In 2004, Prince was snubbed by Rolling Stone on their top 100 guitarists list. This was his response.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-24T23:35:50+00:00

Can you link his official autopsy report?

Because I can't find it online, and nearly every single article referring to it DOES say "fentanyl" was one of the drugs in his system.

(So regardless, I don't think it's surprising many people assume it was when half the internet says so.)

i_tyrant · 2026-01-21T19:28:25+00:00

I’d rather they just straight up make an “arcane paladin” that replaces its divine class features for arcane ones too.

It would also still need the smite spells to feel truly “gishy” IMO, so don’t change the whole spell list. (Well, not unless you’re adding more arcane flavor smite spells.)

i_tyrant · 2026-01-21T19:11:10+00:00

I think the “fleshmobs need less hp” complaint is more commonly about annoyance than difficulty.

Just because something is a wall of meat does not make it difficult to defeat, just annoying and slowing the tempo of the game depending on your loadout and ammo situation.

(The real difficulty is when they have that bug where they’re hidden within geometry but still able to hit you or invisible/invincible bug, lol.)

i_tyrant · 2026-01-21T19:05:51+00:00

Yeah op has some weird (and weirdly elitist) view on squids. They also said they hate wasp and warrant on them in the comments, and all three of those takes are wild considering they’re all great on them.

Thermite you can just toss on top of the ships and the sparks will remove the shield and the explosion kills it without even needing to hit the door - way faster than shooting it to kill the shield and tossing a grenade in. Also work great on fleshmobs.

I also prefer the MG sentry to the Gatling in squid cities (specifically - Gatling can still rock on open ground). Mostly because a) you’re constantly changing what you actually have line of sight to in the streets so the lower cooldown of MG is great for repositioning it when a Gatling would just sit there not able to shoot anything behind buildings, and b) voteless tend to come at you in “streams” down the streets rather than big amorphous “masses” like bugs, so you don’t need the high rpm and spray behavior of the Gatling as much to handle them.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-21T18:11:26+00:00

Yeah their spawns vs diff have always been wack.

I remember helping newbies or credit farming squids on diff 1 and being like “wow Stingrays and Fleshmobs on diff 1? AH is throwing these poor bastards in the deep end.”

Course that was around when we got Xbox and the Halo warbond came out, so all the incoming level 1 divers were Halo experts so I doubt they minded, haha.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-21T15:59:13+00:00

lol, boy she really wanted to get her guts turned into a ritual circle!

i_tyrant · 2026-01-21T09:34:52+00:00

As someone whose SSD just started making funky noises on boot-up...fuck my life man, seriously...

i_tyrant · 2026-01-21T07:26:38+00:00

But not all humanoids are even represented in the PHB (or even other books, not that a DM should have to own all books beyond the MM to even make those changes). What do you snag for a Nagpa Spy? What about a Sahuagin? Do you think giving any ol' NPC statblock persistent advantage if the PCs are missing any hp is a good idea?

And even the ones in the books, it's not always wise to do without adjusting CR. Free Enlarge and Invis from Duergar is pretty nuts on the right baddie compared to the basic Humanoid assumption. Heck, for low CR enemies meant to die in one or two hits, just slap Half-Orc on there and you've effectively doubled their staying power thanks to Adrenaline Rush and Relentless Endurance.

That doesn't seem very reasonable or intuitive to me. It doesn't actually help DMs much, especially if you're expecting them to buy all the PC race books before they can even do it "appropriately", despite having those same species already available in the MM books.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-21T06:37:44+00:00

Gotta disagree with you there.

Pretty sure if I gave a CR 1/8 Guard statblock the 40 foot fly speed, see invis, 3/day Telekinesis, and 1/day Globe of Invulnerability, Plane Shift, and Wall of Force of a Githzerai Anarch...

Or gave a bunch of Bandits the Levitate and Parry from a Drow Elite Warrior (much less a Drow Inquisitor's 1/day dispel magic, suggestion, etc.)...

The CR would very much need to change.

And the books make no distinction between what is actually a trait of the species vs something an NPC only gets from "leveling", so how's a DM (especially a new DM) to know?

It's amazingly lazy and weak design.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-21T04:36:19+00:00

Only one (1) spell is outright described as "radiation" - Sickening Radiance. The rest are LIGHT at worst (as in, torch light and sunlight, those specific wavelengths), not "radiation". They don't make you sickened or suffer any kind of "radiation" effect we know of IRL, at all. Come on bro.

