As a plot hook, you could have some rich jerk commission a custom chess set made using the bones/hide of a powerful, possibly endangered creature.

A rival could show up, trying to use monster parts to make checkers tiles.

I’m 99% certain everyone who tries thinking of loopholes to get infinite wishes wouldn’t know what to do with them.

I’m just gonna assume you’re thinking of D&D, or something similar.

I think the standard thing to do when it’s not your turn is plan your turn, so you can get straight to it when it is your turn. This also makes turns shorter, so you don’t have as much time to fill when it’s not their turn.

If you wanna build the habit, start getting into the swing of “Alice, it’s your turn. Bob, you go next, so get ready. Alice?”

I really wanna make an orc NPC who tries to spread the word of the virtues of orcish society, all while making it clear that he does not share these virtues. “I’m sick of humans seeing the villages I burn and the tableau of corpse entrails I use to write racial slurs, and they just brush it off as ‘typical orc stuff’. No! I am an exceptionally vile orc, and I deserve recognition!”

First, you need to have STERN words with the player who forcibly cracked EJB’s egg out-of-game, if you haven’t already. Dick move.

Second, what happens outside the game is just fanfiction of the game. A spec-fic or an AU fic doesn’t ruin the season finale, whether it’s accurate or not.

Third, nothing has actually changed. You knew how EJB’s story would end before you began playing. You put up with the misogyny BECAUSE you knew the ending. There is value in simply telling a story, even (or especially) if you know how it’s going to end. Ever seen Hadestown?

I will also recommend watching the bad D&D movies from the 00s. All three of them. Bonus points if you watch it with your D&D group and cracking jokes over it.

You should. Something tells me you’ll like the jokes in it.

I’d go even further! Bards are a support class. Their abilities power up their allies more than the bard themself. If we extend that to courtship, then surely a bard is a wingman, using their charisma to help their buddies get laid. The classic Cyrano de Bergerac archetype.

…I wanna play that now.

Please stop acting like bards are the horny class. This is D&D. They’re all horny classes. Might I suggest a draconic sorcerer with daddy issues?

You can just cast fly on a regular rhino. The weird rule interaction is for giving the rhino wings, but it’s still pretty balanced for where you can do it.

Also, this has convinced me to add winged rhinos to my campaign world. Wingless rhinos are the weird thing now.

Just gonna point out, like I did the last time this comic was posted, that she’s wearing a hoodie and holding a smartphone. This isn’t a medievalish world.

I am directly talking about the Monk, though

If that was the case, it’d be phrased more like Two Weapon Fighting from the fighter’s fighting styles. But instead of saying you can add your modifier, it says you can make an unarmed strike. Which means you couldn’t before.

There’s a phenomenon in TTRPGs called a Mermaids Amulet. There was an item in a game that let a mermaid breathe in air, which was the ONLY thing that indicated they normally couldn’t. In short, a rule was only shown to exist by an ability to overcome it.

Monks have the ability to make a bonus action unarmed strike after making an attack, which would be redundant if the dual wielding rules let you do that.

I think that has less to do with monks and more to do with your players.

Unfortunately, the first lesson I learned from GMing is that the story I planned is shit. The only reason these stories are worth telling is because the players make decisions you don’t expect and the dice send things in crazy directions. If there is no chance of failure, success is meaningless.

Instead, I let the dice tell whatever story they like, and I turn that into a better story than I could come up with. And if a roll would genuinely make things terrible if they didn’t roll a specific way, I don’t roll at all.

I tried fudging once. The players could tell, and the story lost all tension. Now I roll in the open, and every roll is exciting.

To me, the ideal is as little as is necessary. If there’s an NPC, they have a name, face, personality and motivation, maybe a generic stat block. If there’s a foreign nation, then it has a name and a two line description at MOST. And if there’s something I find a need that I don’t have, I stall for time until I can fill the gap in properly.

But then, that’s just the ideal. I also go a bit nuts with it if left unattended too long.

If Fantasy Name Generator isn’t doing it for me, then AI is definitely not going to cut it.

For me, the story and characters are the fun bit, and I stick to the mechanics as they already exist for the most part. But the names… I struggle naming one character. Naming large numbers of characters in a way that feels cohesive is hell.

My assumption is they meant a much thicker rope, but yeah, definitely not as heavy as they say.