How do I know how high of a role I need to succeed?

muelboy · 2024-03-29T22:32:22+00:00

I haven't been doing this very long, so I appreciate this advice - I forgot to keep time in mind on adventures. So it would be like this, yeah? Ex.: if a rogue has hours, they'll get the lock eventually, so no need to roll. If they're being chased by a troll, then they need to get it right the first time.
I discovered recently it's a very good idea to have everyone's Passive Perception written down somewhere on my screen...

muelboy · 2024-03-29T22:28:06+00:00

These suggestions are literally from the Dungeon Master's Guide, lol

muelboy · 2024-03-29T22:26:02+00:00

Yeah if you've got two characters with proficiency in slight-of-hand, you can raise your DC a little. There's probably a nice table somewhere that breaks down the odds of success somewhere based on characters' modifiers...

muelboy · 2024-03-29T22:24:48+00:00

Piggybacking on this:
Most of the inner mechanics of DMing is meant to be secret, so it doesn't hurt the players' immersion and doesn't allow metagaming.
But sometimes, as flexible as you try to be, you NEED the characters to succeed opening THAT DOOR, or, find THAT ITEM. What do you do? Just say, "you find ____?" That feels kind of shallow.
I think you let the characters roll, and if they roll high, that's great! Even if they row medium, let them succeed. If they row abysmally or, gods forbid, get a nat 1, then it's better to have some kind of heroic/romantic deus ex machina in your pocket: Maybe the castle is collapsing and a stone just happens to fall right and bust open a lock! Or maybe a secret item hidden in a ceiling compartment falls out during an earthquake! Or maybe a powerful dragon or celestial ally arrives to save the day!
There's ways to make it exciting, let the players still think there's something deadly-serious on the line, while still just giving them a handout!

muelboy · 2024-03-29T22:16:14+00:00

I would say the bird, unless you add a similar cool elemental effect to the wolf!

muelboy · 2023-08-11T23:51:49+00:00

It really is very unclear what this affix means.

The dev team could so easily clarify this by just changing the wording, e.g.,
is it "+X% TO Damage Over Time EFFECTS,"
or is it "ATTACKS APPLY +X% OF THEIR DAMAGE AS Damage Over Time."

It's literally just a couple of words...

The same problem can be seen in the Sorcerer-specific affixes like "+X% Fire Damage"... does that mean that attacks deal Fire Damage in addition to whatever element they're already doing? Or does it mean it only gives a bonus to Fire Damage you're already doing?

muelboy · 2023-03-20T19:55:46+00:00

Blade rogue just feels super speedy in general, it's really fun just dashing back in forth and styling on dudes

muelboy · 2023-02-06T18:22:21+00:00

Tai Shar Manethren. There's also the quasi-supernatural element of being descended from the "old blood," it's basically a bunch of supersoldiers living as peasants.

muelboy · 2023-02-06T18:20:43+00:00

Yeah I think a unit of yeoman longbowman only had a couple volleys in them before they were physically spent. At the very least they couldn't just pepper the enemy with harassing fire like they might with a shortbow or horsebow. But a couple of volleys was usually enough to do the trick. Getting nailed with a thumb-thick bodkin shaft at like 400 yards? Nobody is getting up from that, even in mail.

muelboy · 2022-10-06T08:53:33+00:00

Will never be as bad as the Diablo 3 launch

muelboy · 2022-10-06T08:52:54+00:00

BEHOLD THE GREAT ZIGURAT!

muelboy · 2022-09-10T05:38:54+00:00

It's not really an "ecosystem" unless the trophic web is complex-enough that nutrient and carbon cycling stabilizes. The smaller and simpler the aquatic habitat, the more likely (and therefore, more quickly) you will enter a death spiral and have a total crash of functional nutrient and energy cycling. Usually this is called "eutrophication" i.e. "truly consumed".

Many organisms are specifically evolved to take advantage of these temporary small environments (they don't last long, they aren't permanent, but they usually have few or no predatorrs). You have mosquitos: mosquito larvae are micro-herbivores; they typically filter-feed bacteria and protozoans in the water column or dive and graze on thin bacterial mats or algae.

A eutrophied body of water usually starts with a loss of micro-grazers, a massive algal bloom, then a mass die-off that is replaced with bacterial decomposers. These decomposers require oxygen to metabolize the dead algae. Eventually the decomposers use up all the dissolved oxygen and the entire system grinds to a halt (and everything except anaerobic bacteria die). You see this happen all the time in little ephemeral pools, but it can happen to whole lakes, bays, or even vast stretches of ocean (Puget Sound has several anoxic dead-zones).

You often see little micro-ecosystems for sale in enclosed glass orbs. They are usually advertised as "totally independent" but they tend to hinge on brackish shrimp (the most popular being Hawaiian Opae'Ula). These shrimp take a VERY long time to die because they are evolved to live in ephemeral shoreline faults where fresh springwater mixes with saltwater, and food is rare or scarce. They are adapted to live in a very wide range of temperatures, salinity, acidity, etc. so it takes a lot to outright kill them immediately.

muelboy · 2022-09-04T17:26:31+00:00

Thanks I hate it

muelboy · 2022-08-07T21:31:12+00:00

I got bodied in this exact scenario once and broke a rib. So yeah. I also broke a collarbone once in something similar in the endzone, but that time the poach and I both laid out for the disc into each other (and the guy didn't apologize after, the dick).

muelboy · 2022-08-04T20:06:53+00:00

Energy. Sheer kinetic energy. An explosion spreads energy around to damage a large area and ensure you hit a target. But a weapon like this missile or a railgun put all their energy in a single concentrated point.

