Addl wisdom: some people make jokes when they’re uncomfortable, as a defense mechanism. If you have a player or players constantly trying to lighten the mood, consider that the atmosphere you’re trying to create may not be a good fit for your party, and/or parts of your party may not be a good fit for your game.

One slab of dry ice is a couple pounds, I could easily see a bathtub full of it being a problem. Also, co2 is heavier than air, cats are smaller than humans, and they live closer to the ground, so I think …m… made the right call.

This kind of thing can be fun. It can also be just as or more fun to sit around with nothing more than some scrap paper and an idea. Especially no shade on people that don’t have unlimited budgets to spend on setups like this.

I would really like to commission that one artist that does the WWI kobolds to do a piece with 3 kobolds running a vintage SMG as if it were a crew served weapon. (But sadly they won’t return my emails)

I just want you to know how much I appreciate your hammer comparison. That is an incredibly apt simile and I want you to get credit for it. You should feel good about your analysis and communication skills.

Isn’t SCP public domain? You’re explicitly allowed to do whatever you want with it

This is silly. EVERY system can be exploited, and every group should expect eachother to act in good faith. The difference between systems is what parts are done for you and what parts you do yourself, and every group is going to want a different assortment of those pieces. You’re just mad that some groups get what they want out of DnD. You are the problem person in this image.

What’s his deal?

I didn’t overlook it, I specifically used the term “plagued” in reference to that.

And America wasn’t actually empty frontier, either. It was full of the native people that had been living there since time imemorial, and the ex-europeans slaughtered and plagued their way through.

If I wanted to do that part of the story for you, I wouldn’t have asked you to do it.

I’m done with self care, it’s time for others harm.

People just don’t like homework. (Which is perfectly understandable) And for most people most of the time, learning a new system is homework.

I was going to say no, dwarves drink beer, but then I realized that elves would absolutely be Insufferable IPA Guy.

Elves just get really into coffee for a couple centuries. Their covid bread-making phase lasts until at least 2400.

“You go to ask your Grandpa about it. He tries to explain but is so fucking racist you can’t even tell if he’s still speaking common. In between gibberish that’s probably old-timey slurs, you pick out something like ‘follow the quest hook’ and ‘the dm already told you where to go’”

“Nah roundears I wrapped it up”

“Yeah, I had to spend 50 doing your mom. And 50 before that for her mom, and her mom…”

Mom and dad have 900 years of savings in the college fund.

Battlemaps are good if you’re going for a swashbuckling or strongly tactical feel. I like to say ‘your players can’t swing from the chandelier if they don’t know there’s a chandelier.’

Battlemaps are great for a certain aesthetic (in the the game design sense of the word) because they allow you to add things for players to improv with without explicitly enumerating a static set of options. If you draw the inside of a tavern, when the tavern brawl breaks out they may do something that surprises you; “Can I throw the bottles at him/flip over the table/dive behind the houseplant/throw him out the window/etc” Whereas theatre of the mind requires your player to either intuit that there would be a bottle on the table that they could throw, or you to explicitly say “and there’s a bottle on the table in front of you.” And if you tell them there’s something in front of them, they will laser focus on it and never even think to flip the table/dive behind the houseplant/etc.

Theatre of the mind is good for games that put the emphasis elsewhere. If the focus of your game is on entrigue, or courtly drama, or in a setting that’s highly improvised, that’s when theatre of the mind shines.