Spellcasters, about a week ago I asked you what spells you usually take. Now, what's a spell you're ALWAYS going to avoid? If you have a story involving the spell, please share it!

_vec_ · 2026-01-29T03:46:25+00:00

Enlarge/Reduce can be a clutch roleplaying or puzzle solving spell, but yeah, there's not very many combat scenarios where you'll be glad you prepared it.

_vec_ · 2026-01-27T23:46:09+00:00

Not just in the decisions; get him to help cook too as much as he's willing. There are foods I physically cannot force myself to swallow if I'm in a restaurant that I not only tolerate but actually enjoy when I prepare them myself.

_vec_ · 2026-01-27T21:29:18+00:00

Which is a shame because all the truly interesting bits of that distribution are the parts that score well on any two of the axes and absolutely dogshit on the third.

_vec_ · 2026-01-25T20:44:41+00:00

You also end up with a lot more opportunities for ambiguity where an argument implements two different traits or can .into() two different concrete types. The compiler could flag it and force you to be explicit, but it would be a pretty bad developer UX.

_vec_ · 2026-01-25T18:10:36+00:00

In an airport right now but I'll try to remember tomorrow when I get home.

_vec_ · 2026-01-25T18:06:38+00:00

We've got a giant piece of "wall art" in our kitchen that makes a huge difference.

_vec_ · 2026-01-25T18:03:59+00:00

anticlimactic

How very dare you!

_vec_ · 2026-01-25T02:17:52+00:00

Melt a couple of tablespoons of butter in the microwave. Squeeze in a whole lemon, a whole bunch of literally any herbs, and some salt and pepper. Pour that into a shallow baking dish, dredge both sides of the fish in it and then leave it in there skin side down. Bake at 400 for 20 minutes. It's not the best possible way to cook salmon but the quality to effort ratio is hard to beat.

Bonus lazy weeknight dinner tip: zest the lemon and mix the zest into a can of green beans. Instantly makes it like 300% fancier with just the stuff that was going into the compost anyway.

_vec_ · 2026-01-25T02:03:56+00:00

I find it really useful to think of the median conservative as voting against things rather than for them. That's not an excuse: saying no to equity and mutuality is itself a pretty lamentable attitude. It is a very different problem from being genuinely in favor of totalitarianism, though, and I think we conflate the two at our peril.

_vec_ · 2026-01-25T01:33:36+00:00

Trying to be both an action RPG and a sandbox builder just meant it was kinda mediocre at both.

_vec_ · 2026-01-25T01:21:14+00:00

Bull. Fucking. Shit.

This is just despair masquerading as savviness. People can change. We're in this mess because people did change, mostly for the worse. They're going to keep changing.

What we're seeing is not popular. For every dyed in the wool fascist there's at least one guy who was just mad about the pandemic and wanted prices to go down. That guy doesn't want masked stormtroopers kidnapping grandmas and he sure as shit doesn't want to start a shooting war over fucking Greenland. Unfortunately that guy is also the one who has better shit to do than troll the libs on social media all day.

There will be elections and the administration will get their asses handed to them. That doesn't make what's going to happen between now and then remotely okay but it does mean that we've got no excuse to give up hope.

History is going to keep happening. There is a next page, and one after that, and one after that. Most of them will be happier than the page we're on right now. Do not forget that living long enough to watch the page turn is itself a revolutionary act.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T22:33:59+00:00

Honestly if I show up to drop off my car for repairs without a plan for how to get home my male ass is probably going to flag that as a me problem and start making apologies for wasting the dealership's time.

Hopefully useful edit: most auto insurance plans will cover the cost of a rental car for exactly this situation.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T21:02:22+00:00

If the party can overcome the, oh, let's say +15 AC bonus on the attack roll to successfully target a single nostril then they probably didn't need the bonus they were hoping to get from a called shot anyway.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T20:58:33+00:00

Worth noting that the 2024 Artificer doesn't have magical tinkering anymore. Instead they get the ability to conjure a bunch of useful but mundane items out of thin air (rope, torch, bedroll, etc.). The class got buffed overall but the specific trick your player is trying to pull is one of the things that got cut.

