#3E-Positivity

[talenlee]

3e: Psychofeedback

In game making we’re often talking about feedback loops. That is the idea that when something happens, in a process, it influences that same process the next time it happens. Feedback in audio is a problem you want to avoid. Feedback in marketing is something you want endlessly so you can always make a new excuse for why you need more feedback before committing to an optimal strategy. Feedback is everywhere in every interaction because if you weren’t getting feedback, you weren’t interacting.

TTRPGs are in many cases built on feedback. In most story-run games, ie, anything with what we call a DM or GM interchangeably unless you’re really persnickety about rules language, the game is fundamentally a feedback loop where that story-runner provides a stimulis and the players respond to and incorporate that feedback. Feedback is not a problem, feedback is the whole experience.

Art Source

That’s not what this is about.

This is about a single specific power in 3e D&D, called Psychofeedback, which was so broken I may have gotten it errata’d.

The rules system is 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. The book is Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Psionics Handbook by Bruce Cordell and I assume a lot of other people. In this book, we have the power Psychofeedback, and since you’re not in a position to get this book, here’s the relevant rules text, verbatim:

You can use power points to boost your Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution modifiers as a free action. While the duration lasts, you can use power points on a round-by-round basis to boost any or all of your ability score modifiers (not the actual ability score) by a number equal to half the power points you expend for that round as a free action. For example, you can boost your Strength modifier by as much as 8 points (if you spend 16 power points).

That’s the important rules information. It lets you convert psionic power points to stat modifier at a 2:1 rate. Note that it’s not converting to stat points, but to stat modifier. Now, this means you don’t change things like your strength score (relevant for carrying capacity) but your strength modifier (relevant for single acts of strength like breaking objects or attacking people). This was a level 4 power, available for a Psion at level 8, or Psychic Warrior at level 10. It was also, largely, a completely unusable power, as designed, because the conversion rate didn’t really work out very well. It could be useful for a short burst of strength, but you couldn’t, for example, use it to temporarily inflate your hit points, because when your Constitution decreased, you’d lose those hit points you gained first. You could ge tougher, but you’d have to stay spending power points until you were healed. Neat effect but not amazing.

Interesting power, no real application.

Except.

In the same book we have the Mind Feeder weapon property. By level 8-10, it’s very reasonable to expect a character to have access to this weapon, whose rules state:

A mindfeeder weapon grants its wielder temporary power points equal to the total damage dealt by a successful critical hit.

How often do you get critical hits?

In this case, using core rules available items, a scimitar crits on 3 numbers (18, 19, 20). With improved critical, it crits on 6 numbers (adding 15, 16, 17). With Sharpness, it crits on 8 numbers (adding 14 and 13). That means that a mindfeeder weapon could critically hit just under half the time. What this could lead to was a character who dual-wielded small weapons like these and made five attacks a turn at level 10 (because of ubiquitous buff haste).

You can open with a Psychofeedback buff to your attack of, at that level, 26 power points, all you had. That means +13 to your strength modifier, meaning your attack would do something in the district of 1d4+your strength+magical mods+that extra 13 strength. There’s also this feat from the Player’s Handbook called power attack. Power attack let you exchange a penalty on hit for a bonus to your damage rolls. Remember how you spent those 26 power points for a +13 strength modifier? You have therefore, a +13 extra to hit. So without needing to change how likely you are to hit, you’re suddenly getting another +13 extra damage on that attack.

Now double it.

That meant that your first crit, which cost you 26 power points, is going to be like 2.5 dice-roll damage, +1 from the magical weapon, probably, +2 from a totally reasonable base strength mod, +13 from the new strength mod, +13 from power attack, doubled. That’s 63 power points. The next turn, you can turn those 63 power points into strength, for a +31 strength mod. Critting in that turn on five attacks is very reasonably likely, and that gets you 135 power points back. And that’s +67 Strength modifier. That would be equivalent to a strength of 145. While this is going on, your character is stronger than multiple gods of strength, combined.

You have ten rounds to do this, and every single high roll pushes you further ahead. And this is the thing at start; you don’t need to go much further for the wheels to come off this very fast. And this is level ten where you don’t have a lot of ways to build for ridiculous recovery, or forcing more chances to critically hit. Remember, this is a game system that’s meant to scale up past level 20 infinitely!

This is dumb. It’s also 3rd edition so you can even be mobile and do this, haste letting you make a partial charge to close on a new subject and then ginsu it with your full attack. But hey, at least those power points are temporary, so you can’t just spend all your time doing this in every encounter, right? At least you’re not ending every fight on full power points, after having a strength stat somewhere in the triple digits at some point, Right?

Art Source

Normally with these balance problems in the sprawling game system that is Dungeons & Dragons the problem is the intersection of systemic components that were not designed to necessarily know about one another. It’s usually about using parts from two different books, brought together in a way that resulted in something unintentionally powerful. This is different. This is using two things from the same book whose application to one another seems to be pretty reasonably obvious. This is almost as egregious as the problem of the Spelldancer, another 3e all-star with an internal feedback loop that worked with its own features in the most obvious way.

See, the thing is, now Psychofeedback says ‘temporary’ power points. When the book was new, it didn’t say temporary. It didn’t say that and I wrote a treatment on it for the Character Optimisation board showing how the whole thing broke with core material only, and then one of the website writers for the book showed up in the thread and said ‘oh, that shouldn’t work that way.’

Then we got an online errata for the rulebook, and then in the next edition of the book the rule was changed.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[thydungeongal]

Would you say Pathfinder is a game designed for dungeon crawls, heroic fantasy, or a secret third thing?

It's a secret third thing, and that secret third thing happens to be a thing that D&D 3e, 4e, and 5e, and most modern non-D&D fantasy adventure games actually are too: a dungeon combat game.

Basically, there's a huge gap between TSR D&D and WotC D&D in terms of what sort of behavior the rules actually encourage. This trend already began in the adventure design of AD&D 2e, but it's good to recognize that the game itself was for the most part identical to the other TSR versions of D&D in structure, so while the adventures shied away from dungeon crawls, the game that powered those adventures was still a dungeon crawler.

Ultimately, the dungeon combat game is all downstream from a few design decisions made in D&D 3e: first of all, making combat less abstract, more zoomed in, and more explicitly blow-by-blow than in the TSR editions. AD&D had one-minute combat rounds and the combat procedure was notably very zoomed out and abstract, and characters arguably didn't even have individual "turns" but simply acted in the appropriate part of one big combat round depending on the action they were performing, their party's initiative roll, etc. D&D 3e made the combat procedure much more minutely detailed, blow-by-blow, and concerned with very precise positioning and action economy.

The second design decision that contributed to the codification of D&D as a dungeon combat game was challenge ratings and encounter levels: basically tools by which GMs were encouraged to create a balanced diet of encounters to make a nutritious adventure day.

