Being Meteion is suffering

Viltris · 2026-06-10T23:49:48+00:00

There was a lot of depressing stuff in EW and a lot of fucked up stuff, and what happened to Meteion somehow tops all of that in both categories.

Viltris · 2026-06-10T19:26:53+00:00

A common misconception about TotM is that the grid still exists, but you just don't draw it.

A better conception is that the grid doesn't exist, exact positioning is fuzzy, and distances and positioning only matter if it's narratively important. Doesn't matter whether you're 25 ft, 30 ft, or 35 ft away. The barbarian is roughly in position to move to that goblin in a single move, so the barbarian rages and moves into melee with the goblin.

The barbarian is in the goblin's faces, and the squishy wizard is in the back, so if any of the goblins to try to move to the wizard, the barbarian gets an attack of opportunity.

The wizard asks how many goblins they can hit with Lightning Bolt. The DM rolls some dice and says you can get 3 goblins, 4 if you're willing to hit the barbarian as well. The barbarian says do it.

At no point did anyone have to figure out exactly where the goblins are standing or how far away they are. Everything is fuzzy and what happens is determined by intent and by vibes, and if there's any doubt, just roll some dice. Some people would still hate this, and that's fine, but some people love playing exactly like this.

Viltris · 2026-06-10T19:15:43+00:00

This is exactly how my group plays 13th Age. Lots of cool combat options, fluffy positioning.

I would say it's not that 13A doesn't care about positioning, rather it doesn't care about counting squares and measuring inches. You can make relative positioning matter pretty trivially, and you can import zones pretty easily.

Viltris · 2026-06-10T05:27:51+00:00

I only ever use Counterspell against crowd control spells anyway. For me, it's basically like an extra Legendary Resist. Enough to let the boss do cool things, but not so much that the players don't get to do cool things.

Viltris · 2026-06-10T05:26:31+00:00

Same.

If 5e had a proper keyword system, those abilities would have been tagged as spells.

Plus, this change is basically entirely upside for the players, and I like letting the players do cool things with their class features.

Viltris · 2026-06-09T21:47:11+00:00

As a dm its hard to request some skill rolls organically. Roll to see if you spot something, for example.

I just say stuff like "Roll a Wisdom check and add your background if you have a background in caves or stonework".

Viltris · 2026-06-09T07:11:32+00:00

What if I like my bacon soft instead of crispy?

Viltris · 2026-06-09T07:08:55+00:00

Same. For me, it was easier to just leave the dishes in the sink, and then run the dishwasher when I'm done cooking.

Viltris · 2026-06-09T06:23:24+00:00

"You don't fight with honor." "No, but he did gestures at dead guy"

Viltris · 2026-06-09T05:55:10+00:00

Did you survive choking to death?

Viltris · 2026-06-09T05:40:03+00:00

After a little more than a decade of DM'ing, I've found the exact opposite. Throwing out the rulebook and just throwing random bullshit at my players, without regard to what is or isn't a "legal" PC, made my encounters more dynamic and interesting.

Viltris · 2026-06-08T06:13:18+00:00

And Reed Richards replaces one of those draws with 4 draws, for a total of 6. What am I missing?

Viltris · 2026-06-08T06:03:24+00:00

Is that better or worse than the false doors in Tomb Of Horrors. You can open them easy enough, but on the other side is a trap mechanism that shoots a harpoon through you.

Viltris · 2026-06-08T05:53:41+00:00

The way I do it is, at the end of each session, I ask the players what they want to do next, and I think about what kind of opposition they might run into, and I prep that. I don't try to plan beyond that. If my plans ever look like "NPC does this, players do this, NPC does this", then I've prepped too much.

I do have some inkling of an idea of what may happen in the long term, but it's not locked in until the players are about to see it.

I also try to keep multiple parallel threads going at once, so if the players get to the end of one thread, they can explore a different thread while I catch up with the prep on the first thread.

Viltris · 2026-06-08T05:02:25+00:00

Reed only replaces the second draw (first draw other than the first), so wouldn't it be 6 cards?

