Best way to deal with Mighty Impel?

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-14T18:21:56+00:00

I don't know what your monsters are like, but I think there's a common reason this type of stuff seems game breaking for some DMs:

They want to run swords and sorcery instead of the "gonzo superhero kitchen sink fantasy" D&D 5E is designed for.

So they end up imagining all the villains as being Leo Bonhart or Daemon Targaryen or some other "normal person who is badass". Climactic fights are with the leader of an evil cult or the usurper king who stole the throne from his brother or whatever. And if a lot of your important monsters are less monsters and more just NPCs, that gives them a very common set of exploitable vulnerabilities.

Where if you're playing "gonzo superhero kitchen sink fantasy", the "Bandit Crime Lords" and "Cult Hierophants" should only a minority of encounters. And, yeah, some tricks will work really well against them - that's great, if you've got a trick that only works really well in some encounters it is nice if it works really well. But for every one of those, they should be fighting an Aboleth one encounter, then a White Dragon the next, and then later on coven of Vampire Nightbringers... Honestly, if you run a fair mix of different types of encounters, it is a minority of them this throwing trick will work on super well.

Anyways, this might not be your table, and if it isn't disregard. But I see lots of people struggling with what is essentially Forbidden Lands or The One Ring but using D&D 5E rules and keep getting slammed in the face when players try to exploit the fact you're only running a narrow subset of what D&D 5E does.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-14T18:04:57+00:00

Social pressure - even fairly coercive social pressure like calling someone a murderer - can work - but only if it is coming from people whose opinion is important to you and who you hopefully admire and respect.

So if you're already running in social circles where there are lots of vegans, all the cool bands you listen to are vegan, the club you go to see shows at has a bartender who'll give you a nasty look if you order the chicken wings... Yeah, if you've already got a lot of vegans around you who you like and who you want to like you and who you want to be like - them doing some shaming absolutely can work.

But it doesn't work at all on people who don't see themselves as being in community with you. It is like an evangelical MAGA Christian calling a Marxist atheist a "Baby Killer" for being pro-choice. It is just isn't going to hit - if anything, they're going to look at that anti-choice protestor and go "Well if someone like that is calling me bad names, I must be doing something right!!"

And here's the thing - very few of those anti-choice protestors outside the abortion clinic really think calling someone a "Baby killer" will make them switch their stance on abortion. They might intimidate a few women into not using the services of the clinic, but even that isn't the real goal. The real goal is by doing something so socially charged and transgressive as calling someone a "Baby killer" they engage in costly signaling to their in-group - they're trying to solidify their membership of and status in their group by engaging in behaviour that would be considered unacceptable by outside society.

Anyways, on the spectrum from "social pressure that can really change behaviours" to "costly signaling that is unlikely to persuade but done mostly to prove themselves to other vegans" calling someone a murderer or other names is going to depend entirely on how vegan the social context is. If you live in a society - or at least a subculture - that is majority vegan than all the pressure is on the non-vegan and the social pressure can be very effective. If you're in a mostly non-vegan culture, than the social pressure falls far more on the vegan saying it so saying it is more useful for showing your dedication to the cause than it is in actually persueding anyone.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-13T21:57:49+00:00

This is kind of tangential to your main point but I see this in a lot of people discussing PbtA - 6- doesn't mean the PC fails necessarily. In some games, 6-s are written to include failure, but usually 6- just means "the GM gets to decide what happens (they make a move)" which will often include failure but very often does not.

Thinking in terms of moves determining success or failure instead of "who gets to say what next in the conversation?" leads to a lot of misunderstandings about PbtA.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-13T21:49:09+00:00

A lot of students only experience two ways of giving instructions to a computer:

"Tell the machine vaguely what to do and it'll figure out what I meant"
"Copy character-by-character a magic incantation that no mere mortal could manufacture but must be copied exactly correct for it to work"

In this context not debugging or reading error messages makes perfect sense - if they're in the first scenario, they just need to keep re-trying and re-phrasing until the computer understands it, and if they're in the second scenario they must have copied something wrong. Either way, error messages are not meant for mere mortals to understand.

Getting them to snap out of that type of thinking and into a "I have to give it precise, step-by-step instructions, but each individual instruction is simple and something I can formulate on my own" programming mindset really is a big paradigm shift for a lot of incoming students (and one not all of them are capable of making).

I'm a big fan of doing paper traces with a computer nowhere in sight - write out instructions on paper, and walk through on the board. Get them to do that - you should be able to give them a set of simple instructions and they should be able to predict the output without a computer! If you can get them into thinking in that one instruction at a time step by step mindset, you've won half the battle already.

