Feb 23 2024

Fictionlet

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“It used to annoy me when my elders would bemoan the sad state of the world,” said Greg. “But in this case, things really did used-to-be-better. All of our society’s evils linger on like a cold that just won’t go away, while everything good withers and dies.”

Brigid narrowed her eyes. “Is that some kind of crack about my mother?”

“What?” said Greg. “No! Your mother is a national treasure. I’m talking about the degradation of our culture.”

“Anything specific?”

“Even Dunkin’ Donuts doesn’t carry crullers any more,” said Greg.

Brigid nodded sadly. “We live in an age of barbarism.”

Greg sighed, clearly fighting off despair. “How can we have fallen so low?”

-The Gneech

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Apr 12 2023

Fictionlet

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“You ever notice that people don’t squeeze the Charmin any more?” asked Greg.

“What?” said Brigid.

“Well, I was just—”

“Why would I notice a thing like that?” Brigid demanded. “Why would you notice a thing like that? Frankly I find it hard to believe that anybody in the history of ever actually did squeeze the Charmin!”

Greg shrugged noncommittally, but now that Brigid was warming up, she wasn’t about to stop. “I mean, come on. I know you’re Mr. Airy Persiflage, but you’re not stupid. Squeezing the Charmin was something some Madison Avenue suit came up with, just like the San Francisco treat or the quicker picker-upper. You’ve got to know that, haven’t you?”

“Mmm,” said Greg, more focused on his driving than her rant.

“‘Mmm’?” echoed Brigid. “Don’t you have anything more to say than ‘Mmm’?”

Greg glanced over at her. “You’ve got ring around the collar,” he said, then focused his attention on a tricky left turn. The fact that he was the one in the driver’s seat is probably what saved his life.

-The Gneech

<-- previous B&G

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Oct 11 2022

RWBY: Better Than Its Fandom Thinks

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RWBY Poster
I vaguely remember when the original RWBY trailers came out, thinking “Huh, neat.” But I wasn’t particularly interested, and stayed that way for a long time. It didn’t really make a ping on my attentional radar until late into volume 6, when the “bumbleby” ship became pretty darn close to official with the Blake/Yang/Adam fight. Running concurrently with all the heavy-duty shipping in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, the obvious parallels between Blake/Yang and Catra/Adora meant it was all but impossible to be aware of one and not the other. Without any context of the show, I watched the big BMBLB fight isolated from the rest of the show, and thought, “Huh, neat.” But that was enough that when Tulok created a video on How to Play Yang in D&D, I both understood the references and thought, “Y’know, that sounds like a fun character to play.”

Aurora Sparkfall, monk of the radiant dragonFast forward a few years to when my buddy InkBlitz announced he wanted to run a Spelljammer-meets-Treasure Planet campaign. I decided that now was the time to dust off the character idea, and Aurora Sparkfall, monk of the Order of the Radiant Dragon, was born. And since she was inspired by Yang, I figured it was a good time to finally go and actually watch the show.

But searching for RWBY online showed me its fandom first, or at least the noisiest parts. My search results were filled with things like “RWBY: How to Ruin a Franchise,” “Why I’m Never Watching RWBY Again,” “RWBY Volume 5: The Worst Thing Ever Made,” “RWBY: A Frustrating Mess,” etc., etc., ad nauseam. I’d also brushed up against RWBY shipping wars as part of the She-Ra fandom, given their overlap, and the impression I’d received was that RWBY was essentially a string of cool fight scenes strung together by the worst-written plot-hole ridden ever. That didn’t really match the little bit I’d watched, but I figured that was just because I’d seen some isolated good parts.

So that’s what I went in expecting. I binged the first three seasons in one day, playing in the background while I drew, and… they were good. Rough visually since they were animated in Poser, and a bit choppy since they were originally 5-15 minute webisodes made for YouTube, but fun adventure stories with, yes, cool fights. I knew that Monty Oum, one of the creators of the show and the primary fight choreographer, had unexpectedly passed away between volumes two and three, and so much of the criticism of the show seemed to draw a sharp “Monty Era vs. Post-Monty Era” line, that I figured I must have seen all the good parts and the precipitous drop must surely come shortly.

Except it didn’t. The show got more polished, the writing got more focused, the characterization got deeper… the show kept getting better. And while I think the fight choreography did become a little weaker, everything else around it was so rapidly improving that I quickly became hooked and eager to see what came next. Critics’ cries of “The show has gone off the rails!” and “This isn’t what Monty wanted!” become more and more inexplicable as I saw setups that were clearly made in the first few episodes lead to payoffs that made absolute sense long after his passing. (Plus, how would the critics know what Monty wanted better than the people who actually developed the show with him? Surely if The Secret Notes of Monty Oum were a thing, the RWBY team would have as much access to it as randos on the internet.)

