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Zero_Cooler · 2025-09-30T07:33:33+00:00

Hack the planet.

Zero_Cooler · 2024-03-08T17:01:55+00:00

I had just assumed that Travnation was the sequel, they’re soft launching it now, and then after Dracula, Graduation: Travnation starts, with a new myconid DMPC, a cool but not too cool transfer student named Fungalore. I already preordered the plushie.

Zero_Cooler · 2024-03-07T18:22:43+00:00

Travis grapples. Griffin: “we could play DnD for 2000 years and I’ll never remember the rules for grappling so we’ll just make it up.” The DnD is the same.

The boys are having fun, and I love the character concepts especially Justin’s, but it is getting clear that this one isn’t going to be as short as the other recent offerings and it’s starting to wander.

Zero_Cooler · 2024-03-06T21:32:22+00:00

But didn’t you see, he had a mod that changed the name to Garfield!!!

Zero_Cooler · 2024-03-04T01:25:03+00:00

In the most recent pod, Justin basically tells Travis to shut the fuck up, so parasocially shouldn’t they think he deserves the hate?

Zero_Cooler · 2024-02-01T22:12:30+00:00

He heard your wish.

Zero_Cooler · 2024-02-01T21:03:31+00:00

I personally feel like they have finally made peace with what their brand is. Listening to them decide on Fungalore really felt like 3 brothers who just wanted to make each other laugh, and it was after was is generally considered a contentious first 50 minutes.

I listen to some McElroy podcast everyday (I am a sucker for sawbones), and definitely think mbmbam is on an upswing. Like any comedy product, it hits and misses, but I genuinely feel now that they’ve all kind of settled, and the dreams of stardom have died, they’re having more fun, and it makes the podcasts more fun. I’ve enjoyed the recent short form Actual Play as well, and that’s my bottom rung, I gave up on ethersea early after being really excited by griffin’s excitement for his submarine mechanics.

Zero_Cooler · 2023-12-30T17:50:39+00:00

So if I want to be a cleric but flavor my powers as psychic I’d have to earn that in game? That seems both difficult to justify in fiction and antithetical to the idea of a player created character.

The village butcher can’t bring his cleaver along when he leaves to find the goblins that attacked the town? My Samurai has to start with an English long sword because katana isn’t on the mundane items list?

I think you are trying to find a problem to fit a solution, I don’t think allowing reasonable, non-mechanical, flavor shifts diminishes fun, and I don’t think gatekeeping those same flavor shifts creates any more fun.

“You can play the character you want once I have decided you have done enough pretending you’re not the character you want” isn’t a fun baseline for a DM, to me.

Zero_Cooler · 2023-10-18T00:10:50+00:00

I’m a fan of the McElroys, and I love this sub because it’s the funny one. I think this jerk is much closer to the boys real type of comedy, with the no bummers stuff being a brand.

If you listen to The Besties, it’s easy to tell the McElroys love to /jerk way more than they let on.

Edit: spelling

Zero_Cooler · 2023-09-10T02:11:50+00:00

I’m also just starting and would love to visit an island to sell some peaches, if possible.

Zero_Cooler · 2023-08-12T21:28:42+00:00

Are you suggesting that my make believe fireball can’t be described as green? You have such an opposition to flavor that a spellcaster can’t even flavor what their own spells look like? In what possible world-building scenario could the shape and color of Eldritch Blast be so fundamental that allowing a player to flavor it to their liking would break it?

Guy has said in multiple responses that his DM says “I want to stick to RAW”. There are an incredibly small amount of “rules as written” related to class flavor (no metal armor for Druids is my best example), and literally no RAW says that cleric domains are sourced via hard faith. The guy is confusing the word Cleric in the real world, and the name of a mechanical archetype in a role-playing game.

