Skua

Aarhus university has done exactly that! https://consentomatic.au.dk/

It doesn’t work 100% of the time but it’s pretty good

They’re all forgeries, obviously

I’m with you there having played it a bit. PF2 is cool, does a lot of stuff better than 5E, still has a few things that irk me. Like how training seems to outscale ability scores so fast that the latter is essentially irrelevant to any checks you make. But better than 5E.

Unfortunately 5E is the one that my friends know how to play, and I have not yet persuaded them to try other things. Ultimately I just want to have a game wth my friends, even if I think the specific game is a bit shit. I like the look of LevelUp’s A5E a lot and borrow mechanics from it as “homebrew” in 5E quite often

The second ability would be fine on its own, but combined with the other one it means that strength-based melee characters (the aforementioned barbarians, fighters, and paladins) barely get to play the encounter. While there are more ways to make saves as you level up, when the DC is 27 you’d better have proficiency in that save or you literally can’t make it. There is no way to boost all of your saves that high in 5E. DC 27 is just “if this isn’t one of your class stats, you fail”. Especially when the paladin buffing your saves is one of the most likely to have been teleported 90 ft away last time.

If you’re the fighter in plate armour, well either have fun spending every other round dashing back towards the fight and not hitting anything, or have fun feeling like a liability because the casters have to keep spending their turns and resources just to get you back in the fight. And you’d better have 20 ft of movement left if you actually do hit it too, which you don’t because you only just made it back into melee. It feels like the entire encounter is telling you that you’re an idiot for wanting to play a guy in armour.

Obviously if you find it fun, I’m not about to tell you that you’re wrong to do so. That’s just subjectivity for you, as you said. I do think it’s good for monsters to counter specific classes sometimes, but when it’s something like Goxomoc, which is two CR 30 creatures in one, that’s basically the only thing you’re doing that day. Being hard-countered all day is just not playing.

I agree with you that 5E’s tarrasque is dull. Personally my go-tos for fun high CR statblocks are Fizban’s greatwyrms and Glory of the Giant’s scions. They’ve got all sorts of nasty abilities. They just don’t feel like they’re laser-targeting specific players in the party, and the harder control effects are typically slightly more avoidable with proper tactics and builds.

“DC 27 Dex save or get teleported 90 ft away, and also it has a reaction to teleport 20 ft away when it gets hit” felt like a massive middle finger to all barbarians and most fighters and paladins

I’m gonna be honest, having fought Goxomoc and won (including the other version of it, whatever that was called), it really just cemented for me how much I dislike Flee, Mortals’ design habits. Everything it does feels like it was built to make player abilities not do what they’re supposed to do. It’s like instead of making the monster match the players, they just turn off player features at random instead

Surely the RP is what makes a character interesting, not their species? If your character is only interesting because they’re an orc, in my opinion that’s a pretty boring character

Why punish players that want to be a human?

They allow for it, but mechanically you still just pick one. The one I knocked together and mean to refine gives every species for traits, so a three-quarter-drow quarter-dwarf person is actually (slightly) mechanically different to a half-drow half-dwarf one

God dammit I really need to finish and polish the mixed heritage homebrew doc I have. Sometimes I want to be a half-orc-half-gnome and the game should let me

Aww shit it’s Blood Bowl time, orc barbarian it is

A lot of environments on the internet basically reward hostility. Any kind of engagement gets stuff promoted in the algorithms, including negative engagement, so anything the starts a fight gets put in front of everyone else. That’d mean that people are more likely to see hostile people regardless of whether there are actually more of them than before

That only accounts for online interactions though, so maybe it’s not as strong an explanation as I think if offline interactions are similar

Damn Antarctic elites

Hey, that looks like a successful session to me! They saw and interacted with most of what was prepared and there were even a few RP-driven decisions

Guardian portraits, because whoever wrote the “ordinary-looking furniture with counterspell” statblock was presumably really fed up of their sorcerer player

Unless he absolutely does know which way is west because he has, like, gone outside at least once. Or owns a compass.