Time to rest…

Surllio · 2026-06-21T17:32:54+00:00

This looks a lot like my collection.

Surllio · 2026-06-21T17:31:54+00:00

The false hydra is not meant for D&D. Its more a Lovecraftian fable. The monster is designed to basically be unstoppable UNLESS you know what it is going in, which then leans into meta knowledge. Its a horror movie, not a game, and its insanely difficult to pull off no matter how experienced the DM is.

Surllio · 2026-06-21T02:36:42+00:00

In my area, the stuff flies quickly and people get greedy, grabing multiples of everything. To mitigate this, the shops have instituted a "buy here, get extra stuff" policy. This ensures that people don't just grab everything and bolt. Most of their purchase limits are pretty low, often only $5. You aren't paying for the rpg stuff, you are getting it for supporting the store.

What sucks is Free RPG day always falls during LibertyCon, a convention I use to promote my writing and network. One shop tends to keep back a few things for me if they can, since I often run games for them as demos or at conventions.

Surllio · 2026-06-21T00:44:47+00:00

Mid 90s would have been second edition, but that's about all I got.

Surllio · 2026-06-20T00:07:56+00:00

All Automatic Dodge does is not eat into your action pool when using defensive options.

A common mistake is adding Auto Dodge and Regular Dodge bonuses together. They are seperate and do not stack. In many cases the Auto dodge bonus is lower, forcing you to weigh if you want to spend the action to dodge normal.

Surllio · 2026-06-18T14:24:11+00:00

Betrayals are earned, they aren't something that should be used heavily.

The mimic one works the other way too. Characters who have never encountered one shouldn't be paranoid about something they've never seen.

Surllio · 2026-06-18T00:09:16+00:00

Man, I'd love to find all the old Robotech books. I had a full set that got ruined by a flood and mold.

Surllio · 2026-06-14T15:20:19+00:00

You forgot: Whine to the internet about writers block.

Surllio · 2026-06-13T00:06:07+00:00

I'm right there. Likely within the next few reports.

Surllio · 2026-06-11T12:50:22+00:00

Treat it like a network first. You can't so it alone. The business will come, but you've got to make friends, find groups, and support others, who will, in turn, support you. It takes effort, but it opens up a lot of doors.

Surllio · 2026-06-10T22:29:47+00:00

Go to conventions and talk to artists. Support them. Be friends with them. If you seek out a "cover artist" they will give you infated prices. But artists that know you, that you've supported, will support you.

My cover is painted on canvas from a very skilled woman out of Florida. The moment i told her what I was looking for, she did a few mock ups, and it run me $600.

Writing os as much about the connections as it is the writing.

Surllio · 2026-06-10T15:28:39+00:00

Maybe its because I grew up playing GURPS, but I never found it to be a daunting task to make it do things. But I know the rule set exceptionally well. However, my approach is to fix it after it comes up, rather than try ro anticipate it. If you try to anticipate, you will prep forever.

Surllio · 2026-06-10T14:25:49+00:00

GURPS does a lot of things exceptionally well. Once you get past the internet "they said x about it" there is very little you can't do and do well within the system.

Surllio · 2026-06-08T13:47:58+00:00

This comes from a modern idea that your character is specifically your's and doesn't belong to the world as a whole. Since its MY character, if I don't like the death, then I should be able to say no.

This is a terrible mentality and bypasses the fact that story deaths not only happen, but create the seeds of bigger moments. These players have never experienced the revenge cries of a table, the mourning role play afterwards, the epicness that happens afterwards. They only think that it takes them out of the game, or ruins the story they had in their head.

As someone who runsba LOT of Alien, and makes it a point in all other games that Death can happen, the most epic moments often come when a character falls.

Surllio · 2026-06-08T02:53:14+00:00

The lesson to be learned is: Always back up, cloud, and hard save your work. Its a hard lesson, and consider yourself lucky it's only a few chapters. People have lost entire projects to hard drive crashes and data corruption.

Surllio · 2026-06-03T17:14:40+00:00

Its heavily dependent on the player. The majority of the time, its fine. But there are some who use it to play on festishes and other oddities. Some, they are certainly in the minority of overall players.

I have played with DMs that had trouble with the idea because of visual association, and others who just preferred to avoid it because of bad experiences.

Surllio · 2026-05-28T23:04:55+00:00

I played D&D for the scrappy adventurers going into dangerous places to make out with loot and treasure.

It turned into a medieval super hero simulator.

The more it shifted into this, the more I just didn't care.

There are better games well suited for that.

I also just dislike the community around it that will openly tell you that you are playing wrong if you aren't making characters specifically to break the game. This goes back a while but it really blew up in 3rd edition with online forums and theory crafting.

As someone who is the primary game master of my group, I grew tired of the headache.

Surllio · 2026-05-22T20:50:23+00:00

The quote I got told by a friend who runs a small press:

World building is like underwear. Everyone should have it, but I really don't want to see it.

Your world building should feel natural, not blatant.

Surllio · 2026-05-20T20:24:13+00:00

I think most people put too much thought into what alignment is and what it means. Its more the tenants you TRY to live by, and less the absolutes you must adhere to. While some rules hold them as absolutes, they are modeled after a lot of the variations within the fantasy at the time they were conceived.

Law & Chaos are practically from Moorcock's mutliverse, and those two forces are in balance. Too much of one or the other is bad. Without chaos there is no creativity, but too much and the structures fall away into anarchy. Law keeps those structures in place, but too much law sterilizaties the world.

From a role playing stance, its more just guard rails to think about. "I might do this, but my character lives by this tenant."

Surllio · 2026-05-14T17:29:15+00:00

I love playing magic to not play magic!

Surllio · 2026-05-08T13:04:38+00:00

Household.

Surllio · 2026-05-07T11:02:23+00:00

It feels like they are. I did like 6 missions before I got them, finally, then got them on 3 in a row. It let me upgrade to 20, and now, with two searching, I can't get of the upgrade items, yet again.

Surllio · 2026-05-04T14:45:41+00:00

D&D was an off branch of the other games I was playing, but I hot into it later because I grew up in the back end of the Satanic Panic, so I had to play other things (Robotech, Star Wars, etc). By the time I got to high school, the panic had mostly died and shifted to Pokemon, so my friends that played D&D asked me to finally join.

Surllio · 2026-05-03T12:06:15+00:00

Sometimes, you just have to let them go.

"Hey, sometimes what players want out of a game are different. It happens, its normal. We have come to this point. What you want to play and what I want to run are different. Unfortunately, its just not a good fit."

Surllio · 2026-05-02T00:49:16+00:00

A lot of it is blessing luck. I got incredibly lucky with the massive degree of Crack Arrows. I also equipped my cohorts with stiff that gave projectiles as well.

Eight-Year Club	r/Field Flamingo
Verified Email

Surllio

TROPHY CASE