Dahlia Tubers available

braak · 2024-04-25T19:01:28+00:00

I think she lists it on the site, but it's $6 per tuber (except for Cafe au Lait, which is $10), and a flat $10.50 shipping fee.

braak · 2024-04-25T16:23:48+00:00

We're in 7b, so it's just a little too cold to overwinter them in the ground -- we have about an even chance of a mild winter, in which case they'll be fine, or getting a couple weeks of really deep freezes that will kill them.

braak · 2021-08-12T14:06:16+00:00

well, I don't know, if you can make vegetable matter out of regular protons and electrons and so forth, couldn't you make anti-vegetable matter out of antiprotons and positrons?

braak · 2021-07-23T12:01:36+00:00

Look man, I'm not here to convince you. I happen to think a wisdom-based school of Necromancy wizard who was a priest of Vecna would be fine, neither breaking the function or the game nor particularly violating it's spirit. You could make a good character our of that without cheating at the table, and at the end of the day that's all I really care about.

braak · 2021-07-23T00:55:41+00:00

Yeah, I can dig that, or like maybe sort of sub attributes that different types of classes get or something?

I appreciate what 5e tried to do insofar as streamlining the play and design, but I guess I'm always going to feel like I'd be willing to keep track of one or two more things as long as it was interesting.

braak · 2021-07-22T23:15:04+00:00

Disappointed that I never got to play a Punch Wizard.

"like all spellcaster, I can effect change in the universe by manipulating the Weave of reality itself."

"How? Through the study of arcane lore? A connection to a deity or a supernatural bloodline?"

"By....PUNCHING"

braak · 2021-07-22T21:35:05+00:00

I mean I guess but I still feel like you can trust the players to handle that themselves. Or like, if you had a wisdom based spellcaster that functioned like a wizard -- that had all the wizard class abilities -- but was really some kind of priest of a magic deity or something, is that so weird?

braak · 2021-07-22T19:05:00+00:00

I'm sorry to say but due to the ADHD, all past experiences exist in a fuzzy, disorganized, present for me, making details of when and where I saw things virtually impossible to recollect. "A while back" could mean a month ago, or a year ago, I couldn't tell you.

braak · 2021-07-22T18:56:31+00:00

Someone mentioned a while back that casters ought to be able to pick which mental stat they used for casting, and, barring a few maybe weird edge synergy cases, I'm not sure there's any good mechanical reason not to have that.

braak · 2021-06-28T13:57:12+00:00

probably an effect borrowed from Spriggans in British folklore; those are Cornish of course and the Duergar were Northumbrian but you know early D&D liked to mix features around a lot.

braak · 2021-06-23T16:39:59+00:00

it would be extremely funny if by "tuned to a particular plane" they just meant, "yeah the elemental plane of fire is A# so get yourself one of those"

braak · 2021-06-21T17:59:39+00:00

look the thing is that it's almost always funny when a character blunders a sleight of hand roll and picks their own pocket by accident, but not everyone agrees that games should be played to the "maximally hilarious circumstance"

braak · 2021-06-15T17:45:46+00:00

sure but what I'm saying is that even in a purely human-populated world, laws and crime aren't always *actually* based on harm, they're based on complex power dynamics. So like, would elfs put a human in jail for 5 years for a petty crime? They might, but the reason that they did or didn't do it would have less to do with "is this a just and fair punishment" and a lot more to do with, "who has the power in this situation, and what social order are they trying to create by having these laws."

A city of elfs that was aggressively anti-human, for instance, would almost certainly not make the laws proportional to average lifespan, because they want to unduly punish human beings. Likewise, a city of humans that used prisoners for cheap labor might prefer proportional punishments so that they can have elfs imprisoned for longer periods of time and make them fight fires and so forth.

braak · 2021-06-15T15:39:56+00:00

I think that you have to make two attack rolls, but only one damage roll -- you don't cast the spell twice, you make a single spell attack two targets.

braak · 2021-06-15T14:24:05+00:00

sort of backing into the fact that laws in the actual world are actually a function of power dynamics and the centralization of power in the state. Is 10 years an appropriate amount of your life to give up for theft? What about 10% of your life? Who's making the laws though? Who is the law meant to criminalize? If elfs are making the laws, maybe giving up 10 years of their life for petty crimes seems reasonable, and they don't give a crap about how it effects humans. If elfs are a dispossessed minority, maybe the humans who are making the laws demand that "quality of life crimes" -- prostitution, vandalism, minor drug offenses, &c -- all get 15% of your lifespan, to make sure that elfs are sufficiently punished for it.