The thing that separates a dungeon combat game from heroic fantasy is that a dungeon combat game is ultimately an action game running on a dungeon crawl engine: it's still a type of gameplay heavily concerned with attrition. Now, attrition is actually something that can actually be contrary to a heroic fantasy story: in a heroic fantasy story heroes are supposed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, which is something that can happen within the framework of a game based on attrition, but most of the time a combination of attrition plus the fact that the game itself doesn't care for dramatic resolution means that those moments are less likely to happen without some serious narrative editing.

So a dungeon combat game is basically kind of like an attrition-based dungeon crawl, but because the game cares the most about combat and "challenges" most of that attrition happens within the context of combat encounters planned for the party.

And yeah, I'm lumping in all WotC editions of D&D and both editions of Pathfinder, because in spite of what some people may tell you, the games are actually remarkably similar in terms of what sort of adventure design they encourage and what gameplay looks like. And there's actually nothing wrong with the playstyle imo, even though I'm not its biggest fan. But I think it's also important to distinguish between a dungeon crawl in the old-school, TSR D&D sense, and the ahistorical "dungeon crawls are just a series of combat encounters in an enclosed space" sense (a lot of people think a dungeon crawl means the latter when in fact it isn't entirely accurate).

[inaconstantstateofchange]

Hi!

I'm so glad i found your blog, your deep dives are making my brain tingle in the best of ways! It's so difficult to really find all the info your curious about with the many different editions and histories of everything so you are an absolute lifesaver for understanding all these intruiging lore aspects.

I've been very curious about Asmodeus for a while now but am kinda struggling finding out more about him, I know he's very strong and apparently a large snake?? But I was wondering if you at some point feel the motivation to if you could tell me some about him, he seems so interesting to me and I just wanna know more about who and what he is.

Again, you are so awesome and I vow to devour all your writing!

Asmodeus: An Origin

Thank you so much for the kind words - and for your patience as I worked on this one. If there's any question you had about him that feels like it's not wholly answered here, feel free to let me know! There's still a lot that I was not able to include.

As ever, these writeups will align with current 5e lore, and draw from 3.5e for additional supporting information. On rarer occasions – and always noted – I will reference 1e and 2e, but with the caveats that there is much more in those editions that is tonally dissonant with the modern conception of the Forgotten Realms, and thus generally less applicable.

You would be hard-pressed to find a more succinct introduction to Asmodeus himself than in the following passage, from 3e’s Book of Vile Darkness: 

Asmodeus the Archfiend, the overlord of all the dukes of hell, commands all devilkind and reigns as the undisputed master of the Nine Hells. Even the deities that call that plane home pay Asmodeus a great deal of respect.¹ 

As to his current position, 5e’s Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide features Asmodeus among the list of gods, naming him the “god of indulgence”, and crediting to him the domains of knowledge and trickery. His symbol is “three inverted triangles arranged in a long triangle”, as seen in the image below.² 

While his active circle of worshippers remains small, he is one of the gods habitually turned to by those in need, particularly those who have done something to earn them the displeasure of another god:

After transgressing against a god in some way, a person prays to Asmodeus for something to provide respite during the long wait. Asmodeus is known to grant people what they wish, and thus people pray for all the delights and distractions they desire most from life. Those who transgress in great ways often ask Asmodeus to hide their sins from the gods, and priests say that he will do so, but with a price after death.³

Asmodeus is particularly appealing to those who fear what awaits them after death, or have arrived to find the reality does not match their hopes. For these souls, even the hazards of Baator might be preferable to long centuries of solitary wandering on the Fugue Plane. 

All souls wait on the Fugue Plane for a deity's pleasure, which determines where a soul will spend the rest of eternity. Those who lived their lives most in keeping with a deity's outlook are taken first. Others, who have transgressed in the eyes of their favored god or have not followed any particular ethos, might wait centuries before Kelemvor judges where they go. People who fear such a fate can pray to Asmodeus, his priests say, and in return a devil will grant a waiting soul some comfort.³

The worship of Asmodeus attracts staunch individualists, who desire a future unaligned with the domain of any of the other gods, and are willing to choose self-determination in any form that might approach them.

The faithful of Asmodeus acknowledge that devils offer their worshipers a path that's not for everyone — just as eternally basking in the light of Lathander or endlessly swinging a hammer in the mines of Moradin might not be for everyone. Those who serve Asmodeus in life hope to be summoned out of the moaning masses of the Fugue Plane after death. They yearn for the chance to master their own fates, with all of eternity to achieve their goals.³

Asmodeus achieved his current official status of godhood during the Spellplague, which lasted from 1385 to 1395 DR. After this, for reasons he has unsurprisingly chosen not to reveal, he performed a ritual to alter the metaphysical categorization of all existing tieflings, giving them features that highlighted this connection.

Due to this shift, tieflings are often perceived with wariness by those who believe that Asmodeus is able to exert control over these newly-determined “descendants” of his. While this is an unwarranted suspicion, as tieflings are no more bound to his will than any other individual of another race, the mistrust remains unfortunately pervasive.⁴ 

The true origins of Asmodeus, particularly from 3rd Edition on, are kept rather ambiguous, seemingly quite by design. This is both for Watsonian reasons – that a supreme being of evil such as Asmodeus would not carelessly leave information about his origins (and, potentially, weaknesses) floating around – as well as Doylist: it is a more elegant solution than eternal retcons, and leaves it up to the individual scholar or DM which explanation they ascribe the most veracity to.⁵ 

On the charge of Asmodeus’s true form being a giant serpent, we have Chris Pramas to thank for that bit of lore, stated in 2e’s 1999 Guide to Hell, but rarely mentioned - and not in any definitive manner - from 3e onward.⁶ 3e’s Manual of the Planes, published in 2001, does reference this account, but as a whispered and shadowy theory about the Archdevil Supreme, rather than objective truth.

Brutally repressed rumors suggest that there is more to Asmodeus than he admits. The story goes that the true form of Asmodeus actually resides in the deepest rift of Nessus called the Serpent’s Coil. The shape seen by all the other devils of the Nine Hells in the fortress of Malsheem is actually a highly advanced use of the project image spell or an avatar of some sort. ... From where fell Asmodeus? Was he once a greater deity cast down from Elysium or Celestia, or is he older yet, as the rumor hints? Perhaps he represents some fundamental entity whose mere existence pulls the multiverse into its current configuration. Nobody who tells the story of Asmodeus’s “true” form lives more than 24 hours after repeating it aloud. But dusty scrolls in hard-to-reach libraries (such as Demogorgon’s citadel in the Abyss) yet record this knowledge. Unless it is pure fancy, of course.⁷ 

One can see from the framing of the above excerpt that there is no attempt made at certainty. Perhaps it is mere conjecture, or perhaps a secret, hidden truth that few may know. It is impossible to say for certain. 

Another story of Asmodeus’s possible origin is found in 3e’s Fiendish Codex II. This text, again, does not frame the information given as universal truth, but rather takes pains to emphasize its ambiguity. 

