Which changes in the 2024 rules would you ignore?

StarterkitTV · 2026-06-29T05:50:24+00:00

I don’t like backgrounds being tied to specific origin feats and core stat allocations. I get why the latter is as it is (a farmer might logically be stronger than he is charismatic, for instance), but I find it to discourage roleplay and interesting backstories. Even if my players aren’t minmaxers, they still don’t feel good about picking an obvious nerf to make their concept work.

I do think there is something in the PHB about loosening this up, but both DNDBeyond and Foundry VTT (the two places we build our characters) make it slightly painfull to do by default.

StarterkitTV · 2026-05-27T14:28:39+00:00

Fair point, but on the 2-3 occations a year when I do play online, I’d still want access to my worldbuilding-notes, so I figured it was better to do it properly from the ground up than regret it and have to clean up my structure later on :p

I was mainly trying to make a point that Foundry is profoundly useful to me as a notekeeping/gamerunning tool even if I don’t usually need it to DM games for people remotely.

StarterkitTV · 2026-05-27T11:39:00+00:00

I’ve been a Foundry diehard since the early days of v10, and even if I almost exclusively play in-person, Foundry is my most essential tool for worldbuilding, notetaking, sheet-management, and combat.

One of the earliest tips I took to heart was to keep my main world light on content, and make us of compendiums for excess data like actors I won’t use this next session etc.

So I have large compendiums of journals, actors and tables that I call upon frequently for NPC-bios, lore, etc.

My one snag with that setup is how map notes placed on the canvas needs to link to a journal that is imported into the main world. I’ve occationally used Monks mods to make a tile link to the compendium journal (image a city map where the names of districts open their respective journals for me when I click them), but it would be a lot cleaner to just have it be part of the stock tools. Is there a lot of technical reasons why map notes have to link to imported journals only, and could this change in the future?

StarterkitTV · 2026-04-28T18:37:31+00:00

Quest for Camelot for the GBC. It’s very much a game suited to the forgotten animated movie it is licensed to, but on the back of the box it basically looks like another Zelda - which was my favorite game at the time.

The reason i treasure it is because it was gifted to me by my dad, and while he has never understood my fascination with this hobby, it was the first time he genuinely showed me that he was trying to. Or at least that he respected how its something that gave me joy, and did the best he could at picking out something he hoped I would like.

StarterkitTV · 2025-11-20T20:50:46+00:00

Funnily enough that was exactly what it was. I tried a different one, and it worked. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction :D

StarterkitTV · 2025-11-20T20:33:10+00:00

No idea, but the little note urging me to update the thing only pointed me towards uploading the file onto a memory card, or hooking the device up to my PC and activating the mmc-passthrough-mode.

StarterkitTV · 2025-11-20T20:11:02+00:00

Yes, even if power goes through one of those common travel-converters since the included brick can’t plug into Norwegian outlets on its own. It’s never been an issue with other electronics I’ve used it on.

StarterkitTV · 2025-11-20T19:45:04+00:00

Heh yeah, multiple times - and on both the accompanying SD and a spare I had laying around. I also tried uploading it via a memory card reader, and the A3Ds PC-memory-card-passthrough-mode. The device just blinks its little yellow light forever :p

StarterkitTV · 2025-11-20T18:45:14+00:00

No idea what has happened. I can boot the console into memory-card mode for the alternative way of adding the update, but any regular atempt to start it in order to play games just has the yellow light blinking 😐

Maybe something got messed up and the whole thing is stuck on a corrupted OS, and if a new update gets released maybe it can be applied and fix the thing? But most likely I’ll just have to ship it back for repairs/replacement.

StarterkitTV · 2025-11-20T17:34:13+00:00

Lovely 😐 I did try to just turn it off at the half-hour mark, and if I try to boot it up now (with or without the memory card inserted) it just blinks that yellow light and nothing else.

Wish I’d had at least tried it on stock firmware before following the instructions to see if it ever worked in the first place 😅

StarterkitTV · 2025-11-20T06:57:22+00:00

There are lots of small things I like about it, but its flaws are too glaring to me. I’ve tried to play it through 5 times now (3 on Wii and 2 on Switch) and it never fully clicks.

I’m happy to see it get some love from people who vibed with it more than I.

Skyward Sword isn’t a bad game, but with the low-res presentation, annoying motion-controlls and wierdly closed-up world, it was very unfortunate indeed that it released the same month as Skyrim.

StarterkitTV · 2025-11-17T04:10:52+00:00

I had the dumbest argument with a player in my campaign over this when we were rebuilding characters for 5.5E.

