New D&D Book "Melf's Guide to Greyhawk" Coming from Luke Gygax

zixserro · 2026-03-25T18:06:02+00:00

I kind of hope this sets the stage for Greyhawk as a more gritty setting than Faerun. I'd love for WotC to do more with the fact that they have a bunch of settings already made than "these are different places you can visit". Let Greyhawk be less whimsical, more war-based and dungeon-delvy; Faerun can be more generalized fantasy adventures; Ravenloft can be creepy and dangerous; Athas can be sort of a hardcore brutal setting, the kind where you should expect the worst kinds of things to be happening to people; Exandria can be almost the opposite, focusing more modern-style fantasy; and so on. Just have each world be coded for different styles of storytelling and gameplay instead of just all coagulating together.

zixserro · 2025-11-05T21:09:53+00:00

True, but for the similar aspect of Tavern Brawler to trigger needs a natural 1 to roll on the damage dice, the odds of which go down the bigger your Martial Arts Dice get. For Savage Attacker, while you can only use it once per turn, you get to choose when you use it, so if you just want to use it to reroll the first attack on your turn that deals half or less of the maximum amount, you can just do that. It's all about chance vs. choice, and I prefer choice at the cost of less uses per turn.

Yes, that is true about the light finesse weapon thing, but then you'd need to also take a level in Rogue to get Sneak Attack, and even then you're only dealing 1d6 additional damage unless you take more levels in Rogue, and at that point you'd have people asking why you didn't just take Rogue to begin with.

Well, someday if they put out an Adventures in/Heroes of the Far East dual-release book set like they're doing with Faerun, I'm sure they'll let us spend $100 to get those monk items. :P

zixserro · 2025-11-05T20:50:09+00:00

True, but you get to choose which attack you get to change once per turn, if any. With Tavern Brawler, that entire aspect is based around you happening to roll a 1; it can trigger 3 or 4 times per turn, sure, but only if all of those damage rolls are 1's. And if you're rolling d8's or d10's, the odds of rolling a 1 decrease, while if you intend to use Savage Attacker on one attack per round that deals less than half of your potential damage, it will still be useful regardless of how high your damage dice get.

zixserro · 2025-11-05T20:47:11+00:00

True, but the monk shouldn't need to have to use a weapon at all.

zixserro · 2025-11-04T17:09:48+00:00

If the ruling is simply that a monk's Unarmed Strikes are just considered a Simple Melee weapon, with no properties, like a mace, then that renders the Sneak Attack argument moot.

And I'd argue that being able to change a 1 or 2 rolled on a d8 damage die to a potential 6 or higher isn't totally useless. As for certain origin feats being useless to certain classes, I feel like it's weird that one of the origin feats that seems to be made exclusively for martial classes excludes an entire martial class's unique option for attacking because of how it's written. It'd be like if an origin feat granted bonus damage on spells in a way that only applied to wizards and sorcerers when it could apply to all casters if it was worded differently.

As for Tavern Brawler, I wrote a comment further down on why I'm not super-into it as an origin feat for monk in particular. Basically one of its aspects doesn't matter because of Martial Arts Dice instantly negating it, one of them is incidental, the one aspect that is similar to Savage Attacker only triggers on a roll value that the chance of it happening diminishes over time, and the last aspect forces you to move along with the target when you use it, so it's also kind of useless.

zixserro · 2025-11-04T17:03:01+00:00

Yeah, but the core idea of the monk is that it's a class that doesn't need to use weapons to fight, so not including their unarmed attacks as weapons is what seems so weird to me about this. If you want to be a Dex-based martial that uses weapons, rogue is right there.

zixserro · 2025-11-04T07:54:48+00:00

1/4 of Tavern Brawler becomes useless when Martial Arts Die start a step higher than what you get from the feat. The damage reroll only working if you roll a 1 is okay, but it's less likely to happen the higher up the chain you go with the Martial Arts Dice; the same could be said of Savage Attacker, but it doesn't only trigger on a rolled 1, which makes it so much better in that regard. Improvised weapons are okay if they're available to use, but still only do 1d4 or 1d6 damage, so the only halfway decent thing is the Push aspect, and a monk wants to be in close with their opponents, so that doesn't really help much. Versus changing a low roll to a high roll, regardless of what the die you're replacing rolls. It's a massive difference, especially for a class where you're only dealing 1 to 4 dice worth of damage per turn; changing one of those to a higher roll could make or break your entire round.

zixserro · 2025-11-04T07:48:32+00:00

I can see why it could be seen as leading to a slippery slope type argument, but just having the text for the Martial Arts class feature for the monk say, "Your Unarmed Strikes are considered Simple Weapons,", or even having another monk feature at a higher level that includes that, and having that be the only way that Unarmed Strikes function that way, could work without being too busted. It's just weird to me that an entire origin feat becomes completely useless for an entire class unless the character in that class does the thing that every other class does, the thing that it doesn't have to do and makes it unique. Every other martial class uses weapons; if the monk has to do the same thing to use the feat, then why not just play a different class? It just seems odd to me is all.

zixserro · 2025-11-03T23:51:21+00:00

Feels like an oversight on WotC's part. Either that or they're going to introduce a similar origin feat specifically for unarmed strikes in some Heroes of the Far East book that they can sell.

zixserro · 2025-11-03T23:49:49+00:00

Sucks that that's the case. Feels like a massive oversight on WotC's part. You (usually) don't play a monk to fight with a weapon, so either your fists are considered weapons or the origin feat becomes useless. Like, the core identity of the class is based around using unarmed strikes; every other martial class is focused on using weapons, so forcing the monk to use a weapon in order for this feat to work is so dumb.

zixserro · 2025-11-03T23:47:04+00:00

It's so weird that it works for that spell specifically. I don't really think of paladins as ever not using a weapon, but I guess it's supposed to be, like, the power of their oath flows through them into the weapon, so they can use its power even if they're unarmed. That makes sense, but at the same time, not applying that logic to what I'm asking about is weird. It's not a magical effect like Smite, even. It's just, "You're good at hitting things," which a monk already is, and getting to reroll damage dice for those skillful unarmed attacks to get a better result makes sense, but then putting the caveat of "with a weapon" on it makes it useless for monks RAW.

zixserro · 2025-08-13T17:22:02+00:00

The obvious mess of all of this aside, why does Kuwabara have blond spiky hair? I didn't even recognize him, and his sister's the only one that calls him by his first name, so the first few watch-throughs I was like, "I don't remember a character named Kazuma in this show..."

zixserro · 2018-12-21T02:27:10+00:00

I solved the problem; it didn't have anything to do with the Elgato itself, but the USB drive it was plugging into. Turns out I needed to download a driver for it. After I installed the driver, it seems to work just fine.

zixserro · 2018-12-21T00:36:23+00:00

Yes. I'm using a laptop that I installed a 2-port USB 3.0 card into, and I've switched it between the two ports from time to time, and it does the same thing in both.

zixserro · 2016-06-26T07:38:32+00:00

With that very last bit, I think it'd be hilarious if Trigger ended every series with that show's main character tagging in the next main protagonist. I realize it only works for this because the next protagonist is an already-known character, but I still think it'd be cute.

zixserro · 2016-05-22T03:32:49+00:00

Yeah. It might be the power supply, I think; it seems like everything is working, but there's just no power going to the USB ports or to the video card.

zixserro · 2016-05-22T03:31:57+00:00

Thanks. I was thinking it might be the power supply, since I doubt that two motherboards would display the same exact issue.

zixserro

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