The best way to understand devils and their ways is to listen to the stories they tell about themselves. The most famous of these tales have propagated as myths throughout all the worlds of the Material Plane, becoming familiar to mortals of all sorts. But as is often the case with legends, contradictions abound. For example, the tale of the Pact Primeval is the accepted version of the multiverse’s creation. But an alternate story claims Asmodeus as the fallen creator of the universe.  Countless cultures have their own versions of the Pact Primeval legend. The names of the deities featured in it change depending on where it is told, but the names of the devils are always the same. Perhaps this fact is what inspired Philogestes, the accursed philosopher of evil, to pen his famous proverb: “The gods exist in multiplicity, but Asmodeus is unique.” As is the case with any myth worthy of the name, the following tale is true — whether or not it actually happened.⁸ 

In this account, Asmodeus began as a celestial embodiment of law, formed from the concept itself to fight against the embodiment of chaos — demons.⁹ Over time, as he and his followers became more akin to the enemies they were facing, those celestial beings not engaged in the fight grew leery of what they were becoming, and took him to trial, to account for himself. The god of valor spoke first, laying out the concerns of those gathered against Asmodeus. In response: 

Asmodeus smiled, and the smoke of a thousand battlefields rose from his lips. “As Lord of Battle,” he pointed out, “you should know better than any that war is a dirty business. We have blackened ourselves so that you can remain golden. We have upheld the laws, not broken them. Therefore, you may not cast us out.”⁸

Despite their efforts, the gods were able to find no laws that Asmodeus had broken. Unsurprisingly, as he himself had helped write them. This conflict between Asmodeus and his host and the remainder of the unsullied gods continued on, with the gods unable to get rid of him, and free themselves of the constant reminder of the Blood War.

With time, the concepts of “good” and “evil” entered the world alongside law and chaos, and Asmodeus was able to argue for dominion over those souls that chose evil. The gods loathed the reminders of this fact, however, and when Asmodeus volunteered to move to the empty plain of Baator, they enthusiastically agreed. It was only years later, when the number of souls arriving at their own planes after death began to sharply decrease, that they thought to travel to Baator themselves, where they found a robust operation based around encouraging mortal souls to take to the path of evil. 

“You have granted us the power to harvest souls,” replied Asmodeus. “To build our Hell and gird our might for the task set before us, we naturally had to find ways to improve our yield.” The war deity drew forth his longsword of crackling lightning. “It is your job to punish transgressions, not to encourage them!” he cried.  Asmodeus smiled, and a venomous moth flew out from between his sharpened teeth. “Read the fine print,” he replied.⁸ 

While the recorded story implies a simple act of one-upmanship, a later section of the Fiendish Codex tells us that Asmodeus’s split from the other celestial deities was not so amicable. 

Once he had committed himself to residing in Baator, the deities physically cast him out of the upper realms, and he fell — and fell, and fell. Upon reaching the plain of Baator, he plunged through the nascent layers he had begun to shape. (In some versions, his fall created the layers, breaking the formerly featureless plain into nine pieces, which then arranged themselves into floating tiers.) At last he hit solid ground but continued to fall, spiraling through rock and soil. The protesting earth of Baator tore at his flesh, opening scores of gaping wounds. Still he fell, until he could fall no farther. The point where he finally stopped was the deepest part of Baator — the Pit.  The wounds that Asmodeus suffered in his dramatic fall have never healed. Though he manages to appear blithely unperturbed by his injuries, they still weep blood every day, and he has been wracked by constant pain for millennia.¹⁰ 

This casting down and its associated injuries is corroborated in other texts as well, including 3e’s Manual of the Planes. 

5e’s Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes seemingly follows on from the Fiendish Codex’s account, sharing one conception of the fallout of Asmodeus’s stratagem, positioned as an in-universe account penned by the aasimar bard Anodius in a work titled “The Trial of Asmodeus”.

At some point after Asmodeus broke from Celestia to rule Baator, he was brought up on trial for unspecified crimes and trespasses. Asmodeus claimed the right to speak in his own defense, and a court was gathered, arbitrated by Primus, a being intrinsically aligned with Neutrality and Law. From Asmodeus’s recorded arguments in his own defense, we can surmise that those on Celestia had accused him of acting outside of the law in actively working to turn mortals to evil. 

The case stretched on, with neither side ceding ground, for weeks, until finally Primus declared his judgment. While Asmodeus could not be convicted of any true crime – for he had acted within the law in all things – he was to take an artifact, the Ruby Rod that is synonymous with his position, which would “guarantee his adherence to law”.¹¹ A quote from Anodius’s in-universe text is helpfully provided by Mordenkainen: 

“I literally sit beneath eight tiers of scheming, ambitious entities that represent primal law suffused with evil. The path from this realm leads to an infinite pit of chaos and evil. Now, tell me again how you and your ilk are the victims in this eternal struggle.” – Asmodeus addresses the celestial jury, from The Trial of Asmodeus¹¹

In a manner similar to his contested origin, Asmodeus’s appearance is described in several varying ways — a fact that seems in line for a principal schemer such as himself. This seeming discrepancy could also speak to varying uses of aspects or projection spells.

The Fiendish Codex II in one instance paints him as “a horned, red-skinned humanoid with a tall, lithe frame” who “dresses in splendid robes and understated but elegant accoutrements.”¹⁰ A later section in the Codex corresponds to this description given in the Book of Vile Darkness: 

Asmodeus stands just over 13 feet tall, with lustrous dark skin and dark hair. He is handsome in the same way that a thunderstorm is beautiful. His red eyes shine with the power of hell, and his head is crowned with a pair of small, dark red horns. He dresses in finery of red and black; a single garment of his might cost what an entire nation spends in a year. Of course, he is never without his Ruby Rod, an ornate piece of unparalleled jeweled finery and vast magical power.¹ 

Regarding his personality, he is most often described as “a soft-spoken, articulate, chillingly reasonable fellow who is confident in his status as one of the multiverse’s most powerful entities. Even when surprised, he reacts with supreme poise, as if he were already three steps ahead of his adversaries.”¹⁰ The Book of Vile Darkness notes correspondingly that: 

The actions of Asmodeus are often mysterious to outside observers, but that is due to the short-sighted and dim-witted view most beings have. Asmodeus’s manipulations are labyrinthine and insidious. They work on a grand scale, although when it suits his needs he is willing to focus his attention even on the status of a lowly mortal soul.¹

¹ Book of Vile Darkness. 2002. p. 165-6.

² Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. 2015. p. 21.

³ Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. 2015. p. 24.

⁴ Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. 2015. p. 118. 

⁵ “Watsonian vs. Doylist”. Fanlore.org. 

⁶ In general, I try to stay in-universe with these lore writeups, but in this case it did feel like some out-of-universe context was necessary. 

⁷ Manual of the Planes. 2001. p. 123.

⁸ Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells. 2006. p. 4-5.