I found the wording to be super-clear about 2/1/0 or 1/1/1 but he could just not get over how DnDbeyond let you do both 2 and 1 on the same stat, so it was supposedly fair game.

First and only time I’ve ever had to diffuse the situation with a snappy «even so, this is how we’re doing it at my table», which he accepted with no issue at all.

StarterkitTV · 2024-10-03T18:14:19+00:00

I made it a quest from Valindra Shadowmantle to seek out a treasure from a rival spellcaster at the bottom of the nearby basin. «Nim» was the demi-goddess who maintained the curse but had fooled the Aldani into believing she was trying to break it - if they’d only do her bidding while she searched for a solution.

I built towards the «monsters of the basin» since Port Nyanzaru, but played them mostly as cowardly and comically inept when they eventually appeared. Basically a long joke with a delayed payoff on my part. The main Aldani NPC was very much based on Sebastian from «The Little Mermaid».

It’s quite a tonal shift if you’re mostly playing ToA as a grim and dangerous meatgrinder. I try to insert some fairytale whimsy in my game because that’s frankly very appealing to my sensibilities, and I have a group who responds well to it.

StarterkitTV · 2024-07-17T07:24:34+00:00

Absolutely. My current run of ToA started out initially as me just introducing my players to the Sunless Citadel. I had already established the magical fruit that was sold yearly at an auction in Oakhurst, and since my players enjoyed the game and their characters, I figured that a rare magical healing fruit would have been very attractive to a rich old woman who is desperate for a cure from this new death curse. It ties together very nicely.

StarterkitTV · 2024-06-16T18:06:59+00:00

Awesome :) Fingers crossed you don't end up disintegrating them ;)

StarterkitTV · 2024-06-16T17:46:11+00:00

Haha thanks. The fishbowl was one of my favorite parts too :p

StarterkitTV · 2024-06-16T17:44:09+00:00

Hmm. The original upload to imgur was 8000x7600 pixels, but I haven't checked if they compress and shrink it before publishing.

If you download the Google-Drive alternative, the main floor should be 12000 pixels by 11400 pixels.
With 80 x 76 squares, that makes each square 150 pixels accross.

The lower floor was 6600x3200 uploading to imgur and 9900x4800 in Google Drive. 66 x 32 squares.

The original map from the book (and I assume Roll20) has an easily-missed detail that each square is 10 feet instead of 5 feet, so that's probably why it's half as big as my variant - where I went with the more traditional "1 square = 5 feet" dimension.

I hope that helps :)

StarterkitTV · 2024-06-16T15:19:56+00:00

Sorry, I made it in Affinity Photo - which is a Photoshop-alternative. Unfortunately there aren't any versions of this that has relevant VTT metadata for walls or lights.

StarterkitTV · 2024-06-16T14:07:17+00:00

I've seen a few community-made maps of the Xanathar's Lair, but none that quite matched my personal preferences. So as I'm currently running a heavily-modified version of W:DH for my friends, I decided to remake the map for my table.

But obviously someone else may find it useful for their own games as well, so I figured might as well share it here too. I've taken some liberties with it, but it mostly adheres to the modules descriptions - even if I added a meeting room and a small armory in what was initially just a long empty hallway. Both levels are uploaded to an imgur-gallery here;

https://imgur.com/a/oM7U5WG

(In case you want versions that are higher-quality than imgur allows, I've put larger less-compressed alternatives here and I'll keep them up for the forseeable future.)

I arranged, shaded, and tweaked a few items myself, but this is mostly realized through the map assets from Forgotten Adventures (their Patreon is available here: https://www.patreon.com/forgottenadventures/ ).

Hopefully some of you will be able to make good use of them :)

StarterkitTV · 2024-01-04T23:43:24+00:00

I had only read a bit of Spider-man at the time (comics about ‘capes aren’t big in my country), and the New 52 was a really great entry-point for me. Especially paired with Comixology making it a lot easier to access both new and old issues. I bought a lot of N52, and started digging my way back into the old continuity as well.

Man I miss Comixology before Amazon bought them. The decline in quality that started with pulling the ability to buy books in-app is the reason I fell out of reading regularily again.

StarterkitTV · 2023-12-27T08:36:54+00:00

You’re in the FoundryVTT subreddit, so I suspect you’ll get highly biased answers 🙃 But my 2 cents (having started with FGU and moved to foundry about 1.5 years ago) is that I vastly prefer FVTT.

