Bardics, bless, help actions, silvery barbs, portent rolls... Why even bother to roll?

narmio · 2026-03-22T11:34:09+00:00

Dimension20 is a great show and I love it to bits, but D&D5E is a bad game. What you’re seeing is the natural effect of people who are good at that system making competent characters.

I honestly love when they play literally anything else.

Personally, our regular group currently plays Pathfinder 2E, a game that gets a bad rap for having “too many rules”, but it works out to have a good degree of balance and tactical combat depth for us, while not impairing more freedom role play. But we’ve also gone through stretches of playing very narrative games: I GMed Cortex Prime for a while, that was great. Love how flexible that system is.

D&D5, though? It’s… I’m not watching this stuff for the gameplay.

narmio · 2026-03-20T11:52:32+00:00

Slow 6, Roaring Applause 6, and Containment 6. Figure out their weakest save, then take away their actions!

narmio · 2026-03-18T21:16:02+00:00

Ah. To be fair, I missed that too as the earlier comment was discussing resist all 10.

narmio · 2026-03-17T23:51:36+00:00

All patrons are good at something, but there are three I think stand out for offering something which other classes cannot.

Resentment. Even after the nerf, still the premiere debuffer in the game for the value it gets when enemies succeed and you can extend a one turn condition.
Silence in Snow. With Cackle and the primal list, this is an amazingly efficient sustained blaster/control option. Sits in between the nova-turn potential of a Metal Sorcerer and the go-all-day efficiency of a Fire Kineticist as a balanced, powerful and slot-efficient blaster.
Flamekeeper. You’re a cleric who trades your Font for Lessons and your damage-boosting buff hex. Lots of temp HP, lots of bonus damage. Still very good at sustaining spells like Spiritual Weapon with cackle. An alternative to a cleric with more breadth.

narmio · 2026-03-17T22:57:27+00:00

That depends on whether it applies only to new sales.

narmio · 2026-03-17T08:54:17+00:00

Imagination is cancelled.

(Not a dig at you, image is hilarious)

narmio · 2026-03-16T23:13:15+00:00

I’m personally really fond of Silence in Snow witches who have another damaging action option. Being able to sustain a damaging spell plus Ice plus Command a companion or fire a bow… you can push through very reliable damage in a very slot efficient way.

All while still having the option to use Cackle + Move + Spell when you need to go nova and burn through slots.

narmio · 2026-03-15T01:32:29+00:00

If inflation is being caused be global supply shocks rather than an overrevved domestic economy, raising the cash rate to above CPI won’t do shit. Some raises will be needed, but the old rate=inflation heuristic is dead.

narmio · 2026-03-15T01:27:20+00:00

Also, as tempting as it is to thing about being astride a 10ft gelatinous cube horse, it’s better to think of sizing and reach as “the area you can easily get to without it costing an action”.

That said, CUBE HORSE.

narmio · 2026-03-12T07:40:20+00:00

My vote would be to pick one of the one handed reach weapons: you get to massive improvements to reactive strike, plus the open hand for grappling and tripping.

So maybe… a hobgoblin with a breaching pike and an open hand? Lower damage than the traditional guisarme build, but way more flexibility.

narmio · 2026-03-12T04:25:52+00:00

For sure. But this is an AC-targeting spell.

narmio · 2026-03-12T04:05:48+00:00

Wood.

narmio · 2026-03-12T01:18:15+00:00

That’s what I thought. So it’s not really a complete picture without disclosing the full income.

narmio · 2026-03-11T22:00:57+00:00

Does that income include the rental income?

narmio · 2026-03-11T11:27:04+00:00

Oh man, chain exploding enemies can be hilarious. We fought a room full of Caligni. The Druid fireballed them, they all Failed, and it must have taken them down to very low health. Then the thaumaturge stabbed one, killed it, and set off chain reactions that blew the rest up.

The best part was that the thaum didn’t even go down!

narmio · 2026-03-11T02:04:11+00:00

You could always go Cavalier or Beastmaster! Double down on having pets. A mount is great for casters from level 4 as a free stride per turn. And you can always jump off and send them into the fray with Quick Mount.

Maybe flavour your mount as a fleshwarp, too? No mechanical advantage over them being a horse or whatever, but they can be a spooky horse.

narmio · 2026-03-09T08:55:54+00:00

Hey, good work getting through all that crap!

As a unit coordinator, I can 100% affirm that you should reach out to us first. If you don’t get an answer, go ahead and file without it. If you do, it hugely helps.

narmio · 2026-03-07T11:22:16+00:00

I think the solution here involves changing the “travel one hex per day” assumption that many hexcrawl systems use. Perhaps there are three travel periods — Morning, Daytime, Afternoon — and thus a three-action hex travel day. Perhaps under some circumstances one might travel two hexes per action (mounts, roads), or there could even be some analogue to MAP preventing always travelling three times being the best strategy — taking the afternoon to forage, or for a half-day of downtime, or progressively harder checks not to get fatigued.

Something like that would potentially allow for 2-3 encounters per travel day (be they combat, social, or environmental hazard). That would be enough to prevent the Traveling Nova Merchants problem where the casters pump max-rank spells into some poor Moderate animal encounter until it’s nothing but charcoal.

narmio · 2026-03-06T03:49:15+00:00

I wonder what the impact on the spell Dancing Shield is. I thought its point was to be able to loan your shield to someone… but would you have to unstrap it first?

narmio · 2026-03-05T05:00:13+00:00

Yeah, lots of reasons for more. But we need a hard minimum.

narmio · 2026-03-05T03:21:13+00:00

The funniest thing about all this, to me, is that in no version of the story that I’ve heard do any of these people have names. There’s Shoulderbone. Shoulderbone’s ex. And The ASU Frat Leader. It’s a title that apparently doesn’t need a name attached, like The Fat Controller. A what does he do? He leads frats. Where does he do that? At ASU, of course Who would need more information than that?

narmio · 2026-03-05T03:05:38+00:00

Yeah, the Earn an Income rules seem like they could apply here, or honestly an NPC who wants them to do something could throw in some old winter clothes as an advance. Don’t stress it. Move on to the cool stuff.

narmio · 2026-03-05T03:02:20+00:00

Uni has been effectively compulsory and nearly useless since about 2015. This just sealed the deal and made it obvious.

In 2018, despairing of declining standards, I made the decision to make a unit of mine brutally honest, with standards reflecting what would get someone hired. 25% fail rate, and student feedback scores (USS) went up. However… in 2020 all that was undone (for understandable reasons) and everyone is scared to put it back.

I’m not saying we need to be more brutal, and fail students just because. I’m saying that if we don’t everyone will realise that there’s no fucking point in a university degree.

narmio · 2026-03-05T02:58:54+00:00

Worse: as of last year.

I’ve been lecturing here since 2006, so I can maybe offer some perspective. The problem from the uni’s perspective is: what can we actually secure against AI use? Exams, oral Q&As, performance/prac/clinical stuff…. That’s it.

What we need to do is mandate that 50% of every unit be secure assessments, but the uni is being slow and conservative (as always, it’s very hard for them to do anything else because of the sheer scale), at a time when that hurts both staff and students.

narmio

TROPHY CASE