So over the course of three? Four? weeks I’ve caught up with all the currently-available RWBY, including the end of volume eight and the trailer for volume nine, due to come early next year, and I have thoughts. Specifically, that RWBY is much better than its fandom seems to think it is. There are places where it doesn’t line up with my personal preferences one way or another (the soap opera-esque focus on plot and dramatic thrust over character development being a big one, and its tendency to get weighed down in political shenanigans that everyone knows will be blasted by the inevitable season-finale-apocalypse anyway being another), but these things aren’t bad by any stretch, they’re just not my cup of tea.

As far as actual flaws? I dunno, its tendency to mistake “references” for “depth” is an issue, but then again, how many hundreds of times has Star Trek made extremely tenuous links to Shakespeare or Moby Dick and patted itself on the back for being so smart while it did so? The constant ship-teasing is getting perilously close to queerbaiting at this stage and the audience’s collective shouts of “GET ON WITH IT!” are hurting suspension of disbelief. But hot take: these flaws aren’t actually that bad. RWBY is not ruined, volume five was not the worst TV that ever worsted, and RWBY doesn’t need “fixing.” The worst that I can say about it is that the last two volumes felt to me like they were written by committee rather than following a strong vision, but then again volume nine is a giant left turn and seems like it will be interesting and surprising.

So, yeah. RWBY is good! Not as slam-dunk good as She-Ra, or as impressively realized as something like the MCU, but still something I like, I’m glad to have watched, and am looking forward to seeing more of. I’d call that a success.

-TG

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Sep 09 2022

The MAD Monk

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It’s hardly a secret that I love martial arts action. I’ve practiced (on a dabbler level) Shaolin style, wing chun, tai chi, and judo at varying times in my life, and famously hold Big Trouble In Little China as my favorite movie. So, it should hardly be a surprise that I frequently want to play a monk in D&D.

(Which is weird, because historically D&D has hated monks, and I don’t understand why. But that’s for another post.*)

So when my buddy InkBlitz announced his much-hinted at Spelljammer** campaign, telling us to create a character at 5th level with a single common or uncommon magic item, after mucking around with a handful of different ideas, I finally settled on Aurora: an aasimar monk of the ascended dragon who, ain’t gonna lie to ya folks, is pretty much Yang from RWBY. Her fists are on fire and she punches stuff until it explodes—or shoots fire bolts at it if she can’t reach it to taunt it into coming close enough for her to punch it with fire until it explodes. Ascendant dragon monks can do a breath weapon a few times, but to get the real ranged boom I went with a wand of magic missiles reskinned as gauntlets. They do force instead of radiant or fire (which would be more thematically on point), but force is resisted by fewer things anyway so I’ll say its channelled ki bursts and call it a day.

But of course me being me, I wanted her to have interesting RP opportunities out of combat, and as I’m one of the most natural faces in the player group*** I figured I’d make her a facey monk. Ascended dragon does have a free reroll of a Persuasion check built in, so of all the monk subclasses, it’s the only one that supports a face roll face role at all. Buuuuut monks got no ability scores to spare on Charisma: they need to pour everything they’ve got into Dexterity, Wisdom, and Constitution, in that order. I managed to eke out a 12 and give her proficiency in Persuasion and Intimidation at least, giving her +4 in both of those, which is competent, but she’s not gonna be going Full Clooney on anyone any time soon.

Also, monks punch a lot, but they don’t punch very hard, something I’m keenly aware of after DMing two campaigns back to back where the barbarian does All The Damage In the Universe each turn, and everybody else is like “Oh, and I attack too.” As an experiment I made a build that was a zealot path barbarian, with an eye towards reskinning a flametongue sword as her burning gauntlets, and that was some sweet damage but… flametongue is a rare weapon, she can’t have it. Oops. XD Since “her hands are on fire” is a central conceit of the character idea, it’s back to monk.

So once again I’m fighting the system. I swear I don’t do this on purpose!

