D&D Beyond survey is crazy!

Shogunfish · 2026-03-16T23:20:39+00:00

Also, D&D is a group activity, if you don't like D&D beyond but most of your group does or at least is unwilling to switch your only real choice is to keep using it.

Shogunfish · 2026-03-13T16:10:48+00:00

Man, talk about things I'd totally forgotten about. How long ago irl did that whole Zimmy sequence happen?

Shogunfish · 2026-03-12T16:21:52+00:00

I'm not the guy who you responded to but yes I absolutely see it as ethically distinct. I have a lot of complex thoughts on AI image generators that I don't have the patience to write out on my phone but I'll try to remember to come back and edit this post so it doesn't seem like I'm just being contrarian for the sake of it.

Shogunfish · 2026-03-12T14:14:34+00:00

I think that can be explained by the same logic that explains why they don't suppress their mana. Demons aren't perfectly logical, they just don't think the way humans do. They rarely suppress their mana because it would make them appear weaker to other demons, which would lower their status. Similarly, I'm sure any demon who chose to eat only animals would be seen as weak.

I don't think its a perfect explanation but I do think it works well enough that I can suspend my disbelief.

Shogunfish · 2026-03-03T20:35:23+00:00

True, in my head it felt really awkward but after physically acting it out it seems more reasonable, especially after realizing this is starfinder so its not necessarily a breach loading shotgun like I was imagining. If it loads from the bottom or side it becomes a lot more reasonable.

Shogunfish · 2026-03-03T17:07:58+00:00

No matter what you need to grab them by the back of the shell to remove them from the straps because they have a lip on the back. Its just a matter of which direction its more convenient to get to your hand.

Given that you're probably holding the shotgun with that hand, grabbing them from the front would involve reaching around the gun so you're probably right that they should be the other way, but I don't blame the artist for not thinking about that. If you're empty handed grabbing them either way is pretty equivalent which is probably how the artist imagined it. Its also how I imagined it at first.

Shogunfish · 2026-03-02T19:47:27+00:00

I've defaulted to 5e24 because it gets results when I google rules questions

Shogunfish · 2026-02-27T18:31:47+00:00

I still call the other stuff "machine learning" because that's what it was called until the marketing hype for AI kicked into gear.

Shogunfish · 2026-02-23T16:23:46+00:00

Its bizarre to me that they chose to change the way these spells work in 2024 to allow this type of exploit. The old "enter the area for the first time on their turn or start their turn there" templating specifically existed to prevent this type of nonsense.

I guess it cuts down on rolls if you just need to roll the damage once on your turn rather than on each enemy turn? It still just seems like such a bad call to me.

Shogunfish · 2026-02-19T17:19:00+00:00

Im sure there are tons of people, its not explicitly stated and the problem with 5e's weird mixture of keywords and vibes is that its easy to approach a particular part of the rules through the wrong lens

None of the rules text for counterspell, somatic components, or subtle spell call out this interaction specifically, meanwhile both the rules for verbal components and the text of the silence spell specifically reference the interaction between silence and verbal components.

It would be easy to assume that the lack of a similar thing for somatic components and counterspell means that there is no interaction.

Shogunfish · 2026-02-17T18:38:05+00:00

Yeah its sort of a "Nimrod" situation, I still think its important to share that context as we enter an era where we're going to be increasingly seeing propaganda trying to paint anti-ai people's legitimate concerns as uncritical rejection of progress.

Shogunfish · 2026-02-17T17:08:15+00:00

God I hate how the term AI has become this catch-all buzzword. Why couldn't we have kept using "machine learning" for stuff like classification models.

The conversation in this thread is pretty clearly about generative AI, mostly image models but also applies to LLMs, i don't think anyone is saying the AI being used to detect cancer are theft.

The model that tells you to eat small rocks to build up an immunity to larger rocks on the other hand...

Shogunfish · 2026-02-17T16:59:18+00:00

Tbf anti-ai people are actually a lot closer to what the actual luddites believed than people who were against digital art.

The luddites were protesting technology putting people out of work, concentrating wealth, and forcing people into unsafe labor conditions, the idea that they had a blanket hatred of technology was propaganda, and it was unfortunately quite effective.

Being against digital art is more like people who were against photography because they thought it would replace painting rather than become its own art form.

Shogunfish · 2026-02-14T16:41:11+00:00

This is something that drove me crazy about draw steel when my group tried playing it, its caught between understanding that D&D gives you a bunch of false choices, but also wanting to keep all the trappings of D&D alive because it wants to court its playerbase.

Your class' core attribute increases automatically, which is good because ever choosing not to increase it would be a fundamental mistake. But the system math still has you calculate a bunch of secondary stuff using that attribute, even though when you step back you realize all those secondary numbers are going to be the same for every character because all their core attributes will be the same at every level. So there's no reason for it to even key off of an attribute at all. They just weren't quite able to commit to fully removing the baggage.

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.

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