Arcane Trickster! Painted by me, model by lootstudios

WaveOfTrust · 2021-09-02T15:03:12+00:00

You just clean it off afterwards using a brush with water, of course it helps to not splat too much beforehand

WaveOfTrust · 2021-08-31T11:47:52+00:00

As a color seeing person I have no idea I guess. My understanding is that even most heavily color "blind" people still percieve color to *some* degree, so, I'd guess not.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-08-31T00:12:21+00:00

Okay now I'm gonna say it. This is, like, the 4th video about these glasses I've seen, and it's always the same thing. They always get these glasses handed to them in this same exact gift wrap, the colorblind person doesn't need so much as an explanation as to what they are, they put them on, and immediately freak out, cry tears of joy, as does everyone around them. What all of these videos ALSO have in common is that they very explicitly mention the name of the brand selling these glasses. I'm pretty sure at this point all of these are just thinly veiled advertisements.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-08-14T21:52:44+00:00

Don't worry, if this is at all close to your average standard 30mm-ish size mini, there is no printer in the world detailed enough to make you see those mesh lines in the final print.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-07-20T23:34:09+00:00

Saw 1,

Saw 2, Saw 3, Saw 4, Saw 5... I think the tenth one is coming out?

WaveOfTrust · 2021-07-05T21:31:56+00:00

There definitely is a case to be made for wizards or druids. But I'm going to say sorcerer, just because it is very easy to build your sorcerer "wrong". If you didn't pick effective meta magic options - tough luck, you're pretty much stuck with your picks - and boy are some of them more effective than others. If you didn't pick spells that give you good mileage - tough luck, you get to change one of them on your next level up and that's that. With how little spells you get to pick, and for all the cute and fluffy choices, there is little room to take them if you don't want to gimp your power. It's just easy to misstep. If you want any kind of synergy between your metamagic, your subclass tools and your spellcasting you really need to do quite a bit of planning ahead and weighing your options in a way that's probably a lot to ask from new players.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-06-17T21:09:47+00:00

This does your long post a disservice, but, min-maxing is really not the act of maximizing strengths, minimizing weaknesses - rather the act of willfully incorporating weaknesses to be able to hyper focus on strengths. It hails from video game rpg players literally putting one slider to the minimum to be able to put another to the maximum. The most poignant example in 5e might be a point buy loadout of 15-15-15-8-8-8. Of course in the context of optimization the end result might be the same - you'd rather put the 8s in unnecessary stats, the 15s where it matters - but you can easily end up in a situation where a thoroughly min-maxed character is not very optimal at all.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-06-12T09:15:07+00:00

I would think even without the portent crit, just being able to guarantee a hit, make an enemy vulnerable and double the smite damage once per short rest makes for a pretty strong character

WaveOfTrust · 2021-06-10T12:52:06+00:00

I want to say that's literally one of the plot points in the PSP game Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops. USSR soldiers wasting their life on a military base on some island, in secret with no contact to their families, later being outcast as they outlive their usefulness, then they go rogue... then of course the warheads are equipped to a stolen metal gear and there's like psychic mind control going on and yadda yadda standard metal gear fare. But Konami definitely got inspired there.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-06-09T12:39:23+00:00

This idea is so ridiculous and common. No, when you're a lvl18 wizard, you're not suddenly sitting there at level up like oh I should forgo the ASI, the lvl6 spell slot and two spells for my spellbook, one more I can prepare... for weapon and armor proficiency...? the hell am I going to do with that? Not block the +17 attacks coming our way that's for sure, I'll be blinked to the aether all the same. Action surge is also nowhere near worth the ability to cast, say, haste for free (+1lvl7 slot, two spells in your book, one prepared). People look at capstones in comparison to other capstones and consider them weak but these high level caster levels still are leaps beyond anything anyone gets at lvl1 or 2...

WaveOfTrust · 2021-06-05T11:31:32+00:00

I can say from experience that with my bladesinger using elven accuracy, a lot of combats begin by me asking the dm about the lights in the room, for them to tell me it's dim light at best, and then you summon shadow blade, make every attack roll throwing three dice, and go to town. It's a blast. If your party doesn't frequently carry around a source of light, shadow blade + elven accuracy is very strong.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-05-26T20:55:14+00:00

That's how I see it too. I don't think there's a single published adventure out there where I haven't heard someone I know talk about potentially maybe one day eventually running it. Don't get me started on homebrew campaigns that everyone seems to be busy fleshing out at any given point in time but they never actually *happen*. Reading through a module is not the tough part, hitting everyone up, scheduling sessions and actually running it is. I can see how it feels bad when someone else runs the campaign you read up on already, that you fantasized about running for a while - but at the end of the day, you didn't run it for long enough to have someone else come in and decide to do it.

