So one thing I’ve noticed is that people’s DnD characters may vary but there is usually an underlying thread that they all have in common. This thread is typically related to what that person struggles with the most.

For instance, my betrotheds DnD characters: a bitchy warlock we had to bust out of two different pacts, a sassy barbarian, a reformed drow cultist, and a sunshine fighter cleric.

All these characters were wildly different but at their very core struggle was them grappling with their self worth. My betrothed struggles with their worth a great deal and even with different facets showing their characters all have that too.

Mine all tend to contend with different themes of loneliness and acceptance. Surprise, surprise, the little autistic gremlin yearns to have been met with more love and lasting friendships.

So we’re at breakfast. I am meeting a new friend of my betrotheds for the first time. It’s been twenty minutes since I’ve met this man. I say my theory. He laughs. He starts to describe a few of his characters but specifies that he often has healing aspects. He gives a very broad overview of their character arcs.

I ponder for a moment then said, “Would you like to have my assessment?”

He laughed, “Sure!”

“We’ve just met. It’s gonna get real.”

“Bring it on.”

“I think your struggle is that you feel you must offer something of value or service to people to be worthy of their love.”

His jaw dropped. His fork froze midway to his mouth. A potato fell. He stared into space as this sank in. Quietly he said, “Oh.”

so i just ran a study on long-term ttrpg play and emotional resilience with over 100 participants and uh ... checks out!! we really are all out here processing big shit with our blorbos!!!

And now I wish I was a player enough to analyze my own character selection.

One thing most people don't realize about Gazebos is how bloodthirsty they used to be until the 1930s or so. It used to be that in order to appease your average small town gazebo you had to feed it 4-5 marching bands a year, or roughly 2 dozen barbershop groups. Noaways? Throw it a steely dan cover act every 6 months, maybe a bridal party every few years if you're actively trying to court its favor, and you're pretty much in the clear. And the crazy thing is nobody knows why they calmed down, or that their appetite for flesh won't return to its 19th century heights one day. It's actually an increasingly popular theory among modern Gazebo researchers that we're at the tail end of a period of dormancy and it's only a matter of time until they start howling for blood again. And if/when that does happen there's the question of whether our modern zeeb-keepers are really ready for the task of booking enough sacrificial acts to meet that increased demand. Guild policy has gotten lax in the century since the heyday of Dark Pavillionism and a lot of local keepers refuse to even look at newer research that threatened to upsettheir status quo. Kind of scary to think about

recent generations of gazebos have somehow mastered unpowered flight so we're doomed

Everyone keeps acting like as a druid I'm just boring and not as interesting or violent as wizards or warlocks but they'll all see when I finally perfect my new spell, Himalayan Blackberries Growing Inside Of Your Blood

Minotaur is not a species

The Minotaur was named that because he was the son of King Minos. Anyone with a bull head has to be named after their dad, like the Kyletaur or something.

Im sorry you can’t hide this gem in the tags

#ok but that’s just the myth right? that’s the accepted story#Minos cheated the gods out of a sacrifice so the gods make his wife fuck a bull#now you have a bull kid#but…what if the Curse was just that Minos would have a son -but the kid is cursed to look like a bull?#that also sounds like something the gods would do#to someone who cheats them of a sacrifice owed#‘cause now see Minos has a problem: his only heir - his flesh and blood - his actual child#is a beastly looking creature - how to explain this? what to tell the neighbors? He lies. He tells people#anything but ‘I fathered that’ - so he throws his wife under the bus#and everyone believes in the ‘Queen is a deviant’ story because its ancient Greece and their favorite pastimes were wine#philosophy#and misogyny#In the end of course he can’t kill his own son - as much as he wants to - as much as he’s ashamed#because it’s his fault - he knows it is - so all he can do is lock the kid away#hoping maybe - someday - the curse will get reversed and he’ll have a normal kid to pass the kingdom to#but the gods don’t work like that#and more Importantly - Minos has a perfectly fine child…he just can’t accept him#Minotaur was just his nickname. His Title: “The Bull of Minos.” Another embarrassment Minos will never shake.#his actual name was Asterion - he had a human name but he is always remembered as a monster#Greek Mythology#Minotaur#Mythology#Monsters

I know unicorns in modern media are kind of regulated to cutsie, MLP, rainbow plastic toys, or shitting rainbows, 'lets go to candy mountain' but man. I WISH more fantasy media would put them in unironically. There is so much symbolic and narrative potential in a creature that is, depending on your mythology:

Hyperspecific poll time

Yes I have done/experienced all of these

Today's aesthetic: cosmic horror tabletop RPGs from the 1980s whose creators wrote the "madness rules" by simply plagiarising a list of disorders and their descriptions from the DSM-II and turning it into a d100 lookup table, except the DSM-II still listed "homosexuality" as a mental disorder (it wasn't removed until the DSM-III), with the result that there are several published tabletop RPGs where there's a small but non-zero chance that seeing Cthulhu will make you gay.