But! Blitzy told us to use the character building variations from the new One D&D playtest, which means she gets a free “first level” feat! There’s only a tiny number of them actually in the playtest document, but in the accompanying vids Jeremy Crawford basically implied that the main thing that makes a feat “first level” is that it doesn’t have any stat bumps. I started with Tough, since monks are often on the squishy side for front-line (or even behind-the-lines) combatants, but I was still shopping around for something to boost her faceyness. Wait! Skill Expert gives you expertise with a single skill! She could take that for Persuasion! Except no! She can’t! That has a stat bump and so can’t be a 1st level feat! *facepalm*

Back to Tough? Fighting Initiate to get a d8 with Unarmed Fighting? I’m still waffling and the game is tomorrow night! Skip both and go with Mobile? She already has 40′ of movement and can fly for a minute three times per day. Ask Blitzy to let me homebrew a feat that would take two half-feat parts of Skill Expert and Athlete to give her the ability to kip-up? Haven’t I tortured Blitzy enough??? XD (And in case you’re reading this Blitzy, no, I don’t actually want to do that. XD )

It wouldn’t be so much of a conundrum if feats weren’t so rare. As a monk, Aurora absolutely needs to channel her ASIs into Dexterity and Wisdom in order to scale with the rest of the party (or at least as much as monks do), and so she can’t afford to spend them on feats. In the final analysis, I think I’m going to end up going back to Tough. There’s no feat she’s able to take to buff her faceyness, and starting next level she’ll be taking either fighter or ranger to boost her damage output, so I can wait for that.

FWIW, I attempted a version of this character in PF2E just for comparison, assuming 3rd level PF2E was roughly equivalent to 5th level 5E. I think I succeeded? With my limited system mastery, I’m not sure if an ifrit monk with the Rain of Embers and Stoked Flame stances is what I’m going for or not. >.> But at least her feat selection was more granular! XD

-TG

*Seriously, WotC? d4 base damage? d8 hit die? Step of the Wind costs ki? Rogues get it better for no cost and don’t have to trade their extra damage to do it.
**Homebrewed extensively, but still recognizable.
***Not exclusively so, but noticeably so.

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May 19 2022

Fighting the System in D&D

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A monk performs a stunning strike in a Modern-era campaign.

WARNING: Rant ahead.

When D&D fifth edition landed, it was such a breath of fresh air. 3.x and Pathfinder (first edition) had become so cumbersome with bonuses, status effects, corner cases, and who-knows-what, that I had reached the point of not being able to bear to run them. Even with reskinning, books full of source material, and so on, I got so sick of my Saturday nights being an extended math class that I switched to Savage Worlds and ran only that for a while… which had its own problems, but that’s for some other time. Point is, I ran The Lost Mine of Phandelver and instantly fell in love. It was D&D, but with rules that made sense and moved fast, and it was amazing.

But over the past several months, I find myself fighting with it a lot more than enjoying it, and it’s starting to grind at me, both as a player and as the DM.

You Can’t Make That Character In This Game

I am a HERO System child, and that will always be part of me. One result is that I come up with very fleshed-out character concepts and “kits,” strong ideas about who the character is and how they should work. For example, a character I recently wanted to build was a pistol-packing harengon ship’s engineer, just in case a Spelljammer campaign materialized in my future. Think a cross between Gadget Hackwrench and Tracer from Overwatch. Should be a fairly straightforward thing, right? Artillerist Artificer, and you’re good to go. Except Artillerist is a pet class. You can carry your little turret companion like a weapon if you want to, but it’s still basically a familiar doing its own thing. I also wanted this character to have a wicked kick, with those harengon legs—not something she’d be doing on the regular, more as a bit of character fluff and a potential back-up to fall on if she was pinned down for some reason. So Fighting Initiate could get that with the Unarmed Combat style… except a harengon doesn’t get access to a feat until 4th level, and has to give up one of their quite-probably-only ASIs to get it.

So I tried an Armorer with Thunder Gauntlets, reskinning a heavy crossbow as her paired pew-pew pistols (making one attack requiring two hands), or using the Custom Lineage option to build a kinda-sorta harengon who could get Fighting Initiate but lost the signature leap ability in the process, or Artificer with a couple of levels of Fighter… I tried all sorts of combos. Some of them kinda-sorta worked, but none of them were what I really wanted, or at least wouldn’t become what I really wanted until well into the campaign. Which points to the next problem.

D&D Is Secretly a Seven-Level Game

5E’s designers made it no secret that they really considered 3rd level to be where most campaigns should probably start, but that they felt compelled to include the “training wheels” levels of 1-2 for reasons of tradition and easing new players in. Which, meh, but I could live with that if the game didn’t start to come apart at 6th level and generally go off the rails completely by 9th or 10th. I’m not just talking about the famously-broken CR system that doesn’t work past 3rd, but just the sheer arms race between the PCs and the monsters. Once the 3rd- and 4th-level spells come out, no monster who doesn’t have maxed hit points is likely to survive more than one round; and if you scale up the monsters so they can last any length of time, they’re almost as likely to one-punch any party member who isn’t a barbarian. I’ve observed in multiple games now that starting around 7th level combat feels less like a tactical skirmish and more like rocket tag. Which is fun sometimes, but for me at least it gets old fast.