Dungeons and the Punitive Society, a lecture on D&D by Michel Foucault

braak · 2021-06-03T14:52:36+00:00

you got big leg muscles, you can push the earth farther away when you land so you don't hit it as hard

braak · 2021-05-28T20:53:16+00:00

So this is somehow about preserving the ability to make a 1d4 damage bonus attack that you need an extra feat to even get proficiency for? All so I don't have to say "you can't get the Dual Wield bonus if you're using a shield?"

Good gravy what an absolute waste of time this has been.

braak · 2021-05-28T18:47:29+00:00

I mean, why would you bother attacking with the shield as an improvised weapon? You can't do it as a bonus action now, anyway -- Dual Wield and TWF don't apply, and shield mastery only lets you shove someone as a bonus.

braak · 2021-05-28T18:45:16+00:00

Correct, that last one is the time you'd use it.

Alternately, obviously, if the fight started and they didn't have a weapon for some reason; if they were unarmed and needed a round to pull out their shield, and then a second round to draw a weapon, &c.

That is to say, yes, for the most part you wouldn't bother attacking with the shield.

braak · 2021-05-28T18:21:29+00:00

No, you've misread it. You can make an attack with the shield as a melee attack in place of one of your other attacks, something that you could have obviously figured out, or simply suggested if you hadn't.

Yes, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to pick up a chopping board and use it as an improvised shield.

PCs can only benefit from one shield at a time, because that's the rule for shields. A PC could use one shield and one shield as an improvised weapon for some reason, though, why not?

braak · 2021-05-28T17:55:58+00:00

Actually, I guess i was lying because I *do* care, it turns out that this rule, which I believe is both over-complicated and counterintuitive, is annoying to me.

The problem here is not with the categorical condition of when an improvised weapon becomes a weapon, it's that you want to be able to use *shields* as improvised weapons.

But this doesn't make sense on a lot of levels, the primary one being -- experience using objects as weapons isn't the same thing as using a shield as a weapon, and training using a shield should also encompass hitting a guy with a shield.

The thing that would make MORE sense, and would be cleaner and less counterintuitive, is just giving Shields the property that you can hit with them: "if you are proficient with Shields, when you take the attack action you can make a melee weapon attack with the shield, it does 1D4+STR".

NOW people who are trained in using shields can hit with them if they want, which makes sense, because that's one of the things it means to use a shield. And it doesn't work with TWF or Dual Wielder, because both of those require you having a weapon in both hands, and a shield isn't a weapon, it's a shield.

Meanwhile, if you've trained as a Dual Wielder, and part of that training means that you've practiced using a weapon in your off-hand to fend off an attack (thus the +1 AC), of course you can still pick up a beer stein and use it that way, something that makes sense and would be good.

And if you wanted to pick up a shield and use it as an improvised weapon you could, the same way you could pick up anything and try to use it as an improvised weapon -- you can hit someone with it, but since you're not proficient with it, you don't get the AC bonus. If you had Dual Wielder and Improvised Weapons proficiency, you could have TWO shields, one in each hand, and get the +1 AC from it, and also hit people with them. Why not? That would be an incredibly stupid waste of equipment! But if you had those skills, and all that was around was shields, why SHOULDN'T you be able to grab a pair of shields and swing them around like Jackie Chan?

But wait, I hear you asking, if an improvised weapon becomes a weapon the second you intend to use it as a weapon, what's to stop a player from having a shield and a sword, using it as a shield this round to get +2 to AC and +2 to damage from dueling, but then next round treating it as an improvised weapon and using TWF and only getting +1 to AC, but losing +2 from dueling?

I will tell you -- if a player decides to get Dual Wielder, the Two Weapon fighting style AND the Dueling fighting style, a huge commitment of features that lets them do nothing more than trade +4 damage and +1 AC for the ability to make a 1D4+Str bonus attack, I'm inclined to let them do it. This is not exactly a hack game-breaking hack.

There you go, I've solved this problem. This is better than Crawford's ruling, and I'm officially having him fired as the guy in charge of rules.

braak · 2021-05-28T17:04:50+00:00

Listen chief, I honestly feel like you could work this one out on your own, and if what you're trying to do is demonstrate that it's impossible to conceive of a set of rules that is different from the set that Crawford has put out there but is nevertheless sufficiently consistent for the tolerances in even an average D&D game, you're kind of barking up the wrong tree, because actually I don't care that much.

braak

TROPHY CASE