(Amusingly, one such game was later re-used as the core system for a licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, and the madness rules were carried over verbatim, with the result that seeing Cthulhu can also make your ninja turtle gay.)

Well NOW I'm wondering why in the world a TMNT RPG kept the madness rules at all!

Palladium Books is not known for giving careful consideration to whether a particular game-mechanical subsystem is appropriate – or even relevant – for a particular game before deciding to go ahead and include it.

(They did remove the random madness table from subsequent printings in response to complaints from parents who'd bought the game for their kids, but they didn't bother to update any rules which referred to it, so the second and later printings of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness just have the occasional dangling reference to textually nonexistent mechanics.)

guess who made a wargame with thirteen thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine unit statblocks

trying to format it but it keeps crashing the word processor

hey uh. thirteen thousand? three zeroes?

seven hundred and ninety-nine yeah

two questions real quick:

hey you know how there's a lot of funko pops

i do, yes

it's here.

I thought this was a bit and

I'm here for this. Incredible.

I keep trying to type up some funny comment about this but I'm simply dumbfounded. Good job on the game design @rathayibacter this rules so much

Assuming my text editor's metrics are accurate, this game is 878 921 words in length. Exactly eight hundred of those words comprise the rules in their entirety; the other 878 121 words are the stat blocks.

you know you need to get back to non-gmo grassfed organic canon when the group chat AUs start turning into stuff like the characters hiking the Appalachian Trail. but will I? Non.

“that character would never hike the Appalachian Trail.”

That’s even better. Imagine the most outdoors-adverse person alive. They’ve never peed outside. They would rather be drawn and quartered than eat camp food, and they’re also broke.

Now what is it going to take to get them into a situation where they’re spending 5 months and several thousand dollars to hike over 2,000 miles? Likely with 2-3 other people they cannot stand.

This is perhaps your greatest challenge yet, but I know with some creativity and elbow grease you will find a reasonably in-character excuse to put them in the most hateful situation they could possibly imagine

& it will be so funny. And horrible. And maybe they’ll fall in love < 3 They’re at least getting trenchfoot.

Hi, I’ve been thinking about this comment for about three and a half minutes now because it’s had me so confused, and I think I know what’s going on but I don’t want to make an assumption so I am asking so genuinely:

This post is about the Appalachian Trail, a hiking route established in the 1900s, which roughly three million people visit yearly, and one option is to thruhike it, meaning going from one end to the other without stopping, which many of my friends have done.

Are you thinking of the Oregon Trail?

To be entirely fair, it's 1000% in-character for any D&D party to fuck up what road they're on and not notice until they're all standing in the waters off Key West and finally pass the knowledge check to remember that Oregon does not have gators.

I am well aware the Appalachian Trail ends like two whole states before Florida but it's also 1000% in character for any D&D party to triple down on a mistake.

Not to "Um, Actually," but in a "shortest distance between two points" way, the answer is "Alabama, in some places." :D

Hi, hello, writers? This is how you do a cyberpunk game.

[Image ID : a close up photo of the page of a book. The text is white on a black background and reads "You are encouraged to break every single rule in this book. Except this one.

Rule #00

Player characters cannot be loyal to or have sympathy for the corps, the cops or the capitalist system. They might find themselves reluctantly forced to do missions for them or their minions. But make no mistake - they are the enemy. End ID]

@northvvinds This is from CY_BORG, the cyberpunk spinoff of MORK BORG. Both are excellent TTRPGs that I highly recommend

Since is this making the rounds again, I want to try to sell you on Cy_Borg definitely. I like to randomly generate characters in Cy_Borg, and I always get amazing results. My last character was a goth obsessed with fitness, pumped full of steroids and wearing only black tank tops, chain-smoking in an armored van that allowed him to work as a getaway driver, with big insect eye implants and heightened cheekbones that made him look like a bug, and a passion from VR reenactments of medieval banquets.

inspired by the scariest words my dm has ever said to me and the subsequent coolest (AND SCARIEST) scene of my life

look at my creature

creature FAQ

"why give a seal legs/external ears?" not a seal (though really obviously based off of one), he's a speciating werewolf from a sea ice type habitat

"qallupilluit/selkie/other mythological creature?" no, bargain basement dnd werewolf reskin

"crabeater teeth!" yeah kinda, but actually there's a whole group of seals with lobed teeth you should check them out! my favourite seals are leopard seals and the overall long sleek body shape (minus legs) was more inspired by them.