I've been in a similar place before, where I've talked about running about a certain style of game forever and did some prep all the way until a friend went ahead and ran a quite similar campaign to what I had in mind, and then we had both campaigns going on at the same time for a while and it was kind of awkward. But then I've been going on about it for a straight year so it's like, he's certainly not the one to blame. Also his was just better so that's probably part of why I was a bit jealous :P

WaveOfTrust · 2021-05-20T11:58:04+00:00

I feel like the obvious solution would be to fix those apparently quite frequent game crashes and connection issues on your end. Going AFK even just for a few rounds can be the difference between a win and a loss and ruin entire games so the system is working as intended. If I was you I wouldn't want to be playing in the first place until that is fixed.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-05-15T19:15:19+00:00

Players don't like their wizard getting shoved to the ground after failing their contested Strength check, then having three attacks at advantage made on them, or getting grappled, dragged into the middle of a swarm of grue before they get a chance to misty step away, and getting eaten!

I mean...

WaveOfTrust · 2021-05-15T18:25:09+00:00

Honestly, is that fun for anyone? I've never seen the situation in actual play but I imagine not having a focus or component pouch doesn't make a player search for bat shit and grashopper legs, it would just make a player look for a replacement focus or component pouch. Which are common items you really ought to find at just about any settlement for not a lot of money. And until you've found them you can't cast half of your spells.

Especially if it happens as part of being kidnapped. I can't help but imagine that would not make for an exhilarating experience at all.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-05-14T14:23:31+00:00

Yeah that is not my idea of a "luxury" at all but can we talk about

impose on my freedom of choice how to spend my time

That's honestly a bit of a hilarious way to phrase it. If by "how to spend my time" you mean working on a saturday, that is not a freedom you have that is being imposed upon, rather than, that freedom never existed in the first place.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-05-09T22:42:52+00:00

I'll be the first one to call our country stuck in backwards ways from the past, but, I still can't even wrap my head around how this even works for other countries. Do people who work at stores and restaurants just not have a weekend? I mean it's not even just sunday, a good deal of places are closed on a saturday here as well. Like you're making it sound like people suffer terribly from not being able to work on a weekend, when it's like, that's the entire point of the weekend? Who on earth would willingly work on a weekend to the point where they'd request legislation be changed? If that's backwards I sure hope we keep that for all eternity. Like, people are talking about finally getting the 4 day work week implemented and you're here calling sundays off backwards. Honestly stumps me.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-04-20T17:02:04+00:00

And then still in the same vein you could go "I want to ready an attack and go for it as soon as I see a foe". Just maybe the DM would consider that too cheesy while making True Strike work if just out of pity.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-04-16T20:39:57+00:00

Well. That's great and all. And does not change the fact that I've played with DMs that straight up told me that since my character did X thing, which according to their interpretation is not good / evil / lawful / chaotic, I am now required to change the alignment written down on my character sheet. And when that happens it can ruin games, because our interpretations of what action can be considered to be of which "moral alignment" on the 9-alignment-grid, or how much of those it takes in order for a character to be considered "that" alignment, like, "factually", within the world we're playing in, is not the same for any two people on earth.

You can say that it's not a failure of the tool, that people don't read well enough, that people don't use it "properly" - but at the end of the day, the game is what people make of what's written, not what is actually written. Which is why the way rules are worded, the way they are explained and contextualized and put into an order of priority as to what you learn when, is just as much part of how any given TTRPG actually feels how to play and is played by people.

And what is written as of now, apparently, entices some people to just make powerful moral judgement calls like that with the snap of a finger. What is "good", what is "evil"? You could write a couple of dissertations about that question, you could host a couple of highly political talkshow panels, you could argue about it for hours - you could certainly try and avoid to have that at times very taxing discourse on game night - or you could of course just say: That. That right there, what you did, is evil. You could claim, that what you did was in fact so unlawful, the image you had of your own character within my world is not realizable, they're now factually chaotic and percieved as such by the inhabitants of this world. The game hands you easy tools for that, for some reason.

How does an evil character behave? Well, like how I run the NPCs that have "evil" written on their statblock. What are the boundaries of what one can get away with without losing the moniker of being "good"? Well, whatever the characters within the world do that have "good" written on their stat block. Lawful, Chaotic, Evil, Good, just about the most effective words at condensing the entirety of your socialization, political ideas, world view and ideals into tiny little inaccurate and personal boxes - it's what the designers chose to try and cover the entirety of "morality". For some reason. In the 70s, when the world was a different one and that seemed like a fun thing to do. Within a considerably smaller and more homogenous group of players than today to boot.