⁹ While the description of these events found within the Fiendish Codex is too long to transcribe here in its entirety, I highly encourage you to read the full account for yourself. 

¹⁰ Fiendish Codex II. 2006. p. 73-4.

¹¹ Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes. 2018. p. 9-10.

[ulanxxxs]

Finally finished...🫠 This art isn't directly related, but today, I'd like to share a piece of my long-held headcanon and an AU story about Lucienetta👩🏼🍎

┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈

The year is 3E 427, six years before the onset of the Oblivion Crisis. One day, Speaker Lucien Lachance receives a dire prophecy from the Brotherhood's seer, directly foretelling his death.

“In the year 3E 433, as shadows converge and chaos wraps its arms around Tamriel, the fates whisper. To the Dark Brotherhood, an inescapable catastrophic overturn has been decreed. Caught in the web of conspiracy, your death is unavoidable...”

Lucien realizes that his death is inevitable, for this seer had accurately predicted the death of someone dear to him before—a previous Speaker of the Cheydinhal Sanctuary, a woman whom a younger Lucien had served as a Silencer and with whom he shared a mutual love...

🔽 ( For the rest of the story )🔽

Lucien was filled with panic, as he found himself without a successor, a direct result of continuously losing Silencers. This loss had been causing significant disruptions to his duties. Particularly, the search for a certain recruit had hit a significant snag. Despite the mission being assigned by the Listener more than two years ago, the individual remained unfound.

The girl's name is Antoinetta Marie. She killed her aunt, escaped from the Imperial Prison, and continued to survive through murder as a street dweller. Her record of killings and harsh life, even by Lucien's standards, was remarkable. Above all, the fact that a Speaker of the Black Hand had yet to find her spoke volumes of her extraordinary potential as an assassin.

“At all costs, this ‘formidable girl’ must be found…"

With this resolve, Lucien was determined to bring her back to the Cheydinhal Sanctuary and nurture her as one of his Silencer candidates.

┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈

Here's the prologue—or rather, the premise that sets the stage for our story. The actual narrative kicks off in the year 3E 428, where Antoinetta, having been rescued by Lucien, dedicates herself to rest and preparation at the sanctuary, gearing up for her debut as an assassin.

Most of the story focuses on Antoinetta's Silencer training, during which she and Lucien live together in secret. Unaware of Lucien's real plans, she is thrilled by the new life with the person she admires.

Ultimately, Lucien steps down from his position as Speaker to become a Silencer, paving the way for Antoinetta Marie to rise as the new Speaker. Lucien will now serve her, just as he did for the one he loved in his youth...✨ The story is intended to conclude at this juncture.

Ideally, I'd love to make everything into a comic, but that's not a practical option for me. Instead, by adopting a picture book-like format, I plan to gradually create just the scenes I want to, one at a time🙂💭

[the-insomniac-emporium]

SWORDTEMBER '24, DAY 6: ENTANGLING

Item ID: 3E-2406 Item Name: Wiretrap Chainsword Category: A-4/B-6 Origin Point: Kha’xai’tian Sector, Malltaran Owner: Ockterr Delti Nyx (C), Arebisius Vahlen’de Nyx (O) Description: Approximately 75 cm in length, with a 10 cm handle and an attached vacu-container. Flexible tubes are used to transfer collected material into a processing unit, which rapidly breaks down and reuses inorganic material to create wire constructs. These can be deployed as either a tripmine, a net, or multiple can be used as a bola. Any organic material that gets caught is filtered into a separate section for safe disposal. The blade itself functions identically to a long chainsaw. Although the item is primarily intended for construction/demolition, the potential usage as a weapon resulted in its confiscation. It will be held in storage until the intended recipient fills out the required paperwork. WARNING: THIS ITEM HAS A THUMBPRINT LOCK, IF UNINTENTIONALLY ACTIVATED IT WILL ENGAGE SECURITY FEATURES. HANDLE WITH CAUTION. Cataloger’s Notes: Really wish somebody had warned me about those security features, instead of leaving me to figure it out on my own. At least I was able to add a custom warning to the file… Hopefully nobody else will have to deal with that little booby-trap.

-----

Less than ideal. That’s how Cynthia would describe the unfortunate position she’s found herself in today. Somebody had neglected to inform her of a potential hazard, which had been left out of the initial confiscation report, and now she’s stuck dealing with the fallout. More specifically, she’s entangled in wires made of recycled metal. Stuck in her spinny chair, her phone just beyond her reach, with her coworkers currently out at lunch. She had almost gone with them.

Instead she had lost track of time while trying to figure this oddity. Personally, she couldn’t figure out the original purpose of it, or at least she has difficulty aligning it with her own experiences. It’s not until this forced break shifts her frame of mind that she recalls some trivia about the item’s homeworld, Malltaran. Apparently, the planet is famous for mineral growths, which the locals use extensively in their construction. Giant spires of crystal get cut down to be sculpted into new forms. Something like this item, a recycling chainsword (that doesn’t accept organic material) probably makes more sense there.

Maybe. Oh well, she was going to have at least another fifteen minutes to mull over the possibilities before anyone would come rescue her. Then she’d get to give somebody an earful about neglecting safety protocols… after she gets her lunch break, at least.

[kakita-shisumo]

In which I sound off for much too long about PF2 (and why I like it better than D&D 5E)

So, let me begin with a disclaimer here. I don’t hate 5E and I deeply despise edition warring. I like 5E, I enjoy playing it, and more, I think it’s an incredibly well-designed game, given what its design mandates were. This probably goes without saying but I wanted it on the record. While I will be comparing PF2 to D&D 5E in what follows and I’ve pretty much already spoiled the ending by the post title (that is, PF2 is going to come out ahead in these comparisons most of the time), I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding about my position or intention. My opinions do not constitute an attack on anybody. For that matter, things I might list as weaknesses in 5E or strengths of PF2 might be the exact opposite for other people, depending on what they want from their RPG experience.

As I said before, 5E is an exceedingly well-designed game that does an exceptional job of meeting its design goals. It just so happens that those design goals aren’t quite to my taste.

# A Brief History of the d20 RPG Universe #

I’m going to indulge myself in a little history for a second; some of it might even be relevant later, but for the most part, I just want to cover a little ground about how we got here. By the time the late ‘90s rolled around TSR and its flagship product, Dungeons and Dragons, were in trouble. D&D was well over two decades old by that point and showing its age. New ideas about what RPGs could and even should be had taken over the industry; TSR had finally lost its spot as best-selling RPG publisher to comparative upstart White Wolf and their World of Darkness games; the company even declared bankruptcy in 1997. Times were grim.

That, however, was when another comparative newcomer, Wizards of the Coast, popped up and bought TSR outright. Flush with MtG and Pokemon cash, they were excited to try to revitalize the D&D brand and began development on a new edition of D&D: third edition, releasing in August 2000.

