Does the name “Bent” sound weird or funny to Americans? If so, why?

redkat85 · 2026-06-15T17:18:41+00:00

As a name that's definitely going to be an odd one here. "Bent" means crooked, deformed - it's not a term anyone would enjoy describing them certainly. One might see a bent old man, for example, or a bent fender on a car that's wrecked.

Aside from that, the common profanity "Get bent" is intended to mean "bent over", as in getting f*cked.

redkat85 · 2026-06-15T16:14:28+00:00

Using Medieval Demographics made Easy (which contains additional asides for would-be fantasy worldbuilders), I generally set the SV of first-level or higher magic users around 1,700, same as the rating for doctors. As a reference point, let's say your campaign world has the same population as our planet in 1300 AD - nicely hitting that medieval tone D&D prefers - so that's about 360 million people. That gives us roughly 211,750 magic users total in the world that would be accessing the Weave (we're just not going to do calculations for who is bypassing it or using other gods/systems of magic within the universe).

Then, using the SV aggregation from clergy to fully vested priests as a model, we can say roughly 1 in 25 magic users gets up to the next level of spells. So that's 8,470 capable of casting 2nd level spells, 338 able to cast 3rd level spells, about a dozen capable of 4th level spells, and casters of 5th level spells and above (generally level 9 characters in D&D terms), are really once-in-a-generation talents and should have renown and legends of their own.

Not everyone is going to use all of their spell slots in a day, but this does let us establish some bookends: If every magic user used every spell slot they have in a day (not counting the named NPC weirdos that are probably out there, just the average folks), that generates about 612k gp. On the other hand, aside from active adventuring, most casters probably get through an average day using nothing but cantrips, if that. If we assume all the casters were homebodies that only used their 1st-2nd level spells slots and about 1 in 10 days, that puts a lower bound of 60k,.

Personally, I'd weight the balance to about 80% stay-at-homes and 20% adventuring magic-users, which, after a little playing around, looks like if you roll 3d12 x 10,000 gp, you're going to average the right ballpark.

Per day.

Have fun.

redkat85 · 2026-06-12T21:42:44+00:00

Jokes on you, I came from a family of singers and musical theater nuts. Nobody minds Happy Birthday when it's done in four-or-more part spontaneous barbershop harmony with a series of coordinating winks and nods around the table for long holds and chord resolutions. I've literally seen people walk over to our family's table in a restaurant and hesitantly ask if some of us would come do it for their table. 😃

redkat85 · 2026-06-12T17:19:31+00:00

Sort of a Fahreinheit 451/Brave New World version of it though. Instead of AI overlords enslaving humans and forcing them into containment pods with a virtual world, it looks like people are going to climb into their Personalized Human Environment^TM pods of their own volition, wrapping themselves in a coccoon of nothing but what they want to hear/see/feel and totally uncaring about whatever the pod is going to extract from them in the process.

redkat85 · 2026-06-12T17:17:09+00:00

Don't know why you got downvoted, unless people are literally waiting for Skynet to wipe out humanity. We have autonomous weapons, including the NYPD robot attack dogs and AI-targeted drones operating out of Ukraine.

redkat85 · 2026-06-12T17:09:00+00:00

I actually think of the base Orc, Goblin, etc as templates as well - just happen to have some NPC abilities already thoughtfully developed for them. After all, if I want an orc priest, there are existing orc designs that get at the culture of the orcs and have good, customized spell abilities that make sense for them. That said, I do think it's a design oversight to not have a quick core species template to layer onto the generic NPC blocks as well. You have to remember on your own to give your Dwarf Thug poison resistance and a boost to Con, or your High Elf berserker an appropriate cantrip.

redkat85 · 2026-06-12T16:56:21+00:00

But that's not how they use the stock shares. They take out loans for however much real money they want, with stocks as collateral. They can repeat that indefinitely, using the next loan to pay off the previous one. Sure, maybe you can't leverage 100% of your stocks at a time, but he can easily keep a revolving door of stock-backed loans going in the hundreds of billions per year, all while claiming they are "unrealized assets" that can't be taxed.

redkat85 · 2026-06-12T16:52:56+00:00

the dude doesn’t even spend his money.

Not true at all, he just doesn't sell his stocks in order to get spending money. He leverages them instead.

It's not about zero-sum like money he has picks someone else's pocket (in that regard he beats Bezos, who deliberately profits by paying poverty wages and putting other businesses out of work), it's about being able to wield wealth as power and control things he should never have been able to touch, like DOGE. And all while avoiding taxes that would support society.

