Kichae

I do all of my prep on my laptop, take notes on my laptop, and have a digital GM screen on my laptop, so I use my laptop at the table. I don’t see why any other players shouldn’t get to do the same.

If they’re getting distracted and are not interested in playing the game, then it’s not the tools that should be removed from the table.

Not sure how you’re supposed to use them while carrying around that heavy armoire.

Ok, fair enough. Let’s talk about it.

So here’s the thing, 5e is incomplete. It was shipped without being properly tested, and was pushed out the door because the whole D&D team thought they were getting axed after 4e flopped. It wasn’t designed to be “easy to learn, easy to run, easy to homebrew” – it’s actually none of those things – it was just designed to be a product on the shelves for the 40th anniversary that was not and that did not resemble 4e. There is more product management and marketing to the game than there is design, and somehow two mid-edition rebalances after it was printing money didn’t change this.

But why does 5e feel easy to learn, and easy to homebrew? Because it provides almost zero guidance on how to do these things. It all but completely abandons the player. This has been treated as a feature, rather than an issue, by apologists because it gives tables a lot of perceived freedom. A lot of people, seemingly, see having the responsibility of filling in the gaps as freedom, while also seeing having the option to ignore rules they don’t like as some kind of cage. So, lacking the cage of professional advice, people feel free to do whatever they want.

But here’s where it gets weird. The gaps provided by the PHB and GMG are relatively small. But having the reputation of not having rules for this, that, or the other thing matters much, much more than actually not having them. So, people nail down advantage and disadvantage, look up someone else’s class builds online, and then lean on setting-specific class content to flesh out their fantasy. And why is this? Because none of the sub-systems are as easy to understand and use as dis/advantage is. They are incongruent with the game’s core mechanic, and so they are unceremoniously thrown out. Often, these days, without knowing it, because people are learning how to run the game from YouTube and podcasts, not from reading the books, so they are inheriting someone else’s decisions to cast those systems aside.

Almost nobody is playing 5e as it’s designed, and when people do, many of them don’t like it.

erin (she/her) said in Math Matters: > I don’t fully disagree with you, but you’re just wrong about the area of effect shapes. The rules are very defined on how to represent and find spheres, cylinders, lines, cubes, cones, etc.

You understand that I was making a joke, right? “Embrace the cube of constant radius!”?

Have you actually read the rules? The game, as written, isn’t really meant to be played at all. It just vaguely gestures at activities and suggestions, and if you look too closely you’ll find a lot of junk that doesn’t fit or doesn’t really work.

People don’t play 5e. People leverage 5e’s one core feature and then build their own games around it, ignoring most of the published rules.

Fireball says radius, but in a non-Euclidian geometry radius doesn’t translate to a Euclidian sphere. Embrace the cube of constant radius!

His name translates to Ubermensch!

The ability to import new or custom items using JSON would be great. And support for custom fields in the process.

And multiclassing.

It’s also worth understanding that trauma is something that you work out through your daily life, not just in therapy. One of the models for trauma is that it’s caused by a sense of helplessness in the face of a great stressor or existential threat, and engaging in activities that let you react to dangers can be theraputic.

Theraputic, not therapy.

No one else at the table needs to be directly involved. No one need be asked to be a shoulder to lie on. It’s not any different in practice than the masturbatory power fantasies we’re all engaging in at the table. It’s just starting from a slightly different place.

“DM” is not a trademarked term, because it’s a pair of letters. “Dungeon Master” is absolutely a trademarked term, though, and has been since the TSR days.

You were a fan of Larry, well here is his cousin Darryl, and his other cousin Darrey.

I don’t know, I this phrasing seems quite evocative to me. Tremble means to waver in tone or power, gravel means to hoarse or growling in a low energy fashion, and words colliding means for words to flow into one another in a fluid and informal way. This all makes speech sound less confident, and less educated. Meanwhile, neat speech is formal, and clipped speech has clear start and end points to words, and so clear distinctions between neighbouring words.

Well, I was going to have the party meet an owlbear, but a bugbear it is, now.