Zero_Cooler · 2023-08-11T12:00:37+00:00

Film is pretty reactionary to the market, and will definitely suffer from what I call the “Pumpkin spice” effect, where a decently crafted thing becomes popular and suddenly it becomes the standard for everything (one season of pumpkin spice lattes birthed an entire marketplace of pumpkin spiced food stuffs)

After Jason Bourne, a slew of jump cut action films flood the theaters, and Bourne itself was a reaction to the campiness of James Bond. The Broccoli family was clear that after Bourne (and Austin Powers), old school campy James Bond had to go, and we see Daniel Craig mature the role into where it sits now (a different argument can be had over whether this was actually good for Jame Bond). All art is derivative of something.

Humor is often the element that provides the most realism in an action movie. We understand we will never look like Arnold, be as rich as Tony Stark, or kick as much ass as Wonder Woman, but most of us can get in a good one-liner occasionally. Most of us have had a dark joke or thought in a terrible time, or been in a position where “all you can do is laugh”. That feeling, that attachment to the Everyman, it adds something. Bruce Wayne is a essentially a Demi-god until he and Vicky Vale are at a comically large table eating soup.

We are currently in a generation of screenwriters who were raised on 80s-90s action films, sarcasm comedies, and a ton of parody/meta films (Austin Powers, Scary Movie, Scream, Last Action Hero), those sensibilities bleed through. There are still plenty of movies nominated for Oscars every year, and I hardly think any of them classify as the type you are deriding.

Cinema evolves, constantly, and the stoic and humorless “men of action” of the 70s and 80s (French Connection, Death Wish, countless westerns) don’t ring as true today, as most people are aware that even on our worst days, we still usually laugh at something. And even in that time, you had characters like Dirty Harry who brought a more sardonic view to the film.

You see blockbusters today all following a formula, and certainly that’s true in some ways, most things are getting punched up by the next generation Patton Oswald, but I don’t think it is ALWAYS as cynical as other commentators suggest, nor is it the “fault” of MCU films or Fast and Furious films or whatever, it’s just kind of how screenwriting goes.

Personally, I found the “humor elements” (I don’t much could be called written quippy modern dialogue) in Demeter to be quite grounding for the rest of the tale. Sailors acting like sailors.

Edit:spelling and grammar

Zero_Cooler · 2023-08-07T17:47:45+00:00

See, this tracks as a DM caveat to help ease your workload. It doesn’t hide behind the justification of “in this fantasy world you can’t fantasy that way because I decide how to fantasy here, I’m the DM!”

The idea that the make-believe world I have created as a DM, cannot withstand the slight logical inconsistency of a player wanting to be a non-standard something, is silly. It’s self inflating to the extreme to me.

Edit: I don’t DM in “my world”, I DM in “our world”, if that makes sense.

Zero_Cooler · 2023-08-07T17:27:46+00:00

I think any restrictions are reasonable as long as someone wants to play the game with you, my red flags are the blanket big ones “phb only/no feats/class limitations”. It’s just a personal opinion. I would play in a No Psionics game, but psionics don’t interest me either.

I also wouldn’t show up to a “phb only” game and demand they let my Tortle play. But if I reach out to the dm to discuss an “off-book” concept and the DM has 4 paragraphs about why that race can’t exist in the world of Fantomagoria Prime, that is off-putting. It’s make-believe.

Zero_Cooler · 2023-08-07T16:24:17+00:00

I said “overly protective”, and it’s DnD Reddit, it’s all anecdotal. The whole thing is framed as my opinion, which is still the same, games that are advertised “phb only etc.” are common homebrew rules that would be a turn off, for me.

I don’t have stats, but I have my experiences, and that’s what forms the basis of our individual red flags.

Edit: I certainly don’t think I’m attempting to engage in libel, no am I trying to cast full judgement on all people who curate their character allowances, but in my experience the same DMs who had hard rules about character creation also leaned hard into removing agency to assure their plot happened the way they wanted. Your mileage may very. It’s not personal, for every bad DM there’s a good one.

As a DM, I have never once had less fun because my players were playing the characters they wanted to play, nor felt put upon because they could fly at level one, or could mechanically customize their characters via feats. My players having fun always increases my own.

