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I'm disappointed that Celestial Tree Sloth Attacks aren't a real thing.
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Sep 17, 2011 06:19
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Pope Guilty posted:That poor kobold. I'm actually wondering- Belkar is still supposed to "draw his last breath" relatively soon (before the end of the in-world year, whenever THAT is), and while he does kill a lot of kobolds he also got screwed by the Oracle, so maybe this random kobold will even the score.
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Dec 21, 2011 08:06
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Really, the central conflict of the entire strip is the age-old question of caster supremacy. You've got Xykon who has the most power because he cheesed sorcery, while Roy, the leader of the party, is a fighter who has to think strategically. Tarquin is clearly the social monster, but unfortunately for him this is not Exalted. Elan is the player who just wants to have fun goshdarnit and stumbled into a nifty prestige class in the process.
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Dec 21, 2011 18:38
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There's still a gate in the North after all this, and it's supposed to be surrounded by the mother of all dungeons, so that would make a great closing arc.
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Dec 24, 2011 02:50
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ConfusedUs posted:Agreed. It's similar to how Roy the Fighter is anything but a dumb meat shield, and the whole "make the alignment system make sense" argument Celia used in their trial.
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Jan 14, 2012 20:33
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Buffer Overflow posted:We're all worried that Rich get busted for tax evasion and that his 15 year prison sentence could have an effect on regular updates. Eh, they treat that as a white collar crime. He'll have an internet connection.
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Feb 5, 2012 23:55
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My Lovely Horse posted:Nevermind the localisms, his editor will have their work cut out for them. I will say this for Garth Ennis- he totally avoided all the usual "I am edgy" cliches in Dan Dare. It's a straightforward modern update of the character, with a good war-story vibe.
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Feb 9, 2012 23:19
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I really hope there's a new strip soon. (EDIT: With my luck it'd just intensify the debate.)
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Mar 6, 2012 08:16
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This is like the last episode of The Prisoner.
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May 8, 2012 07:19
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Got my coloring book and magnet, the notepad is still to come. Yay!
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May 17, 2012 20:20
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Gamerofthegame posted:Now let's be fair here. The trick has worked several times thus far. The cure is worse than the disease.
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Aug 23, 2012 03:22
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So Roy's 50/50 on supernaturally-aided jumping working in his favor.
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Sep 11, 2015 16:52
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Colonial Air Force posted:What always confused me about "Turn Undead" is how good of an action is that, really? Sure, the undead are no longer attacking the cleric and his or her party, but now they've scattered to eat other, innocent folk who don't have the protection of a Cleric. Most of the time you're in a dungeon so they just run off to wherever. Early D&D was about getting treasure, heroics were incidental.
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Nov 9, 2015 15:54
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Angela Christine posted:Now make a goblins thread. Hatethreads aren't allowed.
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Dec 30, 2015 03:53
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From a certain point of view.
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Jan 7, 2016 00:37
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I gotta say the plot's starting to drag a little for me. It feels less like the action is moving forward and more like it's stalling into an endless series of "Roy tries this"/"Durkula has a contingency plan!" reversals.
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Jan 7, 2016 01:47
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I'm liking the decompression strips. Haley and Elan were particularly missed.
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Mar 23, 2016 05:12
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"Nod, get treat." is the funniest thing I've read in this strip in a long time.
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May 24, 2016 05:54
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Also everyone's wearing heavy coats so if the hands were just lines it would look awkward.
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Jul 16, 2016 18:45
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Fuego Fish posted:It's weird how the goblins in Order of the Stick manage to be far more likeable and sympathetic, despite being overtly evil, than the goblins from Goblins, who are currently learning that child murder is actually an objectively good act. It's the old protagonist-centered morality thing, with a dash of "gently caress the establishment"- once you assume that your characters are the righteous oppressed, anything they do is righteous.
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Aug 26, 2016 18:41
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Raenir Salazar posted:I feel like the terrible ones like Toughness were meant to be factored in by your DM for other things. The way Monte Cook talks about it makes it sound like a pure "trap" feat, but it has one specific purpose- you're playing a Level 1 Wizard and you want to not die. It really seems to be there just to patch over a problem people had (which is the problem feats have in general- it was never really clear what design space they occupied so they became a catch-all.)
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Sep 14, 2016 18:23
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Sometimes I think the diversions get a little long but I don't have that problem with this at all. It's a monster fight. Those are fun.
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Nov 16, 2016 05:36
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Nenonen posted:Posting Goblins never fails! But is it worth the cost...
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Dec 21, 2016 10:16
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The main thrust of Dune is it’s critiquing “Great Man” figures, both sacred and secular- Paul Atreides, the Messiah, the Kwisatz Hadrach, is just a slave of forces bigger than himself. There’s also stuff in there about politics and ecology and so on.
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Jun 23, 2019 04:44
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The stance Redcloak's taking now feels more like accelerationism than anything else- let it all get destroyed now, maybe next time it'll be better. And it's not like the dwarves' proposal is ideal either, it makes sense for Redcloak not to trust them, but where he goes astray is not being willing to look critically at his own plan.
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Aug 25, 2020 20:19
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THE BAR posted:Feels like this is the way of most online comics. Yeah it's pretty typical. I feel like OotS is one of the few cases where it actually worked.
