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Dungeons & Dragons - The Metallic (Good) Dragons

1. Gold

2. Silver

3. Bronze

4. Copper

5. Brass

Designs for the 5th Edition from Wizards of the Coast’s Art Gallery

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The Evolution of Dice ! I’ve been wanting to do this one for a long time. Is it pretty understandable? Crits welcome!

  Tumblr has deleted a lot of my older posts so please follow this other stuff to see more. INSTAGRAM / FACEBOOK / ETSY

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Some of my favorite weirdass shit of all the weirdass shit in Exalted:

An off-balance, amnesiac elemental dragon who travels the world as a ragged human hobo and gives people he likes magical pillow creatures with faces that explode in the owner’s face when he gets pissed

Tiny, pissy, bitter multicolored sparkledeer that are eternally enslaved to giant sentient mountains that read their thoughts

An ancient race of dinosaur-people with names straight out of a Thundercats cartoon who start out life as Jurassic-park level vicious monsters and have a limited and non-replenishable pool of reincarnating souls

bio-engineered giant reptiles who eat drugs, use their stomachs as refineries, and piss out stronger drugs

a man so done with the state of the world that he has spent centuries as a killer whale eating giant squids

a giant imprisoned primordial who affects the form of an angry boarlike being and a giant imprisoned primordial who comprises a vast silver forest who are probably totally boyfriends

faeries that are actually every-shifting entities of chaos who approach simple things like “identity”, “euclidian geometry”, and “feelings of any sort” like they are cosplay props

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If you think I haven’t been obsess with pastel d&d dice for months now. You are very wrong. JUST LOOK AT THEM

TwT

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Do you think there's a reason games that DON'T use d20s as their primary dice are considered inherently more "narrative" than games that do, when as you say BOTH types create narratives, just different kinds? You've got me curious now about how the type of dice you select can influence the mechanics of a game and how those mechanics translate in turn influence the storytelling!

The shape of the dice has nothing whatsoever to do with a tabletop roleplaying game’s baked-in assumptions about what sorts of stories it’ll be used to tell. It’s pure marketing; d20s are popularly associated with Dungeons & Dragons, and back during the early 1990s, a lot of other RPG publishers – most notably White Wolf of Vampire fame, though they were far from the worst offenders – decided it would be a bright idea to adopt promotional pitches that went something like “D&D is for stupid mainstream normies who just want to roll dice; come play our game instead, which is for Cool People who want to tell Real Stories“. Predictably, a lot of folks fell for it, and the tabletop roleplaying hobby has been dealing with the fallout of the resulting culture war ever since.

(Ironically, most of the games that advertised themselves in this way were not meaningfully less preoccupied with complicated dice tricks and long lists of cool powers than contemporary iterations of D&D were; the disconnect between what they claimed to be about and the rules they actually presented has become something of an inside joke.)

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one of my fave DnD things is how, during character creation, people start talking in first person without realising. they start out like ‘well, she’s a paladin’ and within ten minutes their fists are clenched as they shout ‘MY SISTER DESERVED WHAT SHE GOT AND IF YOU DISAGREE I’LL KILL YOU TOO’

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you know how most of the things humans use as spices are poisonous or repellent to most other mammals? and you know how anything vaguely d&d inspired has dwarves being way more poison resistant than even humans?

dwarf cuisine shouldn’t be bland, it should be unimaginably spicy and potentially harmful or fatal to humans. like green potato and rhubarb leaf salad with a festive garnish of yew berries and deadly nightshade berries, that kind of thing.

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Of all the Dungeons & Dragons tropes that have worked their way into JRPGs in some form, slime monsters fascinate me the most. Old-school D&D has a bewildering variety of conveniently colour-coded slime monsters, and by and large they’re absolutely nightmares to deal with. Encountering even one of the little fuckers probably means a TPK for a low-level party, and many of them can straight up no-saving-throw you no matter how high level you are. How did early JRPGs look at that and go “actually, the Hell Amoebas are our friends”?

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why are cyberpunk tabletop things so obsessed with decency and personhood being tied to how many surgeries you haven’t had

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So I’ve just statted out a Gulper Eel Changing Moon Lunar Exalt.   Jaws-That-Swim-Beneath-the-Light (name subject to change), who was a guild assassin before Luna exalted him after he survived a botched job after jumping overboard in middle of the ocean.

    More importantly, do I have a custom charm that lets him eat things in unlimited size and quantity? You bet I do.  (I was pondering calling it something-something dromedary but this sounded cooler >.> ).

Bottomless Tiger Shark Maw Cost: 3m, Mins: Stamina 5, Essence 3, Type: Reflexive. Keywords: Combo-OK, Gift. Duration: Indefinite. Prerequisites: Moonsilver Stomach Conversion.   A child of Luna can gorge on sustenance whilst it’s available and won’t allow anything as minor as being full stop them.   A Lunar with this charm active has an infinite stomach capacity, storing the food in a gullet woven from Elsewhere and processing it in time.  This allows a Lunar to eat any amount worth of food and water and hence absolve themselves of the need for sustenance over the period of time the ingested sustenance would normally sustain them for, as long as they keep the mote cost of this charm committed. Prematurely ending the commitment has no negative effects on the Lunar, causing them to require normal sustenance from that moment on.   The Gift use of this charm allows the Lunar to commit one mote to have their Deadly Beastman Transformation benefit from the effects of this charm.

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The party's wizard, everytime they meet any minor inconvenience:

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Dungeons & Dragons dragons by age category:

0-10 Years: Basically a giant fire-breathing housecat. Has a big ego, but rarely plans beyond the next meal. Distract with something shiny.

10-100 Years: The firepower of a small army paired with the emotional keel of a somewhat sheltered teenager. Has grand ambitions, but makes poor life decisions; has probably fucked a bard.

100-1000 Years: Remember Smaug’s boast? The unabridged version from the book, not the cut-up version from the movie? Yeah, that. Legitimately scary, but not quite as clever as it thinks it is. Decent “final boss” material.

1000+ Years: A shapeshifting world-class sorcerer with superhuman intelligence, unlimited resources, and a lot of time on its hands. Some decide to impersonate gods; most are motivated primarily in terms of “hey, you know what would be hilarious?”. Distract with something shiny.

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why do people in dnd each occupy a 5ft by 5ft square, how far apart do you think people need to be? why are dnd minis afraid of touching

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Indeed.  Plus, from at least 3rd ed onwards it mentions that your character is presumed to not actually be standing still, they’d be dodging, weaving, making feints, jabs or snarky comments, just nothing mechanically meaningful until their turn.

why do people in dnd each occupy a 5ft by 5ft square, how far apart do you think people need to be? why are dnd minis afraid of touching

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My first thought: Na, he probably just had decent AC.

some things never change