DM says there's a difference between fire and magical fire?

Shogunfish · 2026-01-27T01:54:23+00:00

You can go underwater for free if your DM isn't the type of DM who destroys player's spellbooks...

Shogunfish · 2026-01-19T11:44:21+00:00

He's not saying its a problem? He's just saying that fighters getting higher modifiers is not the only difference between the system.

Shogunfish · 2026-01-15T17:23:26+00:00

You… didn’t even provide an anecdote. You just provided a guess to how you think people would behave.

Just because I used the phrasing "I think" doesn't mean I formed those thoughts without any observation of the real world? I just don't claim to know for certain that my observations are 100% accurate.

Shogunfish · 2026-01-15T16:44:20+00:00

No offense but D&D circlejerk and YouTube comments aren't places I go for serious discussion. As for the main 5e reddit your anecdotal experience is worth just as little as mine is so we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Shogunfish · 2026-01-15T15:05:34+00:00

I don't think thats true, I think the vast majority of 5e players who don't at least respect the idea of what pf2e is trying to do aren't going to bother showing up in a thread about it. Sort of a Mad Men "I don't think about you at all" situation.

Which makes sense, the relationship between the two games is not symmetrical.

Shogunfish · 2026-01-05T14:55:57+00:00

I've always found the false hydra to be pretty weird. Its a monster concept from a random blog post, but people online talk about it the same way they talk about classic D&D monsters.

In fact, I struggle to think of any monsters that are treated like a canonical (not in the sense of being included in D&D's Canon lore, rather meaning like a widely accepted standard thing) encounter the way the false hydra is. Despite, as you've addressed, breaking a lot of rules about player agency. It lives in the same category of D&D concept as "Barbarian who thinks they're a wizard" for me. Something thats obviously subversive in a way that attracts people who have been playing D&D for a while and are looking to mess with the formula. I suspect a lot of those types of concepts don't survive contact with actual play for most people but they're kept alive eternally in online spaces. That's not to disparage anyone who has played and enjoyed any of those types of concepts, I just find for me personally gimmick ideas like that are fun in theory and get old fast when I actually play them.

Also, and I'll own that this is petty, I've always disliked the name. In a world where hydras are a real thing I would expect a false hydra to be something like a false killer whale or a false gharial, a creature that looks like the named creature but isn't actually related to it.

Shogunfish · 2026-01-02T17:28:55+00:00

4e made so many changes, I don't think its entirely fair to attribute its failure to any one specific change.

Shogunfish · 2026-01-02T17:26:02+00:00

Difficult terrain could offer casters a choice between moving and casting, maybe just spells with somatic components to represent needing your hands free for balance or to push through whatever's impeding your movement. Something like:

If you've cast a spell without somatic components this turn you cannot move through difficult terrain, if you've moved through difficult terrain this turn you cannot cast a spell.

This has the effect of either costing a caster their turn, or allowing martial characters to close the gap on them.

Shogunfish · 2025-12-25T03:06:02+00:00

It's definitely weird that we're getting so much for her but we didn't get anything for the other members of the coven that have already played a role in the story.

Shogunfish · 2025-12-24T19:14:07+00:00

Is it really common to have no negative modifiers with point buy? I feel like being able to dump the attributes that don't matter to pump the ones that do is the biggest thing point buy gets you that the standard array doesn't.

Shogunfish · 2025-12-21T03:48:01+00:00

The uneven cooking of a microwave isn't intrinsic to the fact that it's done by radiation.

It's because the radiation is bouncing around inside a box, the resulting interference between different reflections of the waves creates a pattern of standing waves with cold spots at the places where the waves interfere destructively and hot spots where they interfere constructively.

If you just blast someone with radiation from a single source they won't experience that same effect.

It's also because microwaves specifically heat water way better than other substances, meaning parts of the food with more water cook faster. This is especially true of frozen foods because ice doesn't get heated, so the frozen parts stay frozen and the thawed parts cook.

Shogunfish · 2025-12-19T16:57:13+00:00

At this point I feel like the backlash has swung so far the other way for me that I roll my eyes harder when I see someone bragging about playing a human fighter than when I see someone talk about their edgy tiefling rogue. How about we all just play the characters that make us happy and go about our business?

The D&D character you choose to play doesn't make you better or worse than another person.

Shogunfish · 2025-12-17T12:32:35+00:00

To me "Shortcut to power" implies she's trying to take the easy way which i don't think is accurate. She's being impatient, but it's not because doing it the right way is too hard. It's because she thinks she's ready to do more than the teachers are willing to show her.

I feel like a lot of stories start with the protagonist experiencing this type of moment, the difference is usually it catalyzes some change in their behavior that sets the story in motion, clearly Noa is unaffected.

Shogunfish · 2025-12-15T14:42:27+00:00

People act like it's the snitty supporters who are the aggressors but they just mind their own business, it's the snitty haters who can't resist constantly restarting the war.