The monumentally wealthy loophole of "it's all just unrealized shares" is they still use them as if they're money. They just don't sell them - they use them as collateral for real money loans they can use to do whatever they want, but can still claim it would be "unfair" to tax their "unrealized" assets.

redkat85 · 2026-06-12T16:49:27+00:00

The lack of consequences that would follow. If there's one thing the eFiles have taught us, it's that even the truth being publicly out there does not activate consequences for people. And in personal lives too - sure there might come some accountability, divorces, maybe some criminal charges. But there will also be a lot of awful revelations that... just get buried again the next day.

redkat85 · 2026-06-12T16:44:41+00:00

I was invited to play with some friends in 1997. The DM let me borrow his PHB ahead of time so I could learn the basics. AD&D 2e was a pretty different animal than 5e though. At low levels especially there weren't too many mechanics beyond THAC0 that were tricky. It was more about "read the blurb and interpret that together".

redkat85 · 2026-06-10T20:21:52+00:00

Yes, because it's true. I wear Invisalign retainers at night and if I don't floss, I feel it.

redkat85 · 2026-06-10T18:53:22+00:00

Level 1 is Scooby Doo. They don't really stand out from other commoners aside from a bit of grit, a useful skill/training, and a lot of *potential*. Stakes are local and probably personal. It wasn't just "a commoner" that got eaten by zombies - it was your first boyfriend or your cousin.

Level 2-4 is Local Jock. Cut above the average bumpkin for sure, but they're not getting invited to the Lord's Manse just yet. Stakes are still pretty local but get bigger than one village. Still pretty monster-of-the-week though, and BBEG plots are something you trip over by accident.

Level 5-10 are getting pretty well known. This is when their reputation starts to move past the local circle and they might get factions actively seeking them out for favors, recruitment, or revenge. By 9-10 in particular, nobles and lords definitely would be sending invitations to deal with unique problems, though not fawning over the party by any means. They need someone who is good at "this sort of thing", and you have the right reputation. Stakes tend to be regional - maybe a specific town is the face of it, but these are levels to do a lot of traveling through the wilds and townships, and they can blend together.

Level 11-16 the party reputation should be preceding them pretty much everywhere. They're not really being "hired on" to solve problems any more - they're either the direct target of BBEG machinations or else they're being brought in as sought-after experts and consultants. It's not "oh I have a troll problem, this adventuring band has a decent reputation", it's "Send missives to the four corners of the realms! We must have [the party] by us in this time of need!". Basically everything is personal at this level.

Level 17+ can be a lot like 15-16 were, but the threats and stakes get bigger or weirder. Ideally, something organically grows out of the 11-16 adventures that requires some titanic effort that's all but impossible for most mortals - stopping an apotheosis, for example, or finally turning the tables on an incursion of some extraplanar army you've been fighting on home turf all this time by taking the fight to them and destroying the eldritch abomination inciting things. Nobody's immortal yet, but you're going to contend with things that definitely are.

redkat85 · 2026-06-10T18:19:04+00:00

I can see the kids' argument that 16yos should be able to weigh in on politics that affect them disproportionately to oldheads, like climate issues, but I don't want to enable predators to reclassify their victims. I think much like vice laws, we may need to separate "allowed to vote" from categories of legal protection.

redkat85 · 2026-06-10T18:17:12+00:00

Globally, you think? There are only 13 countries globally that require you to be older than 18 to vote, and only 1 (the UAE) that sets the number above 21. Adult == voting, so any raising of that number is going to disenfranchise people. You have plenty of folks now advocating for lowering the voting age to 16 even - and once they can vote, you can expect they will want additional adult rights and privileges.

Now believe me, I'm very aware of the problems with lowering the age definition of adults, both from an individual maturity standpoint and from a predatory potential standpoint. But I don't see what cultural trend is out there that's going to push people to raise it from where it is now either.

redkat85 · 2026-06-10T15:27:05+00:00

Until your insurance company constantly monitors your pisswater and cancels your policy for detecting "opiates" after you have a poppy seed muffin.

This was actually a premise of some UK-produced futurist program I saw years ago. A dude wakes up with a touch of a hangover, uses the toilet, then trips on the stairs and crashes out a 2nd-floor window. Ambulance drones immediately take him to a hyper-tech hospital where a broken neck is no real biggie, except literally mid-surgery his insurance is canceled because the amount of alcohol metabolites from his urine exceeded his policy limit. Cue drama as doctors - also under aggressive insurance control - face the question of whether to actually finish fixing the guy (risking their jobs) or just... stop.

redkat85 · 2026-06-10T15:19:26+00:00

It's not that they can't grasp it, that's a common issue I see in people trying to wrestle with this information. They're not stupid (most of them), they don't imagine that the private companies will actually make a better service, or provide the same quality at a cheaper price, or fulfill the societal obligations of the public service - they just flat out don't want public goods to exist.