"i want to pet him" he's a grown man who hates being touched. he has a phd and teeth like a greenwood saw blade

ttrpg is bad actually because it makes you do things like ‘make fanmixes for a character literally five people have heard of' 

ok can i just say i looked through the tags and i’m fucking furious rn. How the fuck did i get “role playing game” and not “table-top.” Goodbye everybody, it’s been a good run, but i’m afraid i have to leave the internet now and start a new life for myself as a sheep farmer in northern Sweden

thank you for the first addition to this post that has made me laugh out loud

I’m a game designer and you’ve basically put a giant bowling ball on a string that will, at some unknown point in the future, make me swallow my own teeth while I’m trying to do some dumb shit like explain what a dice is.

If you’re wondering what the whole drama regarding tieflings is in the Dungeons & Dragons fandom: basically, capitalism ruined tieflings, and for once that’s not even slightly a joke.

Tieflings were first introduced as a playable species in Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, via the Planescape campaign in 1994. At the time, there were no particular rules regarding what a tiefling was supposed to look like. The text explicitly stated that their basic physiology could vary wildly depending on what their fiendish ancestor was, and one of the first major Planescape supplements even included a table for randomly generating your tiefling’s appearance, if you were into that sort of thing.

This continued to be the case up through the game’s Third Edition. However, when the Fourth Edition rolled around in 2008, the game’s text suddenly became very particular about insisting that all tieflings looked pretty much the same. Some campaign settings even provided iin-character explanations for why all tieflings now had a standardised appearance. Understandably, this made a lot of people very annoyed.

There was naturally a great deal of speculation concerning what had motivated this change. It was widely cited as “proof” that Dungeons & Dragons was trying to appeal to the World of Warcraft fanbase – which was nonsense, of course; nearly all of the Fourth Edition’s allegedly MMO-like features were things that popular MMOs had borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons in the first place, and to the extent that tieflings’ new look resembled a particular WoW race, it was in that they were both extraordinarily generic.

In reality, it was a change that had been lurking for some time. Though Dungeons & Dragons is directly published by Wizards of the Coast, Wizards of the Coast is in turn owned by Hasbro, and Hasbro has long regarded the D&D core rulebooks as a vehicle for promoting D&D-branded merch – in particular, licensed miniature figures.

This was a bugbear that had reared its head before. When the Third Edition received major revisions in 2003, Hasbro corporate had ordered the game’s editors to completely remove any discussion of how to improvise minifigs for large battles, and replace it with an advertisement for the then-current Dungeons & Dragons Heroes product line. Implying that purchasing licensed minis wasn’t 100% mandatory simply would not do.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably already guessed where this is going: tieflings having no standard appearance made it difficult to sell tiefling minifigs, as any given minifig design would only be suitable for a small subset of tiefling characters. In the brutally reductive logic of the corporate mind, Hasbro reasoned: well, if we tell tiefling players that all of their characters now look the same, we can sell them all the same minifigs. So that’s what the game did, going so far as to write justifications into several published settings for magically transforming all existing tiefling characters to fit the new mould!

This worked about as well as anyone who isn’t a corporate drone would naturally anticipate – and that’s the story of how capitalism ruined tieflings.

Here’s that table, btw.  I really dig the art in the old Planescape books.

I already made a post talking about how varied Pathfinder allows/encourages Tieflings to be, but this seemed like a good excuse to just post a bunch of the official Tiefling art that really shows it off

There’s so much variety and flavor :D

💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Bangle of the Arcane Assassin
Wondrous item, rare (requires attunement by a spellcaster) ___

Once per turn while wearing this bangle, you can deal an extra 3d6 damage to one creature you hit with a spell attack if you have advantage on the attack roll. The damage is of a type dealt by the spell attack. If you’re a rogue, you can choose for the amount of extra damage you deal to be equal to your Sneak Attack damage instead; you can still only deal Sneak Attack damage once per turn. If a spell would allow you to attack multiple times over the course of its duration, this extra damage can only be dealt on the turn the spell is cast.

In addition, you can ignore the verbal component required for any enchantment or illusion spell you cast while you’re in total darkness and wearing the bangle. ___

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