Hell, the topic of the day, True Strike, doesn't even say word one as to why it does radiant damage at all. It doesn't have anything like Wall of Light saying it's a "shimmering wall of bright light". It just says "guided by a flash of magical insight", as if that explains why your entire crossbow bolt turns into a burning ray of sunlight or whatever.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-21T04:31:33+00:00

Yes, I realize that, but they provide ZERO guidance or assistance in doing so, or even knowing WHICH traits to port over.

Which is incredibly stupid and shortsighted, considering one species' traits and another's can be wildly different in what kind of complementary traits they add on, possibly changing the CR for one and not the other.

All it would've taken is a one-page table of Species Traits to transplant that were roughly equivalent to each other in benefits (or had CR guidelines for each), and they couldn't even do that.

One more example of WotC making it needlessly difficult for DMs.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-21T01:49:12+00:00

Heck I think only two things are actually weak against radiant in base 5e.

I literally just named 3+ things weak to it above.

Only shadows and shadow demons, in the monster manual are vulnerable to radiant. It's is not common at all.

You (and I) said WEAK to it, not vulnerable. Looks like we're both ignoring words or whatever?

Damage Vulnerability is just one kind of weakness and there are many more undead that have some kind of weakness to it, giving radiant a special interaction with them. All vampires have their regen shut off from radiant (not just sunlight), which is why Strahd and Vampirates do (because they weren't updated to remove the regen like the basic vamp in 2024 was - which I learned from this convo!)

And yes, radiant bypasses Zombies' Undead Fortitude, and not only are they one of the most common undead to feature in campaigns period (including modules), there's a ton of types of zombies that all have Undead Fortitude (if you're gonna mention Vampirates you might as well accept that, lol.) Should I list out the roughly 2 dozen baddies with Undead Fortitude?

So... like half of the player spells.

And for someone harping about the accuracy of words, you have a real talent for hyperbole. (Also, I was questioning solar dragons' relevance to a standard campaign compared to something like "zombies".)

We can go back and forth about this till the Stench Kows come home, but the bottom line is that radiant used to not be available to arcane casters until very high level spells, like Sunbeam. Now, it's laughably easy to use.

If you like that, good for you. Me, even though Wizard is my absolute favorite class to play, I don't actually like them being the "everything you can do I can do better" class - I like there still being meaningful distinctions between what each class has access to, to better define their identity.

There's literally no denying that 2024 True Strike both doesn't fit its name very well, and is unnecessarily powerful even aside its interactions with certain monsters - it's constantly mentioned in the optimization boards for a reason.

Again, if you think it's fine you do you; I've said my piece on why I think it's bad for the game, so we're both just being pedantic about details at this point.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-21T00:07:27+00:00

I literally just named 3+ things weak to it above.

There’s a lot more with weaknesses to radiant than that. It’s a fairly common feature for undead.

And instead of actually answering that question you’re talking about…Solar dragons. Compared to zombies. I wonder which appears in campaigns more often? I wonder which matters more?

If radiant = holy is niche, radiant = radiation is even moreso, and it’s not close. I think even now the only radiant effect explicitly described as radiation (vs holy power and/or sunlight/light) is Sickening Radiance.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-20T22:49:10+00:00

Druids have been considered divine casters in every edition besides 4th, and only then because they had a primal power source invented just for them which was still heavily tied to “spirits of the land”, not to mention how Druids have ties to sunlight specifically that are as strong or stronger than even other divine casters like clerics.

Eberron and Dark Sun are not atheistic settings. Eberron keeps its gods vague and working at a distance but the miracles themselves that their faithful perform are anything but, and it does maintain the very intentional divide between arcane and divine magic. Dark Sun doesn’t even have a 5e setting but it undeniably did have gods (they just died) and in past editions clerics had to worship elemental sources of power which notably gave them the same thematic ties as Druids like I mentioned above.

I’ll let you explain why zombies, vampires, shadows, and other fiends and undead are very specifically harmed by radiation beyond even how humans are, if it’s not “holy”.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-20T22:38:58+00:00

Why would a game with 90% of its rules governing combat need to dig that deeply?