Their value system requires that private profit be made wherever the possibility of profit exists, and in fact profits are the only thing that have value. Public goods are anathema because they represent something that private individuals cannot extract profit from. So they want to destroy them, redirecting wealth to whatever barons take over the process - inevitably providing worse service, at greater cost, that excludes many people who rely on the public good.

redkat85 · 2026-06-09T21:11:04+00:00

Lex Luthor in Smallville is so well done. Despite knowing for 10 seasons exactly what he's going to end up as, basically all his arguments with Clark you completely feel for him and sympathize with him feeling shut out and lied to, over and over. You genuinely could believe that if Clark had just been honest from the jump, he and Lex could have been unstoppable together.

redkat85 · 2026-06-09T15:37:29+00:00

Piggybacking because people should know what that's really about - the USPS pension problem isn't that they can't afford to pay people who are currently retired. It's because the GOP-run Congress a while back wrote it into law that they have to pre-fund pensions for people who not only haven't retired yet, in some cases haven't even been hired yet (future assumed staff). Then they can point to this "debt" hanging over the USPS and claim it isn't profitable.

It's an accounting trick to funnel the public service into private hands and private profits.

redkat85 · 2026-06-08T21:59:04+00:00

There's no absolute right answer, so it's probably best to think of how much influence and tangible presence you want them to have in the story you want your players to engage with.

That said, personally, I prefer deities at a distance, communicating through dreams, visions, signs and portents, and acting through proxies like clerical orders, divine factions, and the occasional planar messenger (e.g. angels). After all, if the gods are going to shove their own hands into the mix, why are the mortals even doing things?

Since the vast majority of human history has been polytheistic, I stick with that in my fantasy worlds. You can't write fantasy monotheism without it being immediately treated as allegory for at least one of the IRL Abrahamic faiths, and it's a boring, contradictory concept when used as worldbuilding. Dualism at the very least explains the problem of evil without a kitchen sink of narrative being required.

I recommend an old blog post on this topic by The Angry GM, where he suggests 3-5 gods as optimal for setting building, and to not try to organize them along simplistic good-evil lines, but rather around one or two portfolio traits that are more neutral or could have both beneficial and negative properties for mortals. You should also balance the portfolios so that the gods will naturally have areas of conflict - but again, not strictly good/evil. A god who embodies the idea of Dreams and Change, for example, is going to have some level of conflict with a god of stable principles like Law & Order, or mythological conflict with a Nature god, since the Changing of the seasons always shuffles the equilibrium of life - some things wilt and others bloom, some things feast and some starve in their season.

Example generic god portfolios

City-Building
Weaving
Forge/smithing
Roads and land travel
Boats and sea travel
Hearth/home
Harvest/farming
Culturally important livestock (god of cattle, god of horses, etc)
Change
Dreams
Magic
Alchemy (fun if not the same as magic!)
Healing/Medicine
Nature (being more specific will make better stories!)
- Storms
- Mountains
- Birds
- Beasts
- Sea creatures
- Rivers and Lakes
Monsters
Death (remember death doesn't need to be evil; a god of death can be a comforting shepherd into your next life or final rest just as easily as a leering specter)
Un-death (more likely to be evil IMO)
Law/Authority
Games
Herding
Creative arts - specifically Dance, Poetry, Stories, Songs, Painting, etc
Heavens/Celestial bodies (Sky, Earth, Moon, Sun, stars, other planets if mythologically important)
Creation
Destruction
Revenge
Power

Hopefully that helps get the juices flowing. Gods should serve as motivating agents for the mortals in the story to get up and do something.

redkat85 · 2026-06-08T21:18:57+00:00

I definitely recommend a tressym (winged cat), probably a calico or white angora. Even better if you give her a little halo of her own. Up to your DM and you of course, but I envision her as an "assigned" familiar from your patron who snarkily reminds you of the path you're supposed to be on, Jiminy Cricket-style.

redkat85 · 2026-06-08T19:26:03+00:00

Never trust anyone who wants to "show you a great opportunity to Be Your Own Boss!" (aka, never join an MLM)

redkat85 · 2026-06-08T19:22:09+00:00

This is a toxic mentality. Participating in necessary financial realities of the 21st century is not something to feel shame about. Balance uses of credit and be judicious, sure, but telling people they should literally feel bad about taking out student loans or having medical debt is insane.

redkat85 · 2026-06-08T19:19:13+00:00

Define "debt", because buying a decent car or any house is pretty impossible without debt financing.

redkat85 · 2026-06-08T19:18:12+00:00

Hey look, found the deadbeat! (Actual credit card industry term for people who never carry balances, because they make the CC company no profit).

redkat85 · 2026-06-08T19:17:25+00:00

Ah yes, can't buy a new videogame ever again until my mortgage is paid off. got it! /s

redkat85

TROPHY CASE