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Sep 3, 2020 00:34
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maltesh posted:Ah: Meant to ask; What's a recommended Xykon quote for an avatar? Other than "Power is Power?" The Evil: A Growth Industry panel. "We're Always Hiring!"
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Jan 18, 2021 00:15
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I was never fully in love with the Godsmoot stuff, like it's important to the story but it felt like an abrupt shift at the time and a lot of the main cast didn't have a lot to do in it. I'm not sure why it didn't work for me as much as other diversions. And again it probably reads better all at once.
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May 29, 2021 02:06
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jng2058 posted:I've actually played a couple of Trek games back in the day. Mostly using the ancient FASA Star Trek rules that weren't great, actually. There's also a weird thing that happens when you introduce ranks into an RPG group that's used to everyone having an equal say in where to go next. It takes some getting used to, and some groups never handle it well at all. Unless you're very careful about which player you let outrank the others, you can run into some pretty serious quarterbacking issues. I mean it's rare that anyone in a Star Trek episode ever pulls rank. Kirk is in charge, sure, but that's easy to handwave. Just be casual about it.
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Jul 12, 2021 08:35
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The first games to deal with this idea were the Braunsteins, by a guy named David Wesley who was into the miniature wargaming crowd. The first one was called Braunstein because that's where it was set, a village in the Napoleonic Wars, and the idea was everyone had a single unit with some specific goal- like, a spy sent to poison the water supply, or a scout reconning forces, etc. The rules were kinda incomplete so the players improvised a lot, and the next time he ran this Wesley tried to codify things more but people didn't like that as much, so in future iterations he sorta played with how detailed the rules were and how much the players could improv, etc. He also did like different settings and such. All of this was in the late sixties in the Twin Cities area, near where Gygax and Arneson were and I know that at least one of them played in these. D&D was the first *commercially published* role playing game, taking the idea of the Braunsteins and mixing it with the medieval/fantasy rules Gygax and Arneson had made for Chainmail, and coming up with the dungeon-crawl structure.
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Sep 14, 2021 19:06
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Yeah these days self-publishing is the preferred term to distinguish from the kind of scams that flourished (and no doubt still do) in the vanity press market but it's the same basic idea.
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Sep 26, 2021 07:47
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The X-man cometh posted:How many new gods have appeared over the generations? Well there's Darkseid, Highfather, Orion, Lightray, Mister Miracle, Big Barda...
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Apr 12, 2022 08:44
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I hope Rich's soul is okay
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Apr 29, 2022 09:26
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The Intellect Devourer is a CR 2 creature that can kill a player in two turns, is resistant to non-magical weapons (why did this bring this back?!), and the way they kill you requires something more powerful than a Raise spell.
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Jul 25, 2023 18:27
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I just feel like puzzle monsters like that should at least have an asterisk next to their CR or some other indicator that you can just eyeball to see you have to design the encounter such that the PCs have resources to deal with them. 4e’s math had some HP bloat but mostly got rid of the save-or-suck attacks and broad defenses (when they introduced Inherent Bonuses it was like the first time it was viable not to give away magic items.) Basically though I’m not interested in any D&D unless they bring back Warlords and that’s not likely to happen from what I’ve seen.
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Jul 26, 2023 03:33
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Good GMs are made, not born, and it helps if you give them a robust set of tools to create good encounters with. 4e’s XP budgets were just so much easier to work with.
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Jul 27, 2023 01:01
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The Bee posted:Yeah. Puzzle, consequence, and extra-risky monsters are awesome. But they need to be labelled as such, and it can't just seamlessly slot into the standard CR system. Yeah this was basically my thinking- older D&D would put a couple of asterisks on the HD of monsters with special attacks/defenses for the purposes of various calculations and it's a good reminder that "this monster has some extra stuff that makes it more challenging." So I think that would be a perfectly traditional solution to the problem.
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Jul 27, 2023 20:13
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Wouldn't be surprised if Haley picked up a few fighter levels at some point, especially while Roy was dead.
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Aug 25, 2023 20:31
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My first I believe was "Stop oppressing my culture."
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Feb 21, 2024 02:10
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FMguru posted:Early D&D had your wizards start with a random selection of spells. Maybe your spellbook has Web, Magic Missile, and Sleep! More likely it has Feather Fall, Tenser's Floating Disk, and Detect Gold. You loaded up on oddball spells because sometimes that was all you had. The old edition discourse made me look up the version of ODD I bought from DTRPG back in ye day- around 2013 or so. Now I can't tell exactly what version it is- it seems to be a new layout of the original text, with new and detailed cover art for each booklet and the Wizards Logo and updated copyright, but it seems to be aiming for the original box. And uh, it doesn't actually say what spells you start with. Like it tells you your spells per level, and that you have books for spells (apparently one per level), and the cost of replacing them and the cost of researching new spells, but the way you decide what spells a Magic User has... apparently was not in the book at first. The original game was not 100% complete and I imagine this was one of the first things they had to clarify. (And part of the confusion re: demihumans is that the booklet lists Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits- er, Halflings (and the book I have uses the updated non-infringing term so presumably that's another tweak) listed after Fighting Men, Magic Users, and Clerics- but when you look at the entries for each they actually say that Elves can be Fighting Men or Magic Users, Dwarves and Halflings can only be Fighting Men, and their level limits.) (In retrospect it's amazing this game got anywhere.)
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Mar 16, 2024 05:10
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