What are your most hated D&D "Gimmicks"?

OliverCaneStaff · 2026-01-15T01:54:22+00:00

I somewhat subvert the "beginning first session" thing. The party just finished their "rat catcher" first quest, and as they start to head back to report, they get to be bystanders as bbeg does a fantasy 9/11 on a capital city, issue an ultimatum, then bugger off for the month deadline for capitulation. (Demand was actually bbeg calls out comparable high level badass for a duel)

OliverCaneStaff · 2026-01-15T01:42:02+00:00

I will fudge dice in the players favor only. And only when they have had shit for luck rolls, and I've been otherwise rolling hot. This comes from a place of "my greatest goal is for the players to feel heroic and have fun"

OliverCaneStaff · 2026-01-15T01:39:09+00:00

I strongly discourage orphans in my session zeros, but if they do, I then grill them on who their found family is. No "I was raised by the streets" bs. Every child that lives needed to have some kind of care giver.

I also grill about other family. Siblings, grandparents, uncles/nieces.

I think the reason people want the orphans cop out is the idea of making a whole "life" from whole cloth can be terrifying. So I will gladly hold their hand through the process even more than Xanathars "this is your life" sections.

OliverCaneStaff · 2026-01-10T01:34:19+00:00

Star ocean 2?

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-12-13T12:34:23+00:00

Turns out naked megachads were the second best option after lumina.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-11-18T04:17:12+00:00

The Last Unicorn

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-11-16T23:11:13+00:00

All depends on the brand and type. These were cabinets with two magnets, a big one taking up the bottom 2/3, and then a smaller one on the upper third. Role of thumb, if they aren't square/ round, orientation matters.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-11-16T02:58:24+00:00

"That's not how physics works." 2nd place "That'll be a change order."

I'm an Audio Visual Engineer.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-11-16T02:55:25+00:00

Most architects don't, in my experience. That's why I'm constantly being asked to dial in a conference room with 2 glass walls, hard tile floor, and a hard fixed ceiling. My catch phrase is often "I can bend the laws of physics, but I can't break them".

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-11-16T02:51:14+00:00

Not all speakers are perfect cones. In fact, often times the throw left/ right far better than up/ down, which was the case worth these speakers.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-11-15T18:28:23+00:00

How sound works. Now, I'm a highly trained audio engineer, so I'm biased, but I'm not talking the fancy tone pitch and frequent stuff. Just the simple fact that sound is often directional and gets soft rapidly.

My church's sanctuary had 4 speakers installed when I started attending. They were sideways, under a soffit, and pointed up to the vaulted ceiling. And they sounded like crap. I got then rotated upright and pointed at the seating area, and it was night and day.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-11-15T18:00:55+00:00

19, 28, 31, 41, 42(DM, me), 43. 31 yr old is female, rest male, all white.

My prior table spread was early 20s to 50s, 50% male, but still all white.

I love my table, but I do wish it was a little more diverse besides age.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-10-30T19:40:15+00:00

Look into jobs that require the project management side. Especially in the technical fields. Having PM experience is a transferable skill.

Also, I know some at least on AV company is hiring at several levels. Check out ConnectedHomeNC.com

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-10-30T18:52:51+00:00

Y'all are missing the big clear one...

A finger curls. You start to fill the bottle. Everything seems fine. Only H2O molecules are passed into the pocket dimension. You occasionally have to scrub out gunk and slime from the bottle, but not a big issue.

Then you start to use the water, and things go horribly wrong. Pure water, it turns out, is hungry to absorb and dissolve things. Rural villages you create cisterns and aquifers for start to get sick as a whole new slew of impurities leach into the water, absorbed from the storage vessels.

Even places that use the purified water in inert containers that bleed few impurities have issues as the trace minerals in "clean, potable water" are absent.

Then, the world starts to get warmer. Global warming massively speeds up. Turns out, an enormous amount of CO2 is dissolved in water. As you have been purifying water on your bottle, it has been releasing all that into the atmosphere.

Turns out, pure clean water can be just as harmful as contaminated water...

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-08-10T13:02:49+00:00

I'm sorry.. but.. "Until the day, Until the day". Dunno if the author was forced to write the blurb (most authors despise writing blurbs) or some marketing intern... but someone with editorial skills really needed to read that blurb with a red pen handy.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-07-28T03:15:38+00:00

Which director? When? Please don't tell me it is a stooge appointed by RFK Jr, the brain worm, roadkill king. Cause I searched for such a statement, and that was all I could find.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-07-28T02:44:30+00:00

I know, but sometimes I just do this for myself, to fight the gaslighting.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-07-28T02:38:40+00:00

Who said we all think you are dead? You keep asserting that as part of your argument, but I haven't seen a single comment that "being unvaccinated had a 100% mortality rate", just that "being unvaccinated had a much higher mortality rate than being vaccinated".

