Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

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WinchesterPremium said:
I'm not sure that really solves the problem, it more just kinda ignores it and shouts "THIS IS HOW MAGIC WORKS DEAL WITH IT!".
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"This is how magic works, deal with it." is pretty much the entire point of Ars Magica, though.

It solves the problem specifically in context of Ars Magica and nowhere else, since the idea of essential nature is taken from Aristotle and the world explicitly runs on Aristotelian physics in Ars Magica. It helps that it's not something made up to solve that particular issue, but the idea of essential nature is applied everywhere in the game (e.g. transformation magics cannot be made permanent, Infernal illusions cannot be seen through since deceit is the very nature of devils, etc.). I think you could still get around these inherent flaws with magic, but the costs might not be worth it. (I think a blind wizard inventing a spell that transforms visual species emitted by a book into sound and reading books that way could work and it'd at least get rid of the worst aspect of being blind for a wizard.)

Edit: I guess my point here is that games about a specific thing can deal with this issue better than "one size fits all" games like D&D.
 
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That someone that brings shit to your campaign, you look at them, nod politely, and say: "Get the fuck out of here."

The fucking wheelchairs themselves are borderline major artifacts. You will have every crippled king, wizard, priest out to kill the party and take the +15 Wheelchair of REEEEE! for their client.

A paralyzed character wouldn't be any fun anyway. And oh, she has that fucking hypermobility bullshit that supposedly causes their joints to move like a circus freaks. Great.

Anyway, Gonna have my players deal with that cult again. Oh, and smuggle drugs.

Because they're all Evil. And the city is a shit hole. And the war is over but refugees and troops are still returning.

They've got some bags of fine ground wheat to fence. 50lb bags with vermin ward on the bags. 8 bags each.

And the kobold gets to hear his mother say: "That's my baby's crackhouse right there!"
 
https://web.archive.org/web/2020082...er.com/Neala_Draws/status/1296499516544290817

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So I did some cursory research, because I was curious, and found that phylactery is derived from the same root that gives us "reliquary", and was used by the medieval church to refer to small objects or charms worn because of inherent magical power. The root Greek word means something like "protection, safeguard".

So a normal person could see that the Jews would use this word because they wear small pieces of the Torah as a symbolic safeguard, and the nerds use it as a lich's power source because it protects the inherent magical power of the lich. Shockingly, the existence of the word phylactery in DND is not anti-semitic dogwhistling.
 
KidKitty said:
https://web.archive.org/web/2020082...er.com/Neala_Draws/status/1296499516544290817

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That whole rant could be aptly summarized as "WAAAH WAAAH WAAAAAH CULTURAL APPROPRIATION", because these idiots only care about anti-semitism when it's to take down something mainstream.

Where are the complaints of anti-Babylonianism? Tiamat is one of the great villains on the setting and the name was totally ripped from a Babylonian sea goddess.
 
KidKitty said:
https://web.archive.org/web/2020082...er.com/Neala_Draws/status/1296499516544290817

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Dungeons and GrandDragons.

My Imperial Wizard casts Poison Wind on the (((Lich))), destroying its phylactery.

I don't know how we didn't see this before :0.

"Will revealing myself as Jewish to them be dangerous?" Are you playing with skinheads twice your size who constantly talk about how much they wish to physically harm Jews? If not then you're probably fine. You're Jewish not an oppressed minority. You can go into the street and shout how Jewish you are and literally nobody will care, those that do care won't care enough to hurt you, and those very few legitimate violent neonazis that are willing to immediately do harm on someone they personally know for no other reason than them being Jewish don't play DnD. You would be at a higher risk for getting smacked in the face if you brought a MAGA hat.
 
I literally never even thought that phylactery had anything to do with Jewish stuff, merely just a nod to Koschei the Deathless and sacred artifacts in general, so this person is really reaching for attention.
 
KidKitty said:
https://web.archive.org/web/2020082...er.com/Neala_Draws/status/1296499516544290817

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This fucker is just looking for exposure since they say right in there "Please Commission me!"

OK, Crazy Uncle Johnny here has been playing since the early 1980's. I've had a couple of Jewish players, including someone who used to joke was a "militant Jew" and only joined the Army because he heard they were offering free food and travel.

He never had a problem with the lich's phylactery. This was back in the 80's, so when he asked us if we knew what a phylactery was, and we said no, he explained it to us and told us that he imagined it was now full of blasphemous texts and runes.

All learning about it did was give us a better way to visualize it and he was totally down with the whole crusade to destroy the phylactery of the next lich.
 
Let's ask the Wiki, shall we?

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See, if Liches went around storing their souls in tefillin, or whatever the plural is in Hebrew, that moron would have had a point. But this is a word that has multiple meanings.