So the “good part” of the game starts at 3rd level, starts creaking at 6th, and rare is the campaign that goes above 10th. That’s effectively a 7-level game, even if there are 20 levels in the book. If you like unusual character combos, say a burglar who’s also a martial artist a la the image at the top of this page, you probably won’t get there until the campaign’s half over—by which time the barbarian’s reckless rage, the paladin’s smite-nova, etc. are all going to be way more effective than anything you can pull off anyway. (Let’s not even get into the fact that such a character would be extremely cool in the Tier-1 or Tier-2 worlds of mortal adventure, but completely in the wrong world for Tier-3+. Spider-Man can go to space, sure, but he doesn’t BELONG there.) Which leads to the next issue…

Anti-Fun Abilities You Can’t Not Use

It’s against my nature to ban character abilities; given the “You Can’t Make That Character” issue already mentioned, I want more options instead of fewer. However, in practice, there start to be some things that show up over and over again, because they’re too good not to use, and I would argue, actually make the game less fun for me as a player, and definitely make the game less fun for me as the DM. For instance…

  • Stunning Strike. On paper, this seems like a fun little controller ability. Spend some of your class resource to make the enemy lose a turn, giving you advantage on hitting them on the next turn. Thematically it fits: has there been a martial arts movie fight where the hero didn’t ring an opponent’s bell, shove them through a pile of crates, or something else that took them out of the fight briefly? So it should be great. But what happens in practice? The monk spams stunning strike until the BBEG fails their saving through purely through the law of averages, and then the rest of the party surround-and-pounds, fight over one round. What cool things can the BBEG do? You’ll never know.
  • Spirit Guardians. Who even let this into the game? The cleric gets an aura that auto-kills enemies within 15′ of them without any effort or risk on their part… and 3/4 of the monsters in the game have no ranged options? The first time someone cast this in my game, I thought I had to be reading it wrong, but nope, that’s how it works. Instead of being afraid of an angry mob, the cleric runs towards them.
  • And More… Banishment ends entire fights with a single saving throw. Wild Shape gives you multiple hit point pools that you can just use and discard. With the right subclass and a single feat, a human barbarian could literally resist all damage of any kind at 3rd level. I used to think sneak attack was broken, until I saw a game get above 5th level, now I feel like rogues have kinda gotten the shaft.

“yOU JuSt Ne3D To bE crEATivE!”

Posting about any of these issues to just about any internet space will get you a bunch of Reply Guys telling you that they can be fixed through encounter design or somehow magically by “Just being creative!” So let me throw in a sidebar rant about that, while I’m ranting. I’m already the King of Reskinning; being a HERO System child teaches you that, as the entire system is literally nothing but reskinning. As for encounter design, does it really make sense that I should have to build all of my encounters around the fact that the paladin is going to go supernova on their smites on the first round, or the barbarian does 75 points of damage per turn unless they crit, or that the wizard will limit every creature to being able to move or attack but not both? What, pray tell, is the point of even having published adventures when I have to throw away all the written encounters and rebuild them from scratch because WotC foes are made of tissue paper? YES, D&D encounters work better if you have multiple foes rather than a single powerful monster, and YES it’s okay for the players to flex on the monsters sometimes, and YES I can just give every monster more hit points or have another wave come running around the corner, BUT these are not solutions to the systemic problems.

Sooo… Whatcha Gonna DO About It?

Honestly, I don’t know. I think that the core engine of 5E is fine, honestly, but it has too much “D&D Baggage” attached to it to really find a meaningful solution. You’d have to go through the whole system from top to bottom to pound out every proud nail, dry out every damp squib, and tune every sour note, at which point you’re basically playing a different system anyway. Pathfinder 2E seems tempting, with promises of robust 1st-level characters and repeated claims by various YouTube channels that it actually is and stays balanced for 20 levels, but I have my concerns.

Heck, HERO System still exists, even if it’s a giant wall-o-text mess these days, and so does Savage Worlds and any other number of alternate rules systems. But D&D is easily King of the Hill in terms of online/remote play support, with PF2E the only other one that even comes close. There are a few random people doing Foundry Mods or Roll20 plug-ins for games that aren’t D&D/PF2E, but they’re super-niche.

So… I don’t know. It might just be that I need a break.

