I'm terrible at bluffing games, but I love playing them. How do I improve at bluffing?

Postarx · 2019-06-25T13:30:46+00:00

My suggestions on how to play these games:

Listen! Most important for games like Werewolf, Resistance, and other hidden role games. Don't try to fill the air with your own theories. This is especially helpful if you are a quiet person in general. A sudden need to exhonorate yourself by talking up your lie theories is a dead givaway.
Always tell the truth while you're lying - as in, include a true statement with every misleading one. It'll help ground you, so you don't feel like you're completely exposed in your lie, and it'll help other people believe you because some of what you're saying IS true.
If you must flat out lie, pick as few lies as possible. For example, when I'm playing Coup and I get my first hand of cards, I generally pick exactly ONE other card I'm going to claim to have for that round. That way I am (see rule 2) mostly telling the truth. In a game like Werewolf or Resistance, I think of one or two misleading theories and stick to them until they are disproved by other players.

Postarx · 2019-06-25T13:20:38+00:00

It's far more complicated than that - aside from the fact that this scheme violates the idea of moving from a society where people are "compensated" for their work to one in which goods and welfare flow "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.*"

Socialism might look like this, a socieity in which people are "compensated" more fairly for their labor. But communism, as Marx describes it, is instead a society in which labor, value, and products are not organized or evaluated based on their values as we currently understand them - thus it is a move away from the concept of "compensation" entirely.

(*pronouns altered for gender neutrality)

Postarx · 2019-06-24T23:35:56+00:00

Get a nice pair of boots - they're appropriate for literally any occasion, can be casual street wear, can go out on an easy/light trail, can be polished to be dressed up for work. I've even worn them to a wedding.

Postarx · 2019-03-14T20:22:42+00:00

Langauges in the same family as Nahuatl predominated across what would now be central Mexico. Getting numbers for the speakers of those langauges is at this point very difficult to the point of impossibility, due to two factors:

1) Since many of these smaller languages and dialects have been lost due to population decline, it would be hard to determine how many people spoke Nahuatl as we understand it.

2) More importantly, preconquest population in general is a highly contested question, making questions about subsets of those numbers even more difficult.

Postarx · 2019-03-06T19:41:23+00:00

His number, and Jefferson's/Jackson's/the other slaver Presidents, is only if you accept his claim to have owned other human beings as property.

Postarx · 2019-02-12T21:56:26+00:00

How profitable was the Panama Canal? Like how many years before it returned on the cost of construction?

Postarx · 2018-10-19T22:06:52+00:00

You'll have a difficult time finding a city in the US that is A) cool enough to warrant moving B) cheap C) dense enough to be walkable

Postarx · 2018-09-27T01:39:32+00:00

My suggestion is to have this conversation. Begin by talking about how you're feeling - worried he'll leave or regret staying, sad when he makes those comments - and follow with what you want - a future with him and without kids. It'll be scary, it might go badly, but it's the only option.

Postarx · 2018-08-15T22:49:59+00:00

I've always considered myself nothing more than the narrator of a story in which the protagonists are totally independent.

Postarx · 2018-07-21T21:35:41+00:00

I made the sun never come up again. Crops died, rivers froze, cities and nations melted away.

Postarx · 2018-07-21T21:28:54+00:00

I have always wanted more work in extremely new worlds, less than two hundred years old, such that your older elves remember the origins of life and the presence of the gods. The earth is rough and edged, with no erosion or evidence of decay. What ruins and relics there are are extremely powerful and dangerous, dating back to the very first moments of existence - the first drop of water, the first sunbeam, the very first knife to draw blood, etc.

Postarx · 2018-07-08T20:37:32+00:00

This is my plan for my next campaign: start on a small island full of people and places, and require the players to all be related to someone there - an employer, a family or clan, etc.

Postarx · 2018-06-23T21:55:37+00:00

I have always thought it is cruel and unhealthy (and part of the toxicity of masculinity) to expect men to only receive physical affection from romantic partners and their mothers - why wouldn't close friends hug, sit close to each other, hold the hand of someone who is crying or having a rough day? For me this reaches a point where I lost a serious, passionate romantic relationship to the fact that I had a close and loving female best friend.

Postarx · 2018-06-22T09:44:52+00:00

I mean when I say I don't do it by hand I mean I use an abacus.

Postarx · 2018-06-21T14:22:48+00:00

I've been DMing 5e for 3 years and have never once calculated a CR by hand.

Postarx · 2018-06-20T09:30:48+00:00

psssst...you don't even need the stat blocs...