Third edition was an almost literal revolution in D&D’s design, throwing a lot of “sacred cows” out and streamlining everywhere: getting rid of THAC0 and standardizing three kinds of base attack bonus progressions instead; cutting down to three, much more intuitive kinds of saving throws and standardizing them into two kinds of progression; integrating skills and feats into the core rules; creating the concept of prestige classes and expanding the core class selection. And of course, just making it so rolls were standardized as well, using a d20 for basically everything and making it so higher numbers are basically always better.

At the same time, WotC also developed the concept of the Open Gaming License (OGL), based on Open Source coding philosophies. The idea was that the core rules elements of the game could be offered with a free, open license to allow third-parties develop more content for the game than WotC would have the resources to do on their own. That would encourage more sales of the base game and other materials WotC released as well, creating a virtuous cycle of development and growing the industry for everyone.

Well, long story short (too late!), it worked like fucking gangbusters. 3E was explosive. It sold beyond anyone’s expectations, and the OGL fostered a massive cottage industry of third-party developers throwing out adventures, rules material, and even entire new game lines on the backs of the d20 system. A couple years later, 3.5 edition released, updating and streamlining further, and it was even more of a success than 3rd ed was.

At this point, we need turn for a moment to a small magazine publishing company called Paizo Publishing, staffed almost exclusively by former WotC writers and developers who had formed their own company to publish Dungeon and Dragon, the two officially-licensed monthly magazines (remember those?) for D&D. Dungeon focused on rules content, deep dives into new sourcebooks, etc., while Dragon was basically a monthly adventure drop. Both sold well and Paizo was a reasonably profitable company. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly.

Except. In 1999, WotC themselves were bought by board game heavyweight Hasbro, who wanted all that sweet, sweet Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon money. D&D was a tiny part of WotC at the time and the brand was moribund, so Hasbro’s execs hadn’t really cared if the weirdos in the RPG division wanted to mess around with Open Source licensing. It wasn’t like D&D was actually making money anyway… until it was. A lot of money. And suddenly Hasbro saw “their” money walking out the door to other publishers. So in 2007, WotC announced D&D 4th Ed, and unlike 3rd, it would not be released under an open license. Instead, it would be released under a much more restrictive, much more isolationist Gaming System License, which, among other things, prevented any licensee from publishing under the OGL and the GSL at the same time. They also canceled the licenses for Dungeon and Dragon, leaving Paizo Publishing without anything to, well, publish.

At first, Paizo opted to just pivot to adventure publishing under the OGL. Dungeon Magazine had found great success with a series of adventures over several issues that took PCs from 1st all the way to 20th level, something they were calling “Adventure Paths,” so Paizo said, “Well, we can just start publishing those! We’re good at it, the market’s there, it will be great!” And then, roughly four months after Paizo debuted its “Pathfinder Adventure Paths” line, WotC announced 4th Ed and the switch to the GSL. Paizo suddenly had a problem.

4th Ed wasn’t as big a change from 3rd Ed as 3rd Ed had been from AD&D, but it was still a major change, and a lot of 3rd Ed fans were decidedly unimpressed. Paizo’s own developers weren’t too keen on it either. So they made a fateful decision: they were going to use the OGL to essentially rewrite and update D&D 3.5 into an RPG line they owned: the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. It was unprecedented. It was a huge freaking gamble. And it paid off more than anybody ever expected. Within two years Paizo was the second-largest RPG publisher in the industry, only behind WotC itself, and for one quarter late in 4E’s life, even managed to outsell D&D, however briefly. Ten years of gangbuster sales and rules releases followed, including 6 different monster books and something over 30 base classes when it was all said and done. It was good stuff and I played it loyally the whole time.

Eventually, though, time moves on and things have to change. The first thing that changed was 4E was replaced by D&D 5E in 2014, which was deliberately designed to walk back many of the changes in 4E that were so poorly received, keep a few of the better ones that weren’t, and in general make the game much more accessible to new players. It was a phenomenal success, buoyed by a resurgence of D&D in pop culture generally (Stranger Things and Critical Role both having large parts to play), and its dominance in the RPG arena hasn’t been meaningfully challenged since. It also returned to the use of the OGL, and a second boom of third-party publishers appeared and thrived for most of a decade.

The second thing was that PF1 was, itself, showing its age. RPGs have a pretty typical life cycle of editions and Pathfinder was reaching the end of one. It wasn’t much of a surprise, then, when, in 2018, Paizo announced Pathfinder 2nd Ed, which released in 2019 and will serve as the focus of the remainder of this post (yes, it’s taken me 1300 words to actually start doing the thing the post is supposed to be about, sue me).

There’s a coda to all of this in the form of the OGL debacle but I don’t intend to rehash any of it here - it was just like six months ago, come on - beyond what it specifically means for the future of PF2. That will come back up at the very end.

# Pathfinder 2E Basics #

So what, exactly, makes PF2 different from what has come before? There are, in my opinion, four fundamental answers to that question.

First: Unified math and proficiency progression. This piece is likely the part most familiar to 5E players, because 5E proficiency and PF2 proficiency both serve the same purpose, which is to tighten up the math of the game and make it so broken accumulations of bonuses aren’t really a thing. In contrast to 5E’s very limited proficiency, though, which just runs from +2 to +6 over the entire 20 levels of the game, Pathfinder’s scales from +0 to +28. Proficiency isn’t a binary yes/no, the way it is in 5E. PF2’s proficiency comes in five varieties: Untrained, Trained, Expert, Master, and Legendary. Your proficiency bonus is either +0 (Untrained) or your level + 2(Trained), +4 (Expert), +6 (Master) or +8 (Legendary). So if you were level five and Expert at something, your proficiency bonus would be level (5) plus Expert bonus (4) = +9.

Proficiency applies to everything in PF2, really - even more than 5E, if you can believe it, because it also goes into your Armor Class calculation. You can be Untrained, Trained, Expert, Master, or Legendary in various types of armor (or unarmored defense, especially relevant for many casters and monks), and your AC is calculated by your proficiency bonus + your Dex modifier + the armor’s own AC bonus, so AC scales just as attack rolls do. Once you get a handle on PF2 proficiency, you’ve grasped 95% of how any game statistic is calculated, including attacks, saves, skill checks, and AC.

Second: Three-Action Economy. Previous editions of D&D, including 5E, have used a “tiered” action system in combat, like 5E’s division between actions, moves, and bonus actions. PF2 has largely done away with that. At the start of your turn, you get three actions and a reaction, period (barring haste or slow or similar temporary effects). It takes one action to do one basic thing. “Attack” is an action. “Move your speed” is an action. “Ready a weapon” is an action. Searching for a hidden enemy is an action. Taking a guarded step is an action. Etc. The point being, you can do any of those as often as you have the actions for them. You can move three times, attack three times, move twice and attack once, whatever. Yes, this does mean you can attack three times in one turn at 1st level if you really want to (though there are reasons why you might not want to).