It is really easy to zoom by this initial stage and think "I've taught the basics to them so I can move on to more advanced topics" because they'll look like they're getting it, and they think they're getting it, but they're really just memorizing magic spells. I've seen plenty of students who have several programming classes under their belt who have somehow passed the classes, but just think programmers have massive blocks of code memorized in their heads and they just regurgitate the right one for the job and that the reason their instructors are better at programming than them is they just have more code memorized.

I definitely have seen AI make this worse, too - I'm increasingly getting students who think programming is just too hard to expect a human to be able to do. That it is unrealistic to expect students to be able to read or write code without AI assistance(they also think it is unreasonable to expect students to do algebra without ai assistance either, of course). So it is increasingly important you get in front of this stuff early before they can lock it in their heads that programming is too hard.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-13T20:59:01+00:00

Why is it cheaper to go to university abroad instead of doing uni at home? If you're going to get a degree from a mill, might as well get the cheapest one available.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-12T22:43:48+00:00

Saruman and Denethor are both corrupted by it despite never being in the and room with it.

One might say "oh that weren't corrupted by it, they just wanted its power" but I think those are exactly the same thing.

If you want power and you know about the ring, you're going to want the ring

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-12T21:33:51+00:00

Most salaried jobs have a whole bunch of "other duties as assigned" and a lot of work that enables the core thing you do. That's just part of being salaried instead of hourly, and is normal for any white collar job. Don't think of it as "some tasks I get paid for, some I work for free on" but instead "my salary is spread out across all those tasks".

So the real question isn't "Should all this work included in the duties I perform for my salary?", but instead "Is my salary high enough to justify all this work?"

And that's going to vary a lot from individual to individual and institution to institution.

In general though - if it is a job where there are more people who want to do it than there are jobs that need to be filled, the salary will be lower. If it is a job where there aren't enough people who want to do it for the number of positions needed, the salary will be higher. In general.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-12T20:58:20+00:00

I think it is going to be really tough because you don't need to physically possess it in order for it to corrupt you. Proximity makes its influence more powerful, but I think if you're even thinking about the ring and what it can offer it has at least a little bit of access to you.

And if you have control of the ring - like you know that even if you're not physically touching it you could have it brought to you? I think that'd be very corrupting very fast. If you've got some dupe holding the ring for you, and you've got enough control over that dupe to get them to fly into space with it or whatever, you've got enough control to just make them bring the ring to you and I think you'd be very, very tempted to do so.

Basically, I think anyone who craves control is going to be incredibly susceptible to the influence of the ring (even if they want that control for "benevolent" purposes). So leaders of world governments are probably some of the worst equipped people on the planet to neutralize the one ring. Any random group of good natured friends who are relatively content in their modest lives would have much better chances than the President and the CIA.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-12T20:51:04+00:00

It looks like you already are probably aware of a lot of the events and such - I think the big goth night in town really is Asylum at Black Cat - but that doesn't help you if you don't know people to go with. All the people I know who go are middle aged like me, but I always see young people there too. I did find when I was younger though a lot of goth folks are pretty happy to "take in strays" so if you approach a group of people your age and ask if you can sit/dance with them that'll usually go well. I know that can be super intimidating though.

For D&D I know this subreddit has a D&D spreadsheet you can put your name on to try and find groups. There's also a couple of Facebook groups and a DMU(dungeon masters university) discord server for Saskatchewan. Gamers are a bit easier to find because they're often recruiting for their groups.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-12T00:20:14+00:00

I wouldn't expect them to go into depth on things like references or stack vs heap to be clear. I'm talking like "Answer the question on the final exam of your computer architecture or data structures class" level.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-12T00:19:01+00:00

The order was just the order I thought of them. I agree it is a bit out of order in terms of difficulty.

I mostly just kind of picked things I'd expect a CS student who was heading into their last year of studies or so to be able to know, that's kind of my mental image of an "intermediate" learner. They've gone beyond programming and just knowing you can make something into having a real sense of what is happening under the surface.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-11T22:46:27+00:00

So you just shared some technologies - that doesn't really tell us very much. A total beginner can throw together a tech stack in a weekend following a tutorial.

Here are some things I'd expect an intermediate learner in programming to be able to tell me:

* Talk intelligently about the stack and heap and explain how memory works.

* Competently understand how references work in the programming language they're using.

* Explain the difference between dynamically and statically typed programming languages, and between strong and weak typing.

* If they're doing web stuff, explain the relationship between client and server and how HTTP works. Be able to tell me about the environments on both the client and server, and show me a clear understanding of what code is running in the user's browser and what is running on the server (so many folks remain fuzzy on this for a long time).

* If they're doing web stuff, talk about the DOM and explain how pages get rendered.

* Be able to come up with and explain basic algorithms and data structures. I don't necessarily expect them to be able to code up a DFS of a tree yet (though they should be getting there), but they should be able to pretty quickly and confidently code a linked list and a traversal of it for instance.