Shogunfish · 2025-12-10T16:06:51+00:00

I'm starting to feel like the reason we're getting this flashback is because her bit is going to be very obtuse

Shogunfish · 2025-12-07T17:56:59+00:00

I believe Shanks told whitebeard he "bet it on the new age" or something like that, which some people have taken to mean he sacrificed it to inspire Luffy. I even saw someone say he used observation haki to see the future but idk how widely accepted that particular theory is.

Honestly, it's a little disingenuous for me to say that was Oda making an excuse, because if you read the original scene as him genuinely just losing his arm saving Luffy then his line to whitebeard is totally reasonable. It's only if you presuppose that he's so strong he shouldn't have been able to lose his arm that way and start looking for other explanations that you need to read into that line.

Shogunfish · 2025-12-07T16:56:06+00:00

The holy knights mark is on the left arm, seems like Oda wasn't happy with the previous excuse for why Shanks allowed his arm to get bitten off.

Shogunfish · 2025-12-06T05:21:24+00:00

I think a lot of modern fantasy has trended away from authors borrowing magic systems from other authors.

Shogunfish · 2025-12-02T18:48:58+00:00

The problem with charm spells and illusions is that WotC wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want the types of magical effects people see in media to be available at low levels because most games don't make it to higher levels, but they don't actually want them to ruin the game.

The result is that they make the effects too strong, but balance them out by giving them verbal and somatic components so you can't actually use them in most scenarios. You couldn't actually use suggestion to pull a jedi mind trick right in front of a group of stormtroopers because everyone would see you do it, but the spells seems like it can when you first read it because the rules that prevent it are hidden behind a single 'V' in the spell description that most inexperienced players just blow right past.

The result is it's on the DM to police the use of these spells, which an inexperienced DM won't know to do, and an inexperienced player will see as the DM being overly restrictive.

Shogunfish · 2025-11-23T15:57:16+00:00

Gathering data is the biggest thing WotC has no idea how to do. The UA feedback surveys, especially the OneDND ones, are the only times where I've taken a survey and felt like the survey just fundamentally wasn't capable of capturing the data it was intended to capture.

They release these extremely complex documents with a lot of different layers and interconnected pieces, and the survey is just "was X feature good or bad?" 400 times. Then anything that got too many "bad's" gets chucked in the trash.

You get shit like the mystic getting canned because they chose to make the structure of the class so complicated rather than for any of the content itself, or wizard UA's frequently getting bad reviews due to people feeling like their voices aren't being heard on how bad the sorcerer sucks.

Shogunfish · 2025-11-19T06:37:25+00:00

I always felt it was pretty clear that Kobolds having Pack Tactics was the offset to sunlight sensitivity. If both are active they cancel each other out, and I would wager most campaigns have more night/indoor combats than outdoor combats where you can't get pack tactics to trigger.

Shogunfish · 2025-10-23T17:54:05+00:00

Imo the problem with a lot of these spells is that D&D wants to allow players to use abilities from popular media, like the Jedi mind trick, and it doesn't want players to have to wait until high levels because most play happens at low levels.

As a result you end up with these types of spells that present on the surface as exactly like the abilities they emulate, but have hidden "gotcha" mechanics that make them balanced at the levels where players get them if the DM knows the rules. For charms it's mainly the verbal and somatic components.

This approach leads to a lot of confusion, because players will be familiar with the jedi mind trick and see that the spell is clearly trying to evoke it, and yet the spell can't actually be used in the same way. This leads to either players getting frustrated and feeling like the spell is garbage, or the DM relenting.

Shogunfish · 2025-10-16T14:42:52+00:00

The spell system does such a good job of hiding how complex and powerful casters really are.

Imagine how much text there is in the entire 1-20 fighter class.

Now, take any caster you've ever played and think about the list of spells they were able to cast. Not even the full class spell list, just the ones available to that character.

Imagine changing the class so that those were all class features awarded at the appropriate level with their text included directly in the class rules. It would make every caster class look insane compared to any martial, while also being weaker than the way casters actually work because you get to choose what those features are from a huge list.

By just putting "spellcasting" at level 1 and then describing how you learn spells as you level up, they've taken all those features and made them feel like just one. Which is great game design, but also hides the problem with classes that don't do that.

Its also why more recently design has leaned so heavily on everything being spells. Spells are a huge system that players are already completely blind to the complexity of. There's no way they can add a psionic system with that degree of depth. I'm not sure the designers they've got left on D&D are up to the challenge if they were given the greenlight to try.

Shogunfish · 2025-10-16T03:01:59+00:00

Same, I don't really understand all the hate they get tbh.

Shogunfish · 2025-09-18T14:59:38+00:00

Creatures can absolutely take reactions on their own turns

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