“Whoa, whoa, whoa! It was a fertility. Festival! It is my job to offer prayers as the fertility rituals are being performed, and now you want to condemn me for it? When I was some distance from the entire event? Are we then to assume that every famine our village suffered before I arrived was due to you drinking in the local tavern, Ser Idiot? I can understand this is a difficult time for you, but don’t let your grief blind you! I will overlook this baseless accusation this once, but only once.”

“I would like to apologise for my actions during the recent spring fertility festival. While I hope we can agree that the virgins stumbling and falling into the bonfire was nobody’s fault, I should have taken greater actions to save them. Indeed, it was far too soon for me to open my arms to the flames, offer their pure souls to the quint-coloured mother and beg her eternal blessing. It was an inappropriate time for funerary rites. I hope you can forgive me.”

“Yes, I worship the majestic mother, bringer of life, she who brings all colours into the world. No, I don’t feel inclined to tell you her name.”

If you kill a PC with a recreation of the Boromir death scene, you might be able to hit all three at once!

And we played the first thing that came to our heads
Just so happened to be
The best song in the world
It was the best song in the world

It’s not the anger that’s cowardly, it’s the refusal to try. It’s taking any other path, so long as you don’t have to risk your own stupid pride. Have the humility to accept you might not make the right call, but the courage to actually make it for yourself.

This adventure comes from a time when modules were a toolbox. One of the most popular modules from the era had a plot of “there’s a bunch of monsters in some nearby caves, and they don’t all like each other”. Tunnels were blocked by debris, allowing the DM to connect it to another dungeon they wanna try. You might come back to the same dungeon a second time, and the contents of the room will change. A module is a starting point, but the DM continues the story from there.

If you don’t know how to prep that, then the empty room is a boon. If you do, then the empty room isn’t an issue. If you don’t want to prep a campaign like that, then maybe this style of module isn’t for you in the first place.

I wasn’t a good DM either. But then I learned. I threw encounters at the players I thought might be fun, and I missed the mark almost every single time. But my players had fun, so I don’t see the problem in getting those encounters wrong. And every failure taught me so much more than every success.

If you fail, but you keep it fun and learn for the future, what have you lost? Only your pride.

But some monsters are strong against certain builds and weak against others. Some monsters are stronger in certain environment and entirely nullified by others. Some monsters are stronger given certain allies and weaker when alone.

If you could devise a system to assign monster complexity based on every scenario you can imagine that monster being part of, then either that’s an astonishingly small number of scenarios or an absurdly complex calculation to force on anyone.

This is a room. After seeing dozens of rooms with monsters and furniture, you are given a room with nothing in it and told to fill it yourself. You know the general sort of thing that goes in the room, so all that’s left is to decide precisely what. Everything before the room has been given to you, and everything after will be given as well. You just need to come up with one room.

You can have a paid product full of things to put into that room and not learn a damn thing about actually preparing rooms like that. You can memorise every entry on a multiplication table and still not know how to actually multiply two numbers. The most valuable teacher is experience, which is why you have to actually figure out what the gaps in the number sequence are.

So you can try. You can come up with a few monsters you think would be fun, and would fit into that room. You add a bookshelf and a table for flavour, and to make the fight a little bit more interesting. It could go well or it could go wrong, but you learn either way.

Or you can rage against the system that dared tell you to figure out a single room by yourself; dared to tell you to put your pride on the line and risk making a mistake.

The second one sounds cowardly to me.

I think it’s mostly cowardice, personally. People don’t want to risk putting their own choices into a game based entirely on choices, just in case they aren’t as good. It’s better to use someone else’s decisions than risk your own pride.

Then you have ignorance. A lot of people don’t know how to fill the gaps, and WotC has never bothered teaching them how. Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren’t something to use without thought (like CR), so people complain for reason 1 again.

I believe it was Running who stated “If I have seen further, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” Referring, of course, to the works of noted giant Thrynn Walk.

Is Jerry Seinfeld alive? According to google, yes.

I’m confused by the college of eloquence being in a system that is clearly not D&D, since an int of 2 would make you non-sentient and a con of 1 would be dead.

Sidenote: Jesus christ, I blocked one guy and 43 comments vanished.

In a single round of combat, a wizard can use a spell to rain fire and bring a max health fighter down to 1 hp.

In comparison, in a single round of combat, a fighter can swing their sword four times and bring a max health wizard down to 1 hp.

So they’re both as good as each other in a hypothetical 1v1 combat scenario which is unlikely to ever come up during an actual game. Bravo. Can we stop having this argument? It’s been 4 months since this exact meme was posted.

Ironically for a post complaining about reading comprehension, but you misrepresented the original post you’re talking about. Even have the classic “quotation marks around a thing that was never said” in the title.

First, and perhaps most obvious, this wasn’t “everyone”. This was one person, and they didn’t get many upvotes. When I recommend a TTRPG, for example, I’m recommending Genesys (like someone else did).

Second, they weren’t saying to homebrew old editions of D&D. They were saying you don’t need to homebrew at all. At most, they said you could reflavour something in 4th edition. Their entire point was that you don’t need to homebrew when you can just find a system that already has what you would have homebrewed in.

Third, they were suggesting this as an alternative to homebrewing specific material into D&D 5e. Pathfinder can provide the experience of “5e with time travel” that you wanted without any modifications. BitD is so different from 5e that it can’t.

You are, however, correct that they did backtrack. I’ll put this down to poorly explaining their argument to start with, as they downplayed the “5e but better” games in their first comment while that was really their entire point.

Personally, I like homebrewing. It’s fun to tinker with the rules and materials. But there’s also an argument to not repeat work someone else has already done.

I guess it depends on how Konsi feels about garlic bread.

Just off the top of my head, you could give them a flaw that, while it doesn’t make them any less cunning, it does let the players see what’s happening.

Method 1: Gloating. What is the point in being a genius if nobody ever notices? When the villain has the party on the ropes, have them point out moments of the plan that the party could have noticed but didn’t. Maybe they wait to give the shopkeep the bounty until the party can see it happen, just so they know.

Method 2: Worse minions. The plan is amazing, but the people carrying it out aren’t quite as discrete as the villain. Maybe the security make a little noise as they stalk the party, and there are moments where the players could spot them.

Either way, the players will know something is up, and might have an opportunity to use this new information to turn the tables on the villain (“might” and “opportunity” being the key words there).

There are dice goblins who get as many as possible and dice elves who have a few good dice they treasure.

I have a slight feeling you’re making it more complicated than it needs to be… Like, how are you in a building with security cameras AND illusions? Surely the illusions make it harder for the cameras to do their job. And surely, since you’re in a building, the giant worms can’t get close enough to affect anything. Plus, the number of banshees would be unchanged since 10 feet ago, as would the scry spell.

It’s actually kind of astonishing that what villains try to do for an entire campaign is done as collateral damage by you using a first level spell slot, and it only heals 6 hitpoints. Meanwhile, Sad Frank drinks two potions and does the same, but without billions of deaths. Score one for Sad Frank.