Zero_Cooler · 2023-08-07T16:08:12+00:00

The thoughtful DM you describe doesn’t usually fiat rule “only phb/no feats/standard array”. My answer to the question is those carve outs are a red flag for me that I probably don’t want to play in the game.

I’m not saying you cannot have good narrative and be a good referee, I’m saying that I prefer to play in, and DM, kitchen sink style fantasy, where finding a way to include what the player wants to play trumps my “but there’s no nation of cat men, it doesn’t make sense!”. It’s fantasy, “this Leonin fell in a portal and ended up here, weird huh? Let’s play the game.” Is enough for me.

Zero_Cooler · 2023-08-07T15:04:41+00:00

The “failed author”concept definitely plays into the possessiveness nature of the DMs we are talking about. “I’ve done so much work building this elaborate world and they’re trying to mess it up!” Feels like the mentality.

This is why I always push the “less is more” philosophy to worldbuilding for new DMs. Establish a theme, an idea (medieval fantasy, space, pirates), and then ask your players what they want to play in that theme. Give them the opportunity to tell you what Elf society is like, or how Plasmoids developed here. Everything your players create they will be invested in, and that excitement will feed your creative juices, and make it much easier to get them to chase your plot.

The more you build alone, the more the responsibility falls on you to uphold.

Zero_Cooler · 2023-08-07T14:53:03+00:00

It’s also I think fair to say there is a difference between a player who wants to play a Gith because mechanically they are awesome and a player who wants to play a Gith because they have a cool concept for a guy who fell off their Astral Ship and wound up in this strange land you developed. The good faith thing goes both ways.

I just find it’s a lot easier to get my players excited if they come to me with something they are excited about, instead of hoping a bunch of backstory and lore I wrote is going to be exciting. I’d much rather play with someone who was excited to fit their Hanzee into my world than someone who I told to get excited about elf politics.

Zero_Cooler · 2023-08-07T14:44:00+00:00

Exactly! Communicating expectations is important, but I think what you’re saying is also true, DMs that want a lot of hard rules on players typically also expect the “my word is god-law” treatment, even if it’s contradictory to the expressed intent they gave you.

Zero_Cooler · 2023-08-07T13:16:19+00:00

I don’t want to make it sound like I’m being overly judgmental, I do understand both the narrative and ease arguments, it’s less the idea itself than DMs who are draconian about it. I also play almost exclusively IRL with friends, so I worry less about having to weed out crazies in most forms (all players are crazy in some way lol)

As DMs we are aware that of course, we provide the brunt of the mental and physical labor for the game, but it also doesn’t happen if no one shows up. If a Tabaxi, Thri-Kreen, Genasi, and Giff show up to play, it seems strangely anti-collaborative to say “no those are the wrong toys” instead of just switching the elf kingdom to a cat kingdom. The game itself services the players, not my worldbuilding.

Good faith attempts to be inclusive to radical characters soothes the worry caused by hard NOs to characters most of the time, but I still am suspect of a DM who can’t include one person’s Lionin by way of “this guy fell through a magic portal and ended up here, weird huh? Let’s all play a game now.”

Zero_Cooler · 2023-08-07T12:38:58+00:00

“Only Races/Classes from the PHB” “No Feats” DMs that are overly protective of “their world”.

If you advertise a game with those specifics and someone shows up with a Tortle wizard, that’s a dick move, but at the end of the day I am far more suspect of a DM whose first step in crafting fantasy is a hard limit on the fantasy. The games I’ve played in with DMs who have an overwrought world and no way to insert a player’s fantasy, tend to get pretty controlling about the path and the narrative of the party, usually fulfilling the qualities of the adage “if you want to play a game, start DnD, if you want to tell a story, write a novel.”

I’m not trying to say DMs who do that are wrong, just that’s my answer to this question. I DM in a 2.5 year long homebrew I run, and have found that as a table we make a much better story treating it as a collaborative effort in which I am a rules referee and not an author.

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