What he did was just willfull ignorance for attention and woke points. It's the equivalent of asking D&D players what we have against tiny jet planes just because we talk about killing Goblins. Even in D&D, phylacteries are 99.9% of the time described in ways that can't have them confused for tefillin.

Unless the lich is trying so hard to protect the family strawberry sauce recipe he decided the safest place to put it would be in his phylactery, anyway.
 
Corn Flakes said:
Let's ask the Wiki, shall we?

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See, if Liches went around storing their souls in tefillin, or whatever the plural is in Hebrew, that moron would have had a point. But this is a word that has multiple meanings.

What he did was just willfull ignorance for attention and woke points. It's the equivalent of asking D&D players what we have against tiny jet planes just because we talk about killing Goblins. Even in D&D, phylacteries are 99.9% of the time described in ways that can't have them confused for tefillin.

Unless the lich is trying so hard to protect the family strawberry sauce recipe he decided the safest place to put it would be in his phylactery, anyway.
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I have had players that would, no shit, try to mug a lich for a family strawberry sauce recipe.

Because my players sometimes get wird.
 
Sobble said:
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I have never heard of this person before, but I get the distinct impression people are annoyed that they're insufferable not about anything else. Tweet:

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And here we have a perfect example of why people don't like these assholes: the overblown sense of self-importance, the smugness thinly disguised as "irony", and the constant and blatant insincerity.

This bitch is apparently part of a company that sells specialty dice. She probably said something inane that riled up the neckbeards, maybe did some diversity hires, and that was apparently worth a commemorative plaque. By her wife. Which she is totally still emotional over for the past two days. How small must your life be, or how large must your ego be, for this situation to be a thing?
 
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
I have had players that would, no shit, try to mug a lich for a family strawberry sauce recipe.

Because my players sometimes get wird.
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That's nothing. As part of a one-shot the party stole a completely worthless coffee maker from some IT guys at their office. Why, you ask? Well, during the drop off of one thing and the covert theft of some data on a pocket server, they were quite rude to us during conversation. Yes, you heard that right. We stole their coffee maker out of petty spite. No, it wasn't valuable, because they immediately started nanoprinting a replacement as soon as they noticed the theft, so it was only good for its material scrap value. Of course, during the escape we were forced to drop it several stories down the stairwell (fortunately in Martian gravity), ruining even that, before slamming a security guard in the head with it as an improvised weapon as we exited the building (it was a large tabletop espresso machine for a couple cups at a time, so it could take a couple hits) dropping its value to probably negative levels. Also, they didn't notice the pocket server missing, only the coffee maker, so we completely fucked up a successful mission all so we could steal a worthless coffee maker, simply because the people who owned it were impolite to us in conversation. And yes, we did make it out of the area, slightly used coffee maker included. Sometimes, it isn't about the money. Its about the principle of the matter.
 
Snekposter said:
That's nothing. As part of a one-shot the party stole a completely worthless coffee maker from some IT guys at their office. Why, you ask? Well, during the drop off of one thing and the covert theft of some data on a pocket server, they were quite rude to us during conversation. Yes, you heard that right. We stole their coffee maker out of petty spite. No, it wasn't valuable, because they immediately started nanoprinting a replacement as soon as they noticed the theft, so it was only good for its material scrap value. Of course, during the escape we were forced to drop it several stories down the stairwell (fortunately in Martian gravity), ruining even that, before slamming a security guard in the head with it as an improvised weapon as we exited the building (it was a large tabletop espresso machine for a couple cups at a time, so it could take a couple hits) dropping its value to probably negative levels. Also, they didn't notice the pocket server missing, only the coffee maker, so we completely fucked up a successful mission all so we could steal a worthless coffee maker, simply because the people who owned it were impolite to us in conversation. And yes, we did make it out of the area, slightly used coffee maker included. Sometimes, it isn't about the money. Its about the principle of the matter.
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My players play slums dwelling commoners, all of them NE or LE, and our last game they were rummaging through a house that the guy who lives there vanished. They'd killed a cultist chick and her two zombies, rolled her up in a carpet, then the kobold alchemist was all "I want the desk!" so they carried it off. As a joke I told them they found in a secret compartment the recipe for the old "TastYum Strawberry Preserves!" that hasn't been put out since the end of the war. The alchemist blew the money they made selling the cultist's clothes (and the bloody carpet) on stuff to try to make it. They gave it to some of the little kobolds who all an around going "Tasty! Yum!"

Supposedly it was an elven recipe.

Next thing I know the players are all talking about "No way it was elvish. This is a kobold recipe! They stole it from the kobolds!" and one of my players has an orc with a background of escaped slave off of an agricultural plantation.