Some special abilities and most spells take more than one action to accomplish, so it’s not completely one-to-one, but it’s extremely easy to grasp and quite flexible at the same time. It’s probably my favorite of the innovations PF2 brought to the table.

Third: Deep Character Customization. So here’s where I am going to legitimately complain just a bit about 5E. I struggle with how little mechanical control I, as a player, have over how my character advances in 5E.

Consider an example. It’s common in a lot of 5E games to begin play at 3rd level, since you have a subclass by then, as well as a decent amount of hit points and access to 2nd level spells if you’re a caster. Let’s say you’re playing a fighter in a campaign that begins at 3rd level and is expected to run to 11th. That’s 8+ levels of play, a decent-length campaign by just about anyone’s standards. During that entire stretch of play, which would be a year or more depending on how often your group meets, your fighter will make exactly two (2) meaningful mechanical choices as part of their level-up process: the two points at 4th and 8th levels where you can boost a couple stats or get a feat. That’s it. Everything else is on rails, decided for you the moment you picked your subclass.

Contrast that with PF2. In that same level range, you would get to select: 4 class feats, 4 skill feats, two ancestry feats, two general feats, and four skill increases. At every level, a PF2 player gets to choose at least two things, in addition to whatever automatic bonuses they get from their class. These allow me to tailor my build quite tightly to whatever my idea for my character is and give me cool new things to play with every time I level up. This is true across character classes, casters and martials alike.

PF2 also handles multiclassing and the space that used to be occupied by prestige classes with its “pile o’ feats” approach. You can spend class feats from class A to get some features of class B, but it’s impossible for a multiclass build to just “steal” everything that makes a single class cool. A wizard/fighter will never be as good a fighter as a regular fighter is, and a fighter/wizard will never be the wizard’s match with magic.

Fourth: Four Degrees of Success. 5E applies its nat 20, nat 1, critical hits, etc. rules in a very haphazard fashion. PF2 standardizes this as well, in a way that makes your actual skill with whatever you’re doing matter for how well you do it. Any check in PF2 can produce one of four results: a critical success, a regular success, a regular failure, or a critical failure. In order to get a critical success on a roll, you have to exceed your target DC by 10 or more; in order to get a critical failure, you have to roll 10 or more less than the DC. Where do nat 20s and nat 1s come in? They respectively increase or decrease the level of success you rolled by one step. In practice, it works out a lot like you’re used to with a 5E game, but, for instance, if you have a +30 modifier and are rolling against a DC 18, rolling a nat 1 nets you a total of 31, exceeding the DC by more than 10 and earning you a critical success, which is then reduced to just a normal success by the fact of it being a nat 1. Conversely, rolling against a DC 40 with a +9 modifier can never succeed, because even a nat 20 only earns a 29, more than 10 below the DC and normally a crit failure, only increased to a regular failure by the nat 20.

Now, not every roll will make use of critical successes and critical failures. Attack rolls, for instance, don’t make any inherent distinction between failure and critical failure. (Though there are special abilities that do - try not to critically fail a melee attack against a swashbuckler. The results may be painful.) Skill rolls, however, often do, as do many spells with saving throws. Most spells that allow saves are only completely resisted if the target rolls a critical success. Even on a regular success, there is usually some effect, even on non-damaging rolls. That means that casters very rarely waste their turn on spells that get resisted and accomplish nothing at all. It also doubles the effect of any mechanical bonuses or penalties to a roll, because now there are two spots on a die per +1 or -1 that affect the outcome; a +1 might not only convert a failure to a success but might also convert a success to a crit success, or a crit fail to a regular fail.

# What About Everything Else? #

There is a lot more to it, of course. As a GM I find PF2 incredibly easy to run, even at the highest levels of game play, as compared to other d20 systems. The challenge level calculations work, meaning you can have a solo boss without having to resort to special boss monster rules to provide good challenges. I find the shift from “races” to “ancestries” much less problematic. PF2 has rules for how to handle non-combat time in the dungeon in ways that standardize common rules problems like “Well, you didn’t say you were looking for traps!” Everything using one proficiency calculation lets the game do weird things like having skill checks that target saves, or saves that target skill-based DCs. Inter-class balance, with some very specific exceptions, is beautifully tailored. Perception, always the uber-skill, isn’t a skill at all anymore: everyone is at least Trained in it, and every class reaches at least Expert in it by early double-digit levels. Opportunity Attacks (PF2 still uses the 3rd Ed “Attack of Opportunity” - but will soon be switching over to "Reactive Strike") isn’t an inherent ability of every character and monster, encouraging mobility during combats, and skill actions in combat can lower ACs, saves, attacks, and more, so there are more things to do for more kinds of characters. And so on.

Experiencing all of that is easiest just by playing the game, of course, but suffice it to say PF2 has a lot of QoL improvements for players and GMs alike in addition to the bigger, core-level mechanical differences.

# The OGL Thing #

Last thing, then. In the wake of the OGL shit in January, Paizo announced that it would no longer be releasing Pathfinder material under the OGL, opting instead to work with an intellectual property law firm to develop the Open RPG Creative (ORC) License that would do what the OGL could no longer be trusted to do: remain perpetually free and untouchable for anyone who wanted to publish under it. The ORC isn’t limited specifically to Paizo or to Pathfinder 2E or even to d20 games; any company can release any ruleset under it and allow third-party companies to develop and publish content for it.

Shifting away from the OGL, though, required making some changes to scrub out legacy material. A lot of the basic work was done when they shifted to 2E, but there are still a lot of concepts, terminologies, and potentially infringing ideas seeded throughout the system. These had to go.

Since this meant having to rewrite a lot of their core rules anyway, Paizo opted to not fight destiny and announced “Pathfinder 2nd Edition Remastered” in April. This is a kind of “2.25” edition, with a lot of small changes around the edges and a couple of larger ones to incorporate what they’ve learned since the game first launched four years ago. A couple classes are getting major updates, a ton of spells are either getting renamed or swapped out for non-OGL equivalents, and a couple big things: no more alignment and no more schools of magic.

The first book of the Remaster, Player Core 1, comes out in November, along with the GM Core. Next spring will see Monster Core and next summer will give us Player Core 2. That will complete the Remaster books; everything else is, according to Paizo, going to be compatible enough it won’t need but a few minor tweaks that can be handled via errata. So if you’re thinking about getting into PF2, I’d give serious thought to waiting until November at least, and maybe next summer if you want the whole Remastered package.

And that’s it. That’s my essay on PF2 and what I think makes it cool. The floor is open for questions and I am both very grateful and deeply apologetic to anyone who made it this far.

[shadow-fell]

Look, a Map (Locations for BG3)

All credit to Mike Schley for the original Sword Coast map, and the 1990 Forgotten Realms Atlas for additional roads.

Notes for nerds under the cut.

So, the basis of this map is the 2e FR map to the 5e map, as they have the same geography (3e/4e is notably different/stretched). Soubar and The Friendly Arm (from BG1!) are added in from that map.