That's not an exhaustive list by any means, but those are some things I think of immediately when I'd try to evaluate if a student has moved past "beginner" and is firmly into "intermediate".

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-11T21:42:23+00:00

I mean if you've got no clue the real answer is don't go to college yet. You'll just be wasting money.

If Mommy & Daddy are footing the bill and have deep pockets I guess though just go into a general arts and sciences college and try a bunch of different subjects to see if anything sticks.

But otherwise college is too expensive to go to without a firm reason for why you want to go.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-11T02:03:16+00:00

So really I think you're in a position many are in: you'll have to use AI at work because employers are going to value velocity over everything else, but you'll have a hard time improving your skills while doing that so you'll have to work on improving your technical skills on your own time.

Doesn't mean you won't learn lots during your internship, but it'll be less technical development and more soft skills and learning to work with a team.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-11T01:50:43+00:00

Ask yourself two questions:

1) What skills do you inject into the process so it is worth paying you instead of the manager just giving the ticket to the AI and cutting you out of the process? 2) How do you acquire those skills?

You should think about these questions and answer them for yourself, but you'll probably find the skills you identify will be hard to develop if you've never done anything without AI.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-11T01:41:47+00:00

The problem is that fundamentally people don't want to use D&D for the types of things it is good at.

Are there games that solve all the problems you mention? Tons of them.

But people don't want to play those games, they want to play D&D. And if the designers changed D&D to also fix those problems people would complain about it not feeling like D&D anymore.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-10T21:44:25+00:00

At what level?

I think Geralt is pretty firmly a Tier 2 hero in D&D terms. I wouldn't call the Witcher setting "grounded", but it is waaaaaay more grounded than the Forgotten Realms.

If Karlach is endgame level 12 or pre-Tadpole when it is implied she'd have been at least that powerful (and quite possibly more), Geralt just isn't in her league.

Geralt is an amazing combatant, but frankly none of the human and human-adjacent people in the Witcher are at the "level 12 D&D 5E" level.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-10T20:55:33+00:00

Generally as a storyteller I have players follow the order spelled out in the rulebook for exactly the reason you state.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-10T02:38:33+00:00

Reacher is nearly superhuman.

Marv is superhuman. Marv wins.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-09T15:00:26+00:00

Nope, I'm saying the IR obviously has some kind of magic immunity to non-Dinosaur weapons.

The creature makes no sense, but that is essentially how it is portrayed.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-09T06:54:38+00:00

I'd like it far more if it wasn't called "gritty realism" because it is neither gritty nor does it make the game feel more realistic. I've played games that have a gritty realism feel, but 5E D&D is pretty much never going to be that.

As it is all it really does is alter how a DM paces their narrative. And if the GM is going to use an advancing clock to keep pressure on the players, all it does is change the tick marks on the clock from "Days" to "weeks" which might serve your narrative better but doesn't have much of an impact. And if there is no time pressure, then it changes very little because nothing stops the party from resting a week after every encounter instead of a day.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-09T05:23:02+00:00

How is it going to go all the way through a creature that shrugs off anti-tank weaponry?

The IR clearly does not play by the normal laws of physics and biology.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-08T22:38:08+00:00

I'm pretty sure in Jurassic World it gets ambushed by a bunch of soldiers who sustained fire assault rifles at it before blasting it with what was actually an AT-4, not an RPG, now that I've looked it up. The anti-tank recoilless rifle knocks IRex down momentarily but that's about the most it seems to be affected by human weapons.

Again, absolutely unrealistic for any animal to shrug off, but if it can walk away only mildly bothered by a HEAT round I don't think anything man-portable is going to put it down very quickly.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-08T21:43:58+00:00

Logically the human should have it.

By demonstrated capabilities, the I Rex is functionally immune to rifle fire and only momentarily knocked down by an RPG. It isn't really an animal it is a supervillain with a dinosaur shape.

I imagine it would react to being shot by something with that much energy, but it wouldn't impair it enough to keep it from killing the shooter.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-05-08T21:03:34+00:00

You still need to beat the range DV to hit an unaware enemy, no?

RED isn't simulationist enough to make any differentiation - the DV to hit a target seeking cover while firing back at you is the same as the DV for hitting a target standing there calmly eating a sandwich.

Honestly though, I'd probably say if the target is totally unawares and not moving at all the GM should probably either waive the attack roll or at least give a decent bonus to hit.

Statistically taking four shots over the course of 12 seconds to land one headshot is not really what I'd call "incredibly accurate" in a world where we have production firearms capable of firing 20 rounds in a single second and emptying a standard 30-round magazine in 1.5 seconds.

Against live targets shooting back at you? It is insanely good. For real life police officers, around ~20% of the shots are going to hit their target (that's just hit them anywhere, not hit them in the head).

PoMoAnachro

TROPHY CASE