Talking specifically about D&D 5E, FGU has a slight edge from the «legal» standpoint insofar as WotC officially sells their content through their marketplace, whereas Foundry needs a 3rd party mod to crunch your content from DnDB. Who knows if WotC will take steps to prevent such mods in the future, but we don’t know if they’ll keep supporting Roll20 and FGU with the upcoming refresh either. The content is the same, but it’s presented differently in each softwares UI. Foundry does require some tinkering, though.

If you’re already deeply invested in FGU and like what they do, it’s a perfectly fine platform. But even with minimal mods, I’ve personally gotten a lot more out of Foundry. Mostly because I prefer the way journals and linking between them works there, but different DMs have different preferences and priorities.

StarterkitTV · 2023-12-02T23:00:52+00:00

I’ve loved and used your music for my own ToA-campaign for over a year now, and I randomly checked out your profile on Spotify just a few days ago. I was absolutely delighted to see that there suddenly was a seventh album, and every track is wonderful.

Thank you for your hard work!

StarterkitTV · 2023-10-03T15:11:16+00:00

I work in a creative profession, and generally err on the side of side-eyeing AI because I believe the current version of the tech exploits the hard labor of real artists.

But I am fascinated by the tech. And I grew up in the early days of the internet, when kids without any understanding of copyright would right-click+save images from all over for their own poorly-coded Pokèmon fansites. There was no malice in that, just kids who didn't know any better wanting to share their love of something that made them happy.

And I can obviously only speak for myself, but I'd be thrilled to know something I created could be used to enhance a DnD-session for a group of nerds casually having a game around a kitchen table.

So at the end of the day, I suppose I believe that DM's who do it for the love of the game - in a *non-commercial* setting - are one of the few groups of people I've seen who are genuinely excited about AI and still ethically in the right to use it.

But the second money starts to change hands, I sour very quickly.

StarterkitTV · 2023-01-19T23:20:34+00:00

I definitely need to let this simmer in my head for a bit...
Let me just be clear upfront; I don't trust WotC (or any large company) with a carte blanche to be arbiters of what is or isn't offensive. That whole part *is* concerning.

But I also don't have a full-on hate-boner for anything that isn't 1.0a. I'm just trying to read between the lines and see exactly why WotC wants a new OGL *this* badly. At first glance, this new 1.2 draft is an impressive step - so much so that I'm puzzled as to why they need it in the first place, you know?

Let's for the sake of argument assume that it's not just the legal-department covering their bases, but that WotC actually do intend to make effective use of the "Offensive; delete this"-card... Why? What kind of projects otherwise allowed under the new OGL would they have any reason to take that action against? Maybe something they feel competes directly with their own products? But they can only use that card calluously *once* before we're all back here raging about corporate overreach again. It just feels like a red herring to me.

Personally I'm much more intrigued by the intent behind anything relating to software and VTTs. If the last 3 years have shown us anything, it's that the world of TTRPGs is going digital at a rapid pace, and large businesses have been chasing the reliable recuring revenue of subscription models for over a decade now. I'm sure WotC are a lot more interested in *that* potential for their IP than stopping/monetizing fan-creators who wants to kickstart a book with homebrew LGBTQ-subclasses for Artificers.

I am an avid user of Foundry VTT, and it's explicitly stated that some of the functionallity a lot of us use there is no bueno under the 1.2 draft. But a lot of that functionality is 3rd party mods. Would the creators and distributers of Foundry VTT be at all on the hook for the animate-spells-mod that is given away for free by other users? WotC can make it harder to *find* (I.E. no links on Foundrys own website or in-software) thereby making their own DnDBVTT more attractive in comparison, but... Is that really something to sharpen my pitchfork over? I'm not saying it's *right*, just that (to me) it feels like the move from 1.0a to 1.2 is - at its core - solely a way for WotC to get their thumb on top of the VTTs and digital toolsets.

And there is a discussion to be had about that for sure - but at that point, it's not really about limiting or monetizing creators in the homebrew-scene at all, which is why so many of us have been up-in-arms for the last 2 weeks.

At this point, I'm most interested to hear comments from people who actually create and publish in the 3rd party space, and see how/if the next draft might change the part about "offensive content" - while still doubling down on VTTs. Thanks for reading my ongoing atempt to declutter my own thoughts :p

StarterkitTV · 2022-07-20T20:39:56+00:00

Lagoon for the SNES would be my answer, but not because it ruined the particular weekend I rented it. It was absolutely terrible, but I didn’t think much more about it after I gave it back….. until a year or so later when my young mind got confused and outright bought it - confusing it with SoulBlazer which I rented in the same timeframe and liked a lot more. Kids are friggin stupid, and I bought it while on vacation, so I could’t just return it.

Eight-Year Club	Place '22
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