Crossing the Fields of the Dead are the Thundar Road and the Skuldask Road, meeting at the dwarven/gnomish village of Tempus' Tears. Thundar ends with the Tradeway, while the Skuldask Road continues on through Elturel southwards.

Skuldask Road is clearly the Risen Road (Leading out of Elturel and towards Baldur's Gate. As Waukeen's Rest is supposed to be the halfway point, I placed it close to the intersection, where the broken bridge could easily block off travel to the Thundar Road.

Moonhaven is the Blighted Village; south of Waukeen's Rest, the Selunite Temple is part of it. Anga Vled is a gnomish village of note, mentioned in the game as where Amanita Szarr, the Lady Incognita, was raised.

Moonrise Towers is often placed much closer to Elturel; this is based off the FR Atlas, a defunct and not fully canon map making software. The towers themselves have one sourcebook appearance, all that is said is "West of Elturel". For BG3, it makes sense to put it closer to Baldur's Gate. In purple is marked off the general area of the Shadow Curse.

Sunrise Spires have similarly only been placed through FR Atlas, but are known to be on the Northern Bank. It is generally placed to the west and closer to Baldur's Gate, so I kept a relatively close position (given also the low resolution of the Atlas maps). They're a Lathendarian fortress that fell in the 1170s, and together with Rosymorn paint a whole Lathanderian-Selunite regional shift I find neat.

Waterdeep is well to the north; Athkatla and BG2's setting to the south. That's kind of all the interesting cities.

Travel Times

From the crash site to Waukeen's Rest is 2 days normal travel

Waukeen's Rest to Rosymorn Monastery is another day's travel

Rosymorn to Moonrise Towers is 2 days

Moonrise Towers to Baldur's Gate is 3 days travel

[multidimensional-trashcan]

(particle) physics dashboard simulator

professional-ton follow reblogged 🔄 particl...

➕ professional-ton follow

big L when the top doesn't even last long enough to couple with a bottom

🪦 massivest-quark-deactivated51025

SCATTER YOU AND YOUR DECAYONISM!!! I HOPE YOU'LL NEVER FIND A STABLE NUCLEUS AND MAY THE β-DECAY GET YOU!

➕ professional-ton follow

'never start an argument you know you'll never be able to finish in your lifetime'

- Albert Einstein

#the comment section is full of these freaks #looks like a graveyard in there #at least there's no need for blocking with these types

(22,045 notes)

🏋️‍♂️ giga-chad-particle follow

pussy so good you tunnel right through that coulomb potential

(43 notes)

giga-chad-particle follow reblogged 🔄 neutr...

🟢 neutrinonionionio follow

for someone that can be stopped by a sheet of paper alpha particles are surprisingly full of themsleves

🏋️‍♂️ giga-chad-particle follow

at least im not some fucking WIMP

🟢 neutrinonionionio follow

you do realize that WIMP stands for Weakly Interacting Massive Particle? there isn't even proof they exist. And while im not very massive at all you are a massive buffoon

🏋️‍♂️ giga-chad-particle follow

yuor still fucking WEAK

(578 notes)

📶 scatter-couple-kill follow

They're the cryptids of the particle world and you loved them so much we're bringing them back in a new format! So let's radiate...

#poll #who'd you rather scatter on #scatter couple kill #we'll be back to our usual bullshit soon

(9,084 notes)

physics-strongest-soldier follow reblogged 🔄 e...

⚡ electron-shmelectron follow

i'm sick of this gluonormativity! electromagnetic, weak and gravitational interaction are just as important as strong interaction!!!

⚛️ atomatic-jesus follow

you are right and you should say it

➿ physics-strongest-soldier follow

colour me impressed! an electron all on it's own, how cute... but now go back to your sugardaddy @atomatic-jesus before you hurt yourself okay?

also, gravitational interaction? really? this would be hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic.

⚡ electron-shmelectron follow

gravitational interaction holds whole galaxies with planets and stars together! maybe you should inform yourself before you go around annoying people

➿ physics-strongest-soldier follow

omp you're one of those freaks. i cant believe theres still particles out there that believe in something bigger than us. bet you also believe that we all can work together to form some sort of "organism".

honey, you're view of reality is so cracked, maybe you should put some gluon

#thought i had all of those freaks blocked #but im kinda proud of that pun ngl #freaks dni

(129,506 notes)

❌ contron follow

so if proton = pro + ton and neutron = neutral + ton shouldn't the electron actually be called contron?

#polarising ideas by me #contron #electron #proton #neutron

(3 notes)

🌈 wollaston1802 follow

hello 👋 im a bound electron ⚡ looking for a radiant photon ☄️ to excite me 🤭. i prefer a length 📏 of 656.278 nm ♥️, 486.132 nm 🩵 or 434.045 nm 💙 (some of you in the violets and ultraviolets may also do it but please no less than 364.56 nm, last time my sugar daddy got ionized they almost didn't take me back). you can find me in the L-shell 🐚 of the 5,000,000,205th H-atom ⚛️ to your left.

#balmer series #very excitable #find me 😘

(113 notes)

⬇️ a-real-downer follow

some of you really need to reconsider your word choices. using 'positive' to describe good things and 'negative' to describe bad things is sooo plum pudding model times. as someone with negative charge of -1/3e myself i refuse to accept such every-day discrimination manifested in our speech pattern

#actually negative #down quark #negatively charged particles unite!

(73 notes)

photon-with-more-than-211-mev follow reblogged...

🪦 special-relativity-my-love-deactivated2024

thank physics that there are no anti-muons in my vicinity im not ready to meet my antiparticle yet

🪦ordinary-nonrelativity-my-hate-deactivated2024

hi :)

〰️ photon-with-more-than-211-mev (new) follow

*waves at you*

#gotta love pair annihilation

(1.6 Mio notes)

🌀 double-u-double-fun follow

🎶i'm a WEAK interaction FREAK🎶

#this song just rules #everybody should listen to it #bosonic vibrations #check them out #they're great

[bendwill]

@luhnsilvars / s.c / circa 3E 425-430

So stranger looks upon stranger. To find company in the far Ashlands did not typically imply a positive encounter, especially so close to the Bani-Dad, and the Ghost-Fence. Redoran presence in Maar Gan can only extend so far here; the closer to the fence a place is, the more pervasive threat becomes. No-one wants to risk Corprus. No-one wants to encounter the Sixth House.

Almost no-one.

The Falasmaryon Proplyon Chamber is not empty when Veresa enters it. There is no immediate threat there; the bodies of the Sixth House cultists are strewn across the ground and are either dead or slumbering — sometimes it could be hard to tell the difference with them. Closer to the center of the room, there is the hooded figure of another — not dunmer, certainly, but it was not immediately clear whether he was threat or not.