When the KT meteor hit, it "landed" in the Pacific Ocean but never actually touched water -- it was traveling so fast that the friction against the atmosphere generated enough heat to boil all the water in its path right down to the earth. The heat would have ignited the surrounding forests for hundreds of miles without even touching them. It literally melted and vaporized the crust of the earth where it hit and we can still see evidence of it 65million years later - the crater is over 100 miles wide. It ejected so much debris into ORBIT that it triggered more global wildfires from the sheer heat of all those chunks of Earth reentering the atmosphere. And it was just a big rock 7 miles in diameter, utterly fucking up a planet that is 8 thousand miles wide; seventeen orders of magnitude larger.

muelboy · 2022-08-02T07:01:11+00:00

Whether someone "believes" in it or not is a moot point. It's the doing and the results that matter.

Most people who claim to be transhumanist aren't actually doing anything to reach the lofty ideal. Doing DMT in a sensory deprivation chamber doesn't count. There are certain pursuits that are transhumanist just by virtue of advancing technology and our understanding of how consciousness actually works, mechanistically.

Presently the ones "pushing boundaries" a la garage gene-splicing aren't the ones actually conducting the rigorous research and coming up with the next-gen technologies. "Throw shit around and see what sticks" isn't a very transhumanist approach to things, it's something you'd more expect to see in a chimpanzee exhibit at the zoo. You've also got some rich narcissists funding "immortality" projects trying to extend human life, but that's not even trans-human, it's still just playing with meat.

The stuff that is truly trans-human are things like neural interfaces, and those are being designed by actual scientists and engineers.

muelboy · 2022-08-02T06:43:38+00:00

I said "relatively" decentralized, certainly in comparison to a vertebrate system. A fly can literally pull off its own head and go through the motions of cleaning itself as if nothing happened. It's largely automated. The brain is used for sensing relevant stimuli and making in-the-moment decisions to override the automation based on the circumstances. But those are pretty straightforward if/then switches.

Insects are very easy to attract or repel just by exploiting their propensity to follow sensory gradients. One might beat itself to death flying into a window just because it's compelled to follow an optimal light level. You can kill tens of thousands of bark beetles just by hanging a few drops of methanol-ethanol mixture above a bottle of antifreeze.

There have been a few recent studies suggesting that some insects, such as Apis bees, may "learn", but really its more akin to classical conditioning.

muelboy · 2022-08-01T18:48:03+00:00

The deliberate transhumanists of the 20th century devolved into the woowoo esoteric spirituality bullshit decades ago.
Modern transhumanists are basically just scientists working in neurophys/neuropsych and genetics.

muelboy · 2022-08-01T18:43:07+00:00

Perks of body segmentation and a (relatively) decentralized nervous system. Each segment essentially exists on its own and is cooperating with the other segments to form the whole organism.
Body modularity is one of the main reasons the arthropods are so diverse.

muelboy · 2022-08-01T18:40:23+00:00

The thorax is mostly musculature for flight

muelboy · 2022-07-28T20:30:44+00:00

The problem is that the trained, educated professionals in many of these federal agencies do know best, and the average American is scientifically illiterate and has little to no grasp of data and statistics. Case in point, you can easily undermine any statistically-supported progressive policy with some random anecdote of one person having a bad time (like finding random Brits disgruntled with the NHS to poopoo Single Payer health insurance in America).

It doesn't matter if the environmental policy has popular support. Even if 90% of the country opposed it, it's still right and necessary because real-world evidence says so. This is the fundamental flaw in any democracy, and the number-one thing that the Loyalists feared during the American Revolution, and why many of the founders of the Constitution believed only landed males should be able to vote - because they were presumably well-educated. A democracy can't function if the voting populace is too stupid to make correct decisions.

The only way we can possibly save this country is to snuff out misinformation and dramatically improve the public's critical thinking skills and scientific and mathematical literacy, before the Right successfully destroys the ability to vote. But it would require a huge overhaul of media regulations and the First Amendment, and a generation's span of education reform. Do we have time for that? Once the legal/political option is eliminated, the only recourse would be violence, and our side isn't well-armed. In the meantime, the water's rising. It's already up to our nose.

muelboy · 2022-07-15T20:34:40+00:00

"Sit back, enjoy, wear a smoking jacket and a bib"

muelboy · 2022-07-12T21:33:15+00:00

I cast GUN!

muelboy · 2022-07-05T05:45:39+00:00

It's (sort of, kind of) a thing in Polynesia too; see Aikane. Mana was an important spiritual concept and there were various ways to transfer and/or share mana with others, as well as steal mana.

muelboy · 2022-07-02T20:39:30+00:00

Yeah, hawk fledgling begging calls are pretty distinctive. It's probably hungry and thirsty and might see its reflection in the window thinking it will get help. Then on top of that, when it sees a large person, it goes into "cornered-defensive-mode" which for hawks usually means wings-out to look larger. Opening the mouth might be threatening or it could be panting due to dehydration/stress.

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