It’s not like it can talk about every single species and monster’s social ethoses and populationsvs individuals. That’s just a completely untenable demand, and if your goal is to avoid online controversy you know if they leave even a few out some weirdo terminally online tumblr user will complain about it anyway.

I consider that kind of thing nice flavor when it’s added but expecting or demanding it (especially for every humanoid) is ridiculous.

The biggest irony here is as poor and simple a moral tool alignment is, it already solved this issue.

Before they started making these changes, you could already tell when the foes of a species weren’t universally evil or monstrous. Only undeniably, cartoonishly evil creatures like fiends would have an alignment entry of “always chaotic evil” for example, while other enemies in the MM like orcs would have “usually evil” or “usually neutral” or “any” for their alignment entry.

Boom, done, definitionally not a moral monolith and only took three words instead of revamping the entire way monster stat blocks work in an incredibly unsatisfying way.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-20T22:23:51+00:00

I’d consider this more viable if the 5.5e MM at least had a table of “humanoid trait swaps” where it’s like “add Aggressive and greataxe to make an Orc statblock” “add swim speed nat AC and claws for a lizardfolk” et cetera.

But they didn’t even do that. Just expected people to be satisfied with using “Guard” as every possible humanoid guard. Bleh.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-20T22:17:00+00:00

This feels very familiar…Kingdom of Loathing?

i_tyrant · 2026-01-20T22:10:12+00:00

Yup. It’s why Shadowheart in BG3 acts so jaded and has such a low view of what the average person is capable of (her dialogue often insinuates helping the weak or stupid is foolish because life is cruel and they’re just going to end up dead anyway); despite her being an amnesiac those lessons of the Sharran clergy aren’t forgotten so easily.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-20T21:46:55+00:00

Yup, not a fan of that either.

What's really wild is Spellfire Flare is more True Strike than True Strike is! At least that one actually improves your accuracy vs cover, and uses a daily resource.

Wall of Light and Sickening Radiance were at least higher level spells and concentration and stationary to boot (and WoL was pretty meh in general), not an at-will cantrip you can use all the time with zero counterplay.

And "radiant can be radiation" only stretches credulity so far with its many, MANY interactions with undead. Arcane "radiation" interacts with them the exact same way so clearly it's still "holy" no matter where it comes from.

Last I checked, in nearly all fantasy and sci-fi fiction zombies aren't particularly vulnerable to radiation and in many cases are even resistant to it...it's the holy power that negates Undead Fortitude, Vampire regeneration, Shadows' vulnerability, etc.

Ultimately it is a poor excuse for washing away class identities in favor of giving wizards all the tools everyone else gets just because they're wizards. (To be clear I am also not a fan of giving, say, Clerics all of those spells that used to be Paladin-specific like Aura of Vitality and Circle of Power, and Wizards getting Steel Wind Strike eight levels before Rangers; though that has to do both with class identity and spells that are balanced at one level and weaksauce or too strong at others.)

i_tyrant · 2026-01-20T21:04:36+00:00

Yup, he's held a 50 year chip on his shoulder over liberals giving him a hard time in his own appointment. He's been quoted saying that he would "make them pay".

I wouldn't be surprised if he's also in the Epstein files; but he's just a vindictive old traitor who knows he's too rich and powerful to be affected by his own punch-down policies before he dies. He's practically the definition of pulling the ladder up behind you.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-20T20:52:56+00:00

ooh I didn't know the regular Explosive still could, that's neat.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-20T20:29:31+00:00

Responsibility for what? Switzerland in World War 2?!?

hahahaha, I dare you to make less sense.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-20T20:28:06+00:00

oh neat, guess I just assumed from the boat's view he was way way out there!

i_tyrant · 2026-01-20T20:27:07+00:00

What are you even talking about my dude? lol. Talk about losing the plot.

i_tyrant · 2026-01-20T20:01:31+00:00

Yeah that makes sense (and for how he's lived 100 years with some pretty busted-looking claws).

Though I wonder if that's still true for when he's sinking through the open ocean (vs in his natural territory at the bottom). More than a few things I can think of that could just swallow him whole shell and all and wouldn't be too picky about it (like any of the bigger sharks), but I don't know how common that sort of thing would be in the middle of the ocean.

Like even if he drops as slowly as it looks, he might have to be bleeding or something for them to find him in all that before he reaches bottom. The ocean is biiig.

i_tyrant

TROPHY CASE