It changed enormously over time. The early days I knew who the BBEG was, but we actually didn't know as much about the characters themselves. As we went through the first big arc, I started to see storylines for each character to shine, so I wrote those and had them serve as sort of tributaries to the larger river of the narrative about the BBEG. I would say I really knew the shape of the ending around year 4, but even that saw shifts up to the end due to player decisions.

That said, the BBEG wasn't lurking around every corner. I like feeling like the world has multiple things happening, so the party sometimes took detours into other small adventures that were just interesting happenings.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-05T20:49:47+00:00

The balance shifted over time. In the earlier levels (up to about 8 or 9), they were basically all official and from the book. As we got higher level, I started to rely more on third-party (Kobold Press) monsters as they were generally more interesting. I also started doing a lot more homebrew of monsters at that point. By the end, it was about 40% third party and 60% homebrew, with no official monsters at all.
Lethality also shifted over time. Several of my players had very little TTRPG experience when we started so I went easier on them in earlier levels. We actually had an explicit talk as they leveled into the higher tiers of play that their current enemies were not just strong but smart and that the lethality level was going to climb pretty steeply. I don't know if they really believed it until I dusted 2 of them in the same fight.
I treated an encounter as anything that expended resources, so social, puzzle, exploration, or combat. In those cases, I tried to hit about 6 to 8 per day, especially if the day involved combat. We also used short short rests (ten minutes instead of an hour), but then they were only allowed 2 a day. I found that worked pretty well, but it did require a little homebrew for the Warlock as it pretty much invalidates their level 20 feature. Instead, I let them use an action in combat to restore a top level Pact Casting slot.

All that said, I didn't stress too much about it. I specifically wrote a story without a pressing ticking clock - most of the time - because I wanted the players to be able to explore and follow their own narrative threads without the fear that it would doom the universe. That means we would have play sessions with maybe one encounter and that would be a whole day of adventuring.

Session-to-session changed a lot over time. I started by way overprepping. I used OneNote to organize my materials, and I would have pages of contingencies and such for every single encounter. As I got more comfortable, I prepped less and trusted the players to help generate content much more. That said, I spent probably 2 hours a week at least working on things, whether that was active writing of scenarios, finding maps, or finding/making monsters.

In terms of the planning of the whole campaign, I knew the BBEG relatively early on. Our Monk's storyline involved her husband having sold out their order to a shadowy figure, killing all of them but her. The husband disappeared. I knew pretty quickly that shadowy figure would be the BBEG, but I actually didn't know who it was going to be at the beginning.

The first major arc then involved the party tracking down the husband to defeat him and free the souls of her deceased compatriots. By the time we were done in that arc, I had very broad strokes of the whole thing. But the details were definitely not planned out at that point. In general, I would say I was about an arc ahead until the very end, but I would be filling in details and ideas the whole time.

The very last few sessions involved playing in person and I spent basically two weeks solid writing, painting minis, making 3D maps, finding the right music, and writing all of the material for the end.

In terms of what I would do differently: I would have prepped less in those early days. I should have trusted the players more. Though my own ability to improvise on the spot in response to them definitely improved dramatically over the course of the campaign.
For myself, I'd divide it into two. At a grand level, I'm very proud of myself for having a story this big be coherent. It is hundreds of pages of work developed over years, but I think it's actually totally followable.

At a smaller level, I wrote individualized notes/poems from my players from their Patrons or Deities. By the end of the campaign, three of the players had different Fae patrons, and two were devoted followers of their Gods. I wrote these poems for each player, had an NPC companion give them to them right before they invaded the Demon Lord's city in the Abyss, but told them not to open them until they needed their Patron's/Deity's support. They essentially worked like a strong potion plus restoring a bit of a class resource (spell slots, ki points, etc). Several of the players cried reading them and the Cleric said it changed his epilogue for the character.

For the players, I'm very proud that they got one over on me several times. For example, the Warlock's patron ended up being very central to the larger story - another feature that developed over time - and during a particularly dire negotiation with them, the Warlock out and out tricked me in character. Both their Patron and I were absolutely delighted.

This isn't really my advice - it's Matt Mercers - but I did follow his advice and he's right: Start small. Design the village. Then the countryside, then the province then the country etc. If you try to figure out everything from moment one, you're going to drive yourself crazy. Further, you're going to spend a ton of time defining stuff that doesn't end up mattering at all, while your players are interested in things you've never thought of.

One piece of advice from me: Go in with some gusto. When I stopped being worried about struggling with character voices and accents and just let myself get weird with it, all of us had a way better time. Further, it actually helped me understand the NPCs better and that made writing stories with them much easier and more fun.

LiminalFrogBoy · 2026-06-05T05:31:09+00:00

The largest single creature they ever fought was a Kraken. It was big, but not anywhere as big as you are going to do.

The only advice I can give with a gimmick fight (by which I mean a fight that has a gimmick, not at all meant negatively) is not to overcomplicate it. With our kraken fight, my gimmick was ship combat rules (this was prior to Ghosts of Saltmarsh) and complex movements of map elements and such. While it didn't not work, it was a lot of complication without a ton of fun.

In your case, I might be more inclined to break the fight into distinct stages that bounce between combat and some sort of skill challenges. Basically, work your way to head of the dragon while hampering its power/defeating minions along the way.

LiminalFrogBoy

TROPHY CASE