Holy shit, now they're talking about how the elves deliberately burned the strawberry fields, how the 11 TastYum recipes are out there somewhere.

So much for the cult adventure.

It's all preserves and brawling over wagons of supplies in the streets and smuggling now.

Plus they bribed someone with a glass canning jar of TastYum Strawberry Preserves and the kobold's mom and aunts are all "Maybe some time picking strawberries will keep your worthless cousins out of the mines and the stocks..."

Fuck it, I can go ahead and roll with this.
 
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
My players play slums dwelling commoners, all of them NE or LE, and our last game they were rummaging through a house that the guy who lives there vanished. They'd killed a cultist chick and her two zombies, rolled her up in a carpet, then the kobold alchemist was all "I want the desk!" so they carried it off. As a joke I told them they found in a secret compartment the recipe for the old "TastYum Strawberry Preserves!" that hasn't been put out since the end of the war. The alchemist blew the money they made selling the cultist's clothes (and the bloody carpet) on stuff to try to make it. They gave it to some of the little kobolds who all an around going "Tasty! Yum!"

Supposedly it was an elven recipe.

Next thing I know the players are all talking about "No way it was elvish. This is a kobold recipe! They stole it from the kobolds!" and one of my players has an orc with a background of escaped slave off of an agricultural plantation.

Holy shit, now they're talking about how the elves deliberately burned the strawberry fields, how the 11 TastYum recipes are out there somewhere.

So much for the cult adventure.

It's all preserves and brawling over wagons of supplies in the streets and smuggling now.

Plus they bribed someone with a glass canning jar of TastYum Strawberry Preserves and the kobold's mom and aunts are all "Maybe some time picking strawberries will keep your worthless cousins out of the mines and the stocks..."

Fuck it, I can go ahead and roll with this.
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Adapt and overcome, my man.

(Meanwhile I'm holding my sides and trying not to injure myself from laughing.)
 
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
So much for the cult adventure.

It's all preserves and brawling over wagons of supplies in the streets and smuggling now.
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Who ever said the cult didn't have anything to do with it? Shit, the Church of Our First Lady of the Grand Gaping Maw might be all bout giving you a square meal, but it's always bland - the Mother Superior's always on about how you have to make your own spice in life or some crazy crap like that. Maybe they think it's like traditional Chinese medicine, where the more rare something is, the more potent it is, so the crazy bastards are trying to destroy the very concept of a food, all to become closer to their all-devouring god.
You've got them running a flour racket in the city, man. Fuckin' flour. Going all-in on how to make Gramma Dragon's All-Natural People Preserves to slather on your toast is just as natural as selling uppers on the side of your crack business when you already own the coca farm.
 
Mooger Meng said:
Who ever said the cult didn't have anything to do with it? Shit, the Church of Our First Lady of the Grand Gaping Maw might be all bout giving you a square meal, but it's always bland - the Mother Superior's always on about how you have to make your own spice in life or some crazy crap like that. Maybe they think it's like traditional Chinese medicine, where the more rare something is, the more potent it is, so the crazy bastards are trying to destroy the very concept of a food, all to become closer to their all-devouring god.
You've got them running a flour racket in the city, man. Fuckin' flour. Going all-in on how to make Gramma Dragon's All-Natural People Preserves to slather on your toast is just as natural as selling uppers on the side of your crack business when you already own the coca farm.
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I'm gonna let them run with this shit. Link the cult in and everything.

We had a little one-shot bit where some baker saw someone selling counterfeit loaves of his bread (No shit, in Rome, bakers used to stamp their shit) so he sent the PC's in to bust up the dude's bakery and break his fingers. Which means they've got a buddy in the Baker's Guild.

Fuck it, might as well go full on The Great Jam and Bread War with the Cult trying to pull some shit.

And I like that idea. The Cult isn't about debauchery and the like, they're nihilist "no pleasure in life!" and getting rid of the concept of food.

The city is already wracked by riots and shit with friction between the Guard, the Legions, the noble houses, and the guilds. The problem with the Legion being able to cut off the aqueduct and the canals, the guilds and the nobility fighting over control of the docks, the Guard just trying to hold the areas where they can, and the merchants hiring mercs to provide security and fight the guilds, the whole place is just a shit show, so adding in a couple of cults won't hurt. Even if the PC's don't stop it, they're at the bottom of society, so it'll take a while for them to notice.

And I gotta say, having them running non-lethal because of the 'weapon ban' has really made for returning minor villains and a lot of fun. And the whole bottom run of society, even lower than murder hobos, is something they took too really well. We've got a witch who does fortunes and provides security at a mahjong parlor/opium den, a monk who's a beggar and mob enforcer, an orc crusader who's a leg breaker for the black market, and a kobold crank cooker alchemist. It's tailor made for trouble.
 
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