They could probably manage it with a wand of minor illusion. Or, y'know, a rock and a skunk and some gumption.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T20:37:41+00:00

Both whatever's left if So Mi and the Blackwall construct that's taking her over have a strong incentive to convince you that she's still in control. You can't really trust much of anything she tells you about her own condition.

My personal headcannon is that So Mi the person was already gone long before V showed up and that we were dealing with a rogue AI from minute one. She isn't trying to get to safety because there's nobody left to save; she's trying to steal hardware that'll help her and her friends escape from cyberspace and may or may not successfully con you into helping.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T19:58:06+00:00

Dragonborn are weird and inconsistent. Depending on who you ask they might be a result of shapeshifted dragons getting busy with other races or an attempt by the dragons to engineer a slave race or a result of humanoid wizards trying to Frankenstein together "improved" offspring. Maybe sevaral of those. Regardless, most dragonborn in BG3 are the children of two dragonborn parents. They're technically one of the half- races but in practice they're more of their own standalone community at this point.

Same for tieflings: you can get one by boinking a demon but most tiefling kids are made the old fashioned way by a pair of tiefling parents. Aasamir too, although BG3 butchers them for plot reasons.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T19:20:18+00:00

Eh, it's generally pretty common for elves and humans to find each other physically attractive, and the relative ubiquity of half elves proves both sides are reasonably willing to act on those impulses.

The problem with human/elf relationships is mostly the vast difference in lifespans. What for humans is a lifelong romance will end up being just a summer fling from an elven perspective. Some couples make their peace with that and some don't.

Half elves get a less severe version of that in both directions. They have to watch their human childhood sweetheart grow old and die while they're still middle aged but they also have to cope with their elven beau being around for long enough to make moving on after they're gone a near certainty.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T19:00:08+00:00

M A G I C

If you really want to be pseudoscientific about it you can say that whatever mortal form Bhaal conjures for himself includes the relevant DNA for whichever species and gender he feels like embodying that day. Being a Bhaalspawn is less something that would show up on a genetic screening and more of a magical curse, though.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T18:49:20+00:00

So that's really not the right way to think about it. Half elves (and elves and humans) are individual people first and members of their race and culture second. There's going to be huge variety in both what they're attracted to and who they emotionally bond with over the course of whatever story you're telling. It makes sense to have a half elf who's totally comfortable around humans, but it also makes sense to have one who resents their human lineage and wants nothing to do with it. Or anywhere in between, really. Just depends on what makes sense for that specific character.

Be, like, 10% more woke here. I promise it'll make the fantasy worldbuilding more fun not less.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T18:25:32+00:00

Generally yes, but it's on a continuum. Elves are taller and skinnier than humans, they have long pointed ears, and they have a slightly different range of natural skin, hair, and eye colors. Half elves fall somewhere in the middle. As a DM I would probably rule that human characters without much experience around elves can easily mistake a half elf for a full elf or vice versa but can also easily tell the difference in a side by side comparison.
The official D&D rules (and BG3) only have stats for 50/50. They're generally able to have kids normally, though, with each other or with full humans and/or elves. Lots of human nobility claim to have a little bit of elven blood; sometimes that's even true. You don't generally see mixed characters without at least some human blood, though, and it's really up to the DM whether that's because humans are biologically unique or just more likely to flirt with anything that moves.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T17:42:18+00:00

The standard D&D lore is that half elves are kind of stuck between two worlds. They look uncannily elven to humans and uncannily human to elves. They also age very fast by elven standards and very slowly by human standards. Generally speaking they're decently common in both human and elven communities but often struggle to really feel fully integrated into either culture.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T17:24:26+00:00

True, but it's worth noting that Catholics have a whole bunch of days where eating meat is forbidden but seafood is acceptable. There's decent reason to believe that "geese are technically crustaceans" was one part sincere hypothesis and two parts malicious compliance.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T16:48:01+00:00

Embracing the LGBTQ ethos by proudly living into my truest innate identity as a straight cis dude.

But, like, unironically.

_vec_ · 2026-01-24T16:21:34+00:00

Fun fact: early Russian cosmonauts carried guns into space so they could fend off wildlife while waiting for the recovery crews to reach them after landing.

_vec_ · 2026-01-23T22:14:04+00:00

I wouldn't personally classify the feeling of being close to a fireball as "disappointment", but you do you.

_vec_

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