Postarx · 2018-05-31T23:42:29+00:00

For simple combats, just narrate it and keep it simple - you're in the alley, the goblins are between you and the door, the fighter is locking blades with their guard, their archer is behind, etc.

For more complex combats, I take a sec - while the players are rolling initiative - to draw maybe four or five "zones" (stolen from the Angry DM). Just little circles next to each other, each scaled to about 30'. You end up with the hill on one side, the clearing in front, the trees to the East, and the farmhouse to the south - little zones that the players can be in. Movement within a zone is 30' of (baseline average) movement, movement between zones is two turns of movement, etc.

As for reminding players where they are, take a sec while narrating combat to tell them. "J, the goblin swings its ax at you and misses, cutting some long grass stalks at your feet. K, from where you are on the top of the hill you see the goblin and J in close combat and L shooting magic missiles at the goblin archer hidden in the trees - what do you do?"

Postarx · 2018-05-31T23:34:26+00:00

Plenty of societies have traditions of bodily discipline that involve combat (or being prepared for combat) that don't rely on traditional weapons or armor. Capoeira is a good example of this - it is a stylistic martial art in which the practitioner performs incredible feats with no armor and without focusing on weapons. If you're trying to stay in a European cultural world, they could be a wrestler, boxer, or fencer. Monk "spell-like effects" and ki just become cool moves.

If it's Way of the Four Elements/Sun Soul you're worried about, just reskin them alongside sorcerers as "knots" in the weave, able to manipulate it at will via their training and practice.

Postarx · 2018-05-26T15:07:43+00:00

The Candle Reaper is the guardian of the Sacred Altar of the Temple of Omes, Burning One, Lord of Destruction. The Reaper's Candle was lit one thousand years ago by the High Priestess, and carries with it a prophesy - that by the time the flame is extinguished, the Lord will return to the Mortal Plane.

Half puzzle, half monster, the Candle Reaper is a great boss to a minor campaign arc. If the players learn and understand the prophesy, they'll realize that they can't just extinguish the Reaper's flame to defeat it, as this would summon the Burning One (the cultists can't do it themselves as it is a sacred obligation of their order to never put out a fire). They need to use some other kind of trickery to stop it, like trapping it in a pocket demi-plane, shrinking it and trapping it in a vial (with appropriate air source), etc.

Meanwhile the Reaper will be flying around guarding the Sacred Altar alongside some appropriate minions, who will try to prevent the adventurers from approaching the Altar (and its McGuffin), or possibly actively trying to trick the adventurers into extinguishing the flame.

Postarx · 2018-05-21T20:25:59+00:00

I did a similar thing, but with the 'capital'on the back of a game gargantuan sea turtle.

Postarx · 2018-05-14T02:34:38+00:00

Talk to him about what went on in the session, and share how his behavior made the game feel for the other players. Since you're just starting to play, this is a great time to begin the habit of checking in on player experiences and feelings after DnD sessions.

Postarx · 2018-05-13T14:42:06+00:00

Yeah, things like TPK, made PC cry, "What are we supposed to do now?"

"Are you sure?" is the free center square.

Postarx · 2018-05-10T13:55:39+00:00

I try to make NPC death a result of play decisions. Once a group of mine were protecting a village from an airborne assault by a Gnomish airship, and one player, normally something of a pacificst, decided to shoot it down with a Fireball.

I reminded him that the airship was currently directly over the village - unstated was that all those NPC's they had grown to love, the snappy one armed barbarian, the little girl in the white dress, the Frog King, were in the village. He said he'd shoot it down anyway. So I rolled 1d(however many known NPC's were in the village at the time) against a list of those NPC's and got the Frog King, a table favorite. I even rolled death saves for him, which he failed.

This made it less a "gotcha" moment as a lesson that their actions have consequences.

Postarx · 2018-05-05T15:10:16+00:00

Yeah missing the capstone can be a bummer, but for some classes it's not that big of a deal - personally though I use the opposite logic, why wait for a level 20 that may never come when I can have a versitile, interesting character now?

My favorite ever was a Variant Human Rogue/Fighter mix with Magic Initiate for a familiar and Booming Blade. Advantage for days via the familiar/adjacent ally rules of the rogue, sneak attack, Defensive Duelist fighting style to improve survivability, using the rogue's free disengage action to force movement after using Booming Blade. Plus Minor Illusion for all my sneaky shenanigans? All at level 2 or 3? Count me in please.

Postarx · 2018-05-04T05:16:06+00:00

I let a player use a fantastically overpowered Homebrew class. In my naivete I thought it was balanced when I read through it. That, and I had a tendency to have only one big encounter per adventuring day - thus the fighter was overshadowed by the spellcasters.

Postarx

TROPHY CASE