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Apr 20 2022

More Rambling About 5E vs. Pathfinder 2E

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Brother Drang summons lightning against the cave leaper. It's SUPER EFFECTIVE.

Some follow-up to my last post on this topic, I’ve had a few things keep coming back to me from the things fans of PF2E have said. Specifically, “martials who don’t suck,” and “all levels matter.”

You’ve Been Bushwhacked, Martial!

Martials occupy a very weird space in 5E. In the grand tradition of “linear fighters and quadratic wizards,” martials are generally quite strong at low levels, but quickly become overshadowed by the casters at higher levels. This trend is not absolute and can be very muddy, as there is literally no completely non-magical class in 5E. (Sub-classes, yes. But every class has at least one and usually multiple magical variations.) And it has certain outliers that have to be accounted for. Every fight in my Tomb of Annihilation campaign has to be balanced around the barbarian, who does “every hit point in the Universe in damage” every round. A different barbarian in my upcoming Red Hand of Doom is literally resistant to every kind of damage, except psychic… effectively giving him a d24 hit die. Paladins go supernova. Monks stunlock boss monsters and turn apocalyptic encounters into trivial surround-and-pounds.

(Sorry, fighters and rogues. Being dependable over the course of 6-8 encounters per day is not the selling point 5E’s design seems to think it is.)

PF2E‘s approach to this, as far as I’ve gathered from my research, is to balance around encounters rather than days (which as I mentioned in my last post, has its dangers), and to hit casters with a nerfbat.

I am fine with hitting casters with a nerfbat.

I am very, very fine with hitting casters with a nerfbat.

So if that’s actually true, well… it does sound appealing.

But then I hear about PF’s classes have things like the Gunfighter holding a sword in front of the barrel of their gun so the bullet splits in two and hits two different targets, and I’m just like… “Really?”

So. I dunno.

Dirty Secret: 5E Only Has 7 Levels

It is a truism (and not without reason) that 5E kinda goes off the rails somewhere around 10th level. It’s not impossible to play by any stretch, but everything has to be extensively customized to the crazy abilities of your specific party, and you have to design enough flexibility into every fight that the monsters will last more than a round and a half, but can’t one-punch half the party. This is why published materials tend to stop here, the work-to-reward ratio of building those adventures doesn’t outweigh the fact that fewer campaigns actually get there… which turns into a downward spiral, since there are fewer adventures, so fewer people play, which causes them to make still fewer adventures…

But this is just half of the picture. 5E is designed with the idea that levels 1-2 are “trainer” levels, with characters who are extremely simplistic to play, and are also extremely fragile. More experienced groups are low-key expected to just always start new campaigns at 3rd level, when classes really “come online.” (And a lot of multiclass characters don’t really reach their intended “build” until 6th, 7th, or higher.)

So effectively, D&D campaigns are only expected to be levels 3-10.

In our group, we lobbied InkBlitz to only award 1/2 experience for the campaign Shade-Of-the-Candle is in, because we want it to last! But at the same time, we do kinda feel like we’re languishing in the 5th-7th range (and I think Blitzy’s getting bored there). Imagine how much better it would be all around if we could keep leveling up without being afraid that this level will be the one that kills the campaign because it becomes unmanageable?

Now, this is mostly theoretical, and the only evidence that Pathfinder is any better is, well, PF fans saying so. I can tell from just looking at the math that low-level PF characters are sturdier (my PF Shady build had 20 hp at 1st level), but low level monsters hit harder, too (a 1st level hobgoblin does roughly 8 points of damage per hit and has a good chance of hitting twice per round). But creating a 1st level PF character is a fairly lengthy process that involves choosing options for your background, your class, your ancestry, a personal feat (which can be mostly flavor) and any archetypes (how PF handles multiclassing, “half-” races, and other mix-and-match abilities). So there’s already a lot of customizing going on right out the gate.

Whether this extra mental investment translates into more fun, probably depends a lot on what you want out of the game. I love to build “exactly the character I want,” so there’s a lot for me to chew on there. Some of the other players are much happier with a pushbutton game where they don’t need to think about the rules—which is an understandable side effect of having to do a lot of adulting all the time, and just wanting your D&D night to be fun with friends.

And, well… do I really care about getting to play 20 whole levels of a game? I’m feeling a certain amount of fatigue from my Tomb of Annihilation game, but that’s also because it’s one long single narrative that has taken a year and a half to get through. My Storm King’s Thunder campaign was much more rambly and episodic (at least until the end), and I’m looking forward to going back to that.

It’s 11th level… we’ll see how playable it actually is. >.> It would certainly be comforting to have confidence in the system underneath it.

-TG

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