He regards her with a casual, non-threatened air, and gestures the staff held in hand towards one of the giant Propylons. The staff's make was vaguely nordic, as was the voice as it spoke from somewhere beneath the shadowy hood, void of further detail.

“You wouldn't happen to know where the indice for this place is… Would you?”

[darklordazalin]

Azalin Reviews: Darklord Claude Renier

Darklord: Claude Renier Domain: Richemulot Domain Formation: 694 BC Sources: Realm of Terror (2e), Gazetteer 2 (3e), Gazetteer 3 (3e), Legacy of Blood (3e)

Scholars have determined that prior to being claimed by the Mists, the Renier family was made of two branches – high born nobles that used their influence for the betterment of society and a clan of wererats that did the opposite. The Renier family have a complicated history in the Demiplane of Dread and the first known Reniers to stumble into the Mists settled in Mordent. Their patriarch, Jacques Renier, built the House on Gryphon Hill as well as Heather House, the current dwelling of the Weathermay family. It becomes more complex as the wererat curse developed in Jacques’s offspring, splitting the family further. This rivalry between the human and wererat side of the family only increased when Claude Renier and his pack of wererats fled into the Mists and found themselves in the city of Silbervas in Falkovnia.

Claude quickly integrated his family with the local wererats that lived in the sewers of Silbervas and created a thriving thieves’ guild that integrated with the humanoids of Silbervas. As in the manner of rats, Claude’s influence rapidly multiplied and eventually drew the attention of Falkovnia’s little mercenary, Vlad Drakov and his band of more talented thugs, the Talons. Vlad oversaw the extermination of the wererats in Silbervas and to everyone’s surprise, was quite successful in his endeavors. Over the course of three years, which have been aptly named ���The Years of the Impaled Rats’, Vlad flushed out the wererats from the sewers of Silbervas causing Claude to flee into the Mists once more.

As if being defeated by Vlad Drakov wasn’t torment enough, the Dark Powers created a prison in the form of Richemulot just for Claude Renier. From Chateau Delanuit in Pont-A-Museau, Claude ruled over the governing bodies of Richemulot as well as his own family. He ruled through manipulation and ensuring the other wererats were too busy vying for his attention to plot against him. He paid particular attention to his twin granddaughters, Jacqueline and Louise Renier. Seeing as Jacqueline eventually usurped her grandfather’s position as the Darklord of Richemulot, one can imagine how well this worked out for the twitchy rat.

Claude Renier is little more than a footnote in Jacqueline’s story. A footnote that was defeated by Vlad Drakov who couldn’t win a battle against a single zombie…I rarely agree with our tormentors, but in this case they were well advised to throw Claude to the rats and deliver the carcass of his domain to Jacqueline.

[frenchcurious]

Pour le 100e anniversaire des 24 Heures du Mans, Ferrari est en pôle position avec sa nouvelle 499P comme ils l'étaient en mars au Sebring WEC 1000. Ils ont terminé 3e au général pour la première fois avec la nouvelle voiture. - source William Tuttle.

[campaign-spotlight]

Dungeon Lore V: Playtesting and Pathfinder [S2F5]

In this week's Flashlight, we talk about playtesting at scale, becoming a cult leader, and the development of D&D 3e and D&D 3.5e as well as Pathfinder. Reilly shares his philosophy on ability checks and roleplay. Jake really doesn't know anything about cinema.

We mention the games Swords of the Serpentine and Time Watch, both of which look extremely fun. Also, here are some links that we used in research for the episode: 

Here’s a Department of Commerce study called “A Nation Online” that talks about who would be able to access the Internet in the era of the 3rd Edition playtest, complete with some very old-school Excel charts.

Here’s a forum thread from Jonathan Tweet (the lead designer on D&D 3rd Edition) that talks about the changes in 3rd Edition.

Here’s a contemporary Death Cookie review of 3rd Edition that discusses some of the changes from previous editions.

Here’s a review of 3rd Edition play from 2000 that’s mostly positive.

Here’s another forum thread with a retrospective on how players felt about D&D 3rd Edition.

Here’s Monte Cook, one of the designers for 3rd Edition (but not 3.5) talking about the development of 3.5.

Here’s a brief history of Paizo, the publisher of Pathfinder.

Here’s the character generator we used in this episode.

We didn’t really get into this, but Roll20’s Orr Report shows the relative popularity of different TTRPG systems. 

Here's the character sheet that Reilly builds in this episode. As you can see, neither one of us knows how to minmax D&D 3e:

If you like the music on the show, go check out more of Reilly's music.

Follow us wherever you get your podcasts, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. You can also get episodes right from the source at our RSS feed. If you enjoy Campaign Spotlight, consider subscribing to our Patreon. For more on the show, including links to all our social media, visit our website.  

[churchyardgrim]

3e ravenloft’s greatest hits: lady edition

ASK AND YE SHALL RECIEVE 

Natalia Vhorishkova

so we know and love the Weathermay-Foxgrove sisters, 5e actually kept them more or less the same, BUT. what 5e neglected to give much detail on was Natalia, and as soon as i read the dread possibilities in Van Richten’s Arsenal i was obsessed. holy shit! fucknasty sadomasochist werewolf lady, locked in a deadly game of cat and mouse with the hunter she seduced and betrayed and who has now made it his life’s goal to hunt her down?? give me 40k words about her right now immediately.

Perseyus Lathenna

holy shit yall, i didn’t even know about this character until i went looking, but she’s? amazing?? a tiny-ass grandma wizard who got the goodness traumatized out of her, and was then inspired to try again years later and ended up reclaiming that drive to help people? a disabled woman who innovates a new method of spellcasting that doesn’t need somatic gestures? a respected scholar who keeps her identity close to her chest, as a way to bypass the systematic inequality of the cultures she’s working in? holy shit i love her. put her in your game so help me god.

Tara Kolyana

listen i know we all love Ireena but 5e did her so so dirty, and 3e for all its faults gave us Tara. homegirl’s parents saw the writing on the wall and got the fuck out of dodge, and it fucking? worked?? she’s free? mostly. mostly free. the narrative tugs and tugs like an undertow but she’s had time to grow now, time to become a wholeass person outside of Barovia, outside of her destiny, and who knows what she could do now? who knows what kind of power she could have if she went back to Barovia as an adult, a full-fledged cleric with a solid sense of her self and her duty.

Ebb

literally who doesn’t love a fuckmassive shadow dragon. she’s fantastic, she’s goth, her best friend is a wizard, what more can i say? 

Lyssa von Zarovich

light of my life, girlboss of my heart, this list would not be complete without Lyssa. Strahd’s direct grandniece by way of the oft-forgotten middle brother Sturm, her goals are simple; reduce Strahd to a fine ash for the crime of piledriving the family’s history and reputation, and do some actually functional governing in Barovia. and she’s a genius! she not only found out about Strahd’s Big Oopsie entirely independently of anyone else in the know, she then looked at what uncle dearest had done and said “yeah i’ll have what he’s having” and fuckign followed