I take it the group isn’t actually supposed to fight this demon? I’d generally assume that a group would already have magic weapons once they meet strong enemies that they aren’t expected to run away from. Especially if it’s a recurring enemy.

What about a kobold riding a t-rex?

Good point.

Counterpoint: Many groups have trouble discerning between a regular encounter and an encounter they aren’t supposed to fight.

Dragons are pretty high level-threats in D&D, which most players rarely get to fight because most campaigns don’t last that long. Which does make it a bit weird to name the entire franchise after such a rare enemy.

I assume that’s supposed to be a codpiece, but it sure looks like a chastity cage …

Unless you’re in the middle of a major plague or have a ridiculous amount of war, peasants in a medieval-style world who survive young childhood should generally get to an age of about 60. Though getting old with medieval-level medicine while working a physically demanding job probably sucks hard.

Not really. D&D characters have jobs (unless they’re unemployed), the class just describes a set of skills that would (hopefully) be useful for that job. Class is more equivalent to a university degree or trade school diploma - it usually suggests certain jobs, but those skills are usually useful and sought after in many different careers.

Warriors can have many different jobs, like bodyguard, townguard, soldier/mercenary, robber, brigand, monarch, hunter, or something completely different like university professor and the character just takes their exercise regimen really seriously.

Uneducated is probably best. For all we know, that barbarian is conversational and literate in 3 different non-common languages, can communicate in 6 and has a doctorate from a far eastern university - barbarian is a class, not a job or ethnicity.

In the real world, there are many places with a high density of non-European languages.

Many powerful people like to make people believe (and possibly believe themselves) that they’re just rulers. And it’s just plainly more effective when your underlings are well-informed of your intentions (assuming you’re not trying to set them up). e.g. imagine if the knight thinks that a dragon is a direct threat to the king and burns down the countryside to hunt it (any means necessary etc.), when in reality it’s not a direct threat to the king at all and you were just supposed to keep the countryside safe from dragonfire.

Of course, the entire premise is that it’s not obvious to the knight why a dragon must be killed and what are acceptable means to achieve that. e.g. in Faerun’s Sword Coast, you’d expect that every knight is well-informed about this.

A+ character concept.

An orca on land wouldn’t be too difficult, and knowing what a whale is wouldn’t be metagaming unless being uneducated is part of your backstory/character.

Aztec death whistle would also be interesting. IDK how hard it actually is to produce that sound and it’s definitely harder to find (or make) than a vuvuzela, but you certainly don’t need to know any music and the effect is really impressive.

Play the music from tape while miming on the instrument. Surely, acting falls within the scope of bardic abilities!

Or just do some form of oration (rousing speeches, telling jokes, rapping …). Bards don’t have to play an instrument, and using your voice for your bardic performance is way more practical than bringing some instrument on the road.

Oh, I do agree that it’s tedious, especially when it’s tabletop instead of a video game.

My point is pretty much that I want consistency - if you (the game) don’t care about adventurers who are very short, it doesn’t make sense to care about adventurers who are very fat. Though I think it’s pretty clear that the main issue for the BG3 devs was that animating fat characters is a lot of extra work that most players won’t appreciate.

and have you ever been camping for more than a week without modern gear or tasted hard tack+pemmican?

Have you ever tried losing a lot of weight? Takes a pretty long time, even if you basically don’t eat anything. The main character in BG3 basically springs into existence at the beginning of the game (with a very good excuse for why someone who never did any adventuring is suddenly on the road), and the game takes places over a couple of weeks or a few months, depending on how often you rest.

If you’re really fat, it takes quite a while to get the weight off. In BG3 specifically, you’re not (necessarily) an adventurer before the game, but get picked up randomly in a city. I see no issue with a fat level 1 wizard, and even for martials you can just say they trained for a couple of years and then stopped training once they got a job in the city. They probably should get some kind of penalty, but on the other hand you should also get a penalty for being small (i.e. gnome or halfling) and BG3 just threw that out completely. If a gnome can wield a two-handed sword made for adult humans without penalties, a fat dude can have the same stamina as a thin dude.

This is supposed to be Christian propaganda? So the fucked up comic by the same guy that one of the other comments is talking about is actually serious instead of being a story about how much Christianity sucks? That’s seriously fucked up …

Part of that is that most of the fights are way beyond what a low-level party should be dealing with in standard tabletop D&D, which makes the gameplay weird in some ways. The player characters and friendly NPCs get power-ups, too, but it’s definitely expected that players reload often, which is obviously not a thing in tabletop.

What I want to know is, if the gap between casters and non-casters is truly that big, why are players still picking non-caster classes? Might as well use one of the half-/third-caster classes and reflavor the magic to make them superpowered martials if you just really want to play a character that only makes narrative sense as a non-caster.

That’s how they get you. Fukken scammers.

Yeah, it’s just basic arithmetic with (usually) small numbers, and if you’re the min-maxing type you might add probability calculation into it, but the latter is strictly optional and the former is basically the fun part about maths.

TBH I think probability calculation is fascinating, but it can get a bit cerebral if you want to do it during play.