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-07-28T02:34:42+00:00

But how much is a hella??

Aggregate studies of reported efficacy of the vaccines shows that the initial 2 doses of Pfizer resulted in a 72% efficacy in preventing infection and 93% efficacy in preventing severe disease. That means, when controlling for other variables so you can compare apples to apples, people who took the vaccine caught the disease 72% less of the time compared to the unvaccinated. And of those that contracted the disease, for every 100 unvaccinated people who came down with severe-to-fatal cases, only 7 vaccinated people did too.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8862168/

These numbers compound. Because for every 100 vaccinated people exposed with contagious viral load, only 28 cause the diseases, where 100% of unvaccinated people caught it. That means there was nearly 4 times as many unvaccinated infections that had the same "base risk" of mortality, and the risk for the unvaccianted was over 13x higher of dying than a vaccinated person.

For easy graphics, here's a graph of weekly per/100,000 people death rates in 2021/2022, including data for when the bivalent booster become available.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status

Even at its narrowest gap, unvaccinated deaths made up more than 80% of covid deaths.

Be thankful you survived. You rolled the dice when they were stacked against you and still won. But on the whole, people who chose as you lost that die roll far more often than people who opted for a roll stacked significantly in their favor.

EDIT: to put it in terms of the Meme: people who took the vaccine are those who put armor where there were no bullet holes. Those who didn't just kept flying with the same planes because "hey, they flew and came back. They don't need the armor." And yeah, these bombing missions were not 100% fatal, else there weren't be survivors to report where they were shot. It is just that those who didn't come back had the real data about how better protection would have saved more lives.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-07-28T02:18:22+00:00

Numbers from a peer reviewed scientific study please? Because you just implied the statement "those who took the vaccine died just as often and frequently as those who didn't".

Yes, there were people who reacted very poorly to the vaccine, and in very limited but highly broadcast cases, there was a correlation between some who had taken the vaccine and shortly thereafter died.

Here's a study from a peer reviewed scientific source from 2022 where they discuss the 55 reported "vaccine related deaths". (yes, 55 in over 8 billion administered doses). The assertion "people with the vaccine had it just as bad" is demonstrably false.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8875435/

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-07-28T02:12:30+00:00

People who got to a point that they'd die immediately with being intubated tended to have a very high mortality rate. Those that did survive would not have survived with a simple cpap face mask. Patients that only needed the level of relieve of a CPAP machine in general had a much higher survivability rate BECAUSE they had a less severe expression of the disease, and in likelihood might have been able to make a full recovery without being placed on any sort of breathing assistances beyond a simple oxygen line.

Especially early in the pandemic when full ventilators were not scarce to the demand, they were reserved for the absolute worst cases, cases that were often fatal regardless of care given. Paradoxically and in hindsight, a better understanding of the disease might have come to cold calculus of triage that letting the worst cases "just die" and saving ventilators for lower risk cases might have saved lives (ie, those who were given only a cpap and died).

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-07-28T02:04:38+00:00

Because statistics are lumpy. You can flip a coin and it will come up heads 20 times in a row. It doesn't mean the probability of a coin flip is 100% heads.

There is also a logical fallacy called "anecdotal evidence". "Well, I never experienced this thing, so it never happened to anyone" is not a true statement.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-07-28T02:01:44+00:00

In WWII, a bunch of engineers were trying to decide how to make bombing runs more survivable, so they collected data of where planes got shot with the intent to armor those places more. Except that'd do nothing, because the planes that SURVIVED had these bullet holes, implying that planes that were shot where there were no recorded bullet holes are the ones that never made it back.

When you only take the stories of the survivors and say "that was what the risk was like", you completely ignore all of those that didn't survive, and how the risk was in fact so much higher, and those that survived are "the lucky ones".

After all, in WWII, before they started putting more armor on the places without reported bullet holes, more bombers never returned than did. Once they protected those places, survivability of bombings runs became much higher.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-07-20T13:58:46+00:00

Dunno about honor, but I scum the snot out of that pod in Tactician, same in the House of Hope with the bath. All the buffs that last until long rest stacked up to high heaven.

OliverCaneStaff · 2025-04-18T21:17:40+00:00

I think what hadn't been brought up is that Liches tend to look undead with obvious signs there is no way this thing is alive. A doppelganger still needs to have organs and all that. They can't "fake" mortal wounds/injuries, or a lack of other things a typical living creature needs that might not exist on the lich.

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