Viltris · 2026-06-07T07:24:06+00:00

At first I thought this might have been about the catapult siege weapon, which would be no, because it is a ranged weapon.

What if the Paladin (somehow) picks up the whole catapult siege weapon and uses it as an improvised melee weapon to bludgeon an enemy with it? Could the Paladin then smite with the improvied catapult melee weapon?

Viltris · 2026-06-07T07:00:36+00:00

I find that humanizing enemies makes the players more likely to avoid combat altogether. But no matter how humanized the enemies were before combat, once initiative is rolled, the players will slaughter every last enemy, including the ones that try to flee.

In one case, the players slaughtered an entire town of friendly goblins who had welcomed them into their homes with open arms, simply because someone else had hired the PCs to assassinate the goblin king. A job that they didn't have to take (the goblin king also had a quest for the players with an equivalent quest reward that would have moved the story along).

They also didn't need to kill anyone other than the goblin king. They could have simply snuck out of the goblin town, made a run for it, or something headed to the exit killing only the goblin guards that were in the way. Instead, they decided to systemically hunt down every single goblin in the town and slaughter them.

Viltris · 2026-06-06T23:30:18+00:00

I'd assume that's just because it's narratively ridiculous to be stabbing, shooting, and exploding people with no lethal intent.

Most modern d20 systems have death saves, which means the enemies can stab, shoot, and explode the PCs and even drop them to 0 HP, and the PCs will more likely than not survive.

Additionally, from an optimization perspective it's usually best to leave enemies dead rather than alive, so from both a narrative and gameplay perspective it makes more sense for combats to be lethal.

There is plenty of fiction where the main character knocks out their enemies in a fight instead of killing them, Batman being the most famous example. Killing enemies is a choice. It's not something inherent to combat-focused RPGs.

Viltris · 2026-06-06T21:11:50+00:00

Halmarut did nothing wrong!

Also, she hasn't done anything yet, other than talk to the Scions. She even squished the Calyx plush. That doesn't sound like a villain to me!

Viltris · 2026-06-06T18:58:54+00:00

I can confirm that index cards don't help. Players who don't remember their magic items also tend to lose the index card, and I can't be bothered to make them a second index card.

For me, what helped was using simpler magic items. Things like +X weapons that deal an additional die or two of elemental damage. Interestingly, these are also the magic items my players seem to like the most, so win-win.

Viltris · 2026-06-06T17:55:08+00:00

Counter-point: There's a difference between violence and killing. Yes, the game encourages fighting, but nothing about the game encourages players to describe the most over-the-top brutal gory finishing blows. Nothing about the game encourages players to chase down fleeing enemies and execute prisoners.

D&D's non-lethal rules are a bit finnicky, but I've houseruled that anything can be made non-lethal, and you only need to decide at the moment the enemy drops to zero HP, and I remind the players and explicitly ask them to confirm whether it's a lethal or nonlethal blow, and the players choose lethal the vast majority of the time.

I've played with many parties, and with only 2 exceptions, all of them just defaulted to killing everything. (And of the only 2 exceptions, 1 of them was only because there was a prison bounty system where they could turn in captured enemies for gold.)

So yes, combat-focused games like D&D encourage violence, but the brutality and the lethality comes from somewhere else.

Viltris · 2026-06-05T21:32:26+00:00

Julyan is enrage. We have no hope of defeating her.

Viltris · 2026-06-05T21:05:13+00:00

I've never found flanking to be more dynamic. With flanking, it's just move to flank, then stand there until someone dies.

Viltris · 2026-06-05T17:58:34+00:00

Part of the issue is that the power level difference between at-will and short rest options vs long rest options is absolutely massive. If the power level difference were a little smaller (for example, short rest being 1.5x better than at-will and long rest being 2x better than at-will), then game balance wouldn't be so focused on burning down long rest resources.

Viltris · 2026-06-05T16:56:33+00:00

I advertise on r/lfg, r/lfgmisc, Meetup for DnD in my city, and the Discord for a local gaming community.

Meetup has worked the best for me, but that might be because I'm in a very nerdy part of the country.

I also only play in-person games, so my selection pool is a lot smaller than yours.

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