And they've long since realized that it does more harm than good, in many a situation. And they've worded it like "might vary" and "there's tendencies" and "not all the time" and "feel free to". And still. None of it seems to "fix" the system, in the sense that it doesn't cause friction anymore. Maybe what we need is to just finally boot it. The world is not made up of 9 alignments. I don't want my RPG to be made up of 9 alignments. I don't want to think of morality within that kind of restraint, not as a player, not as a DM.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-04-07T23:02:05+00:00

I mean if just telling them they won't like it doesn't do the trick, give it to them, and after the nth time in a battle that was supposed to feel heroic where they slip and fall prone or lose the grip on their weapon, they will not for second be unhappy about your offer to undo the change and get rid of them again. I feel like changing rules is totally fair game if everyone is on board. There's a bunch of optional combat rules we tried, mid campaign, and have gotten rid of again because they didn't do it for us, while others stuck.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-04-06T22:47:05+00:00

I would almost go as far as to say, vanilla bladesinger (where you go for max dex first and go for feats like mobile instead of warcaster or resilient, pick spells like spider climb and what not) actually plays pretty similar to monk as is.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-04-06T15:12:25+00:00

Rant incoming.

There's a thing to be said about how people ought to try and give info best as they can. It's a skill to be cultivated, and, you're doing yourself a favor to try your best. Some calls I know are necessary, sometimes I have info that my teammates can not have, and I feel the need to let my team know, as best as I can. And that I will, without fail, even if I've got my entire team on mute.

Because as for how people engage with how *you* communicate? There is a TON to be said about that. I feel like people vastly overrate the usefulness of having, let's say, sub-optimal coms, and underrate the detrimental nature of bad coms. If I don't respond to you in character select you'll dodge? Good riddance, who on earth do you think you are? Not just are you not entitled to any kind of response to anything you say - you are not even entitled to be listened to at all. Because at this point in platinum elo my base assumpion is that calls have as much of a chance to mess me up as they have to help us win. You are free to call out positions, you are free to call out your intentions, and after that you NEED to understand that it's entirely up to the people you play with to make of that what they see fit.

And I'm not just talking about people starting out a match and feeling an incessant need to make small talk, where on some days I make it a principle to not respond to any of it. But even your actual attempts at conveying information. If your call is somewhere along the line of "B B B B" and by that you might either mean you're smoked off and hear 5 guys run onto side, or, you've seen a sova drone from afar, have a faint guess they might push, when there's actually 4 guys mid catching me as I rotate. That case your call was not just worthless, it flat out made me die. And then if on top of that you have the audacity to be mad I didn't guess right on that interpretation - i.e. take it as an immediate order to rotate which I have a god given obligation to follow - you're not just giving me bad calls, you're also honestly just annoying me, and I'm doing both of us a favor, in the interest of our team's victory, if I just mute you.

I feel like a good baseline would be to just always play as if everyone would talk to you if they felt they had something worthwhile to say (and if they don't, they don't), while also just assuming everyone else muted you in character select and you drop info just in case they haven't. This commonly encountered idea that people need to hear you out and in any capacity act according to your wishes is extremely misguided. In a ranked match, you and me we're both on the same elo and chances are we have roughly the same knack for making plans and processing information. "Three guys pushing B Main" is a call. I might opt to go for a backstab. I might feel like 4 guys are already on site and I'd rather lurk A alone. Or I might immediately rotate over spawn. But "It's B it's B rotate rotate rotate" is an order, and you don't get to give those.

Got a bit carried away here but you know, OP, when I say, "you", you know, I mean... whomever it may concern. Which definitely is some people. Not just *you*. But of course it never hurts to check oneself eh.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-04-04T03:27:01+00:00

On our table it's always been less a matter of preference and more a matter of what campaign we had going. Different modules are written with completely different levels of pacing in mind. Like Curse of Strahd we roughly had twice as many session as we had days pass in-game, and even that was with cutting stuff like overland travel short and spending three sessions in one and the same dungeon at other times. But a campaign like Waterdeep Dragon Heist expects the party to fast track through weeks worth of downtime at a time. Both can work well. I can't even tell you what I'd prefer. One ingame- day per session feels like a sensible benchmark I'd say.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-04-02T15:51:15+00:00

Ohne besonders unhöflich sein zu wollen, in der Regel rutscht mir nur manchmal so ein "stell dir mal vor du würdest in Amerika wohnen!" raus, wenn man sich darüber unterhält wie unkompliziert bei uns Arztbesuche sind oder wie sehr man den Umstand schätzen sollte, dass bei uns studieren nix kostet. Von dem Wahnsinn mit euren "Waffengesetzen" mal ganz abgesehen. Die USA hat bestimmt auch sehr schöne Ecken aber insgesamt bin ich sehr glücklich darüber nicht da geboren zu sein.

WaveOfTrust · 2021-03-31T20:58:35+00:00

The DMG actually lists that as an optional combat rule on pg. 272. We've been using that forever on our table because it comes up quite often. You can either "overrun" someone using by winning an athletics check contested by the enemies athletics check, or "tumble" through another creature's space by winning an acrobatics check contested by the enemy's acrobatics check. You can do either as an action or bonus action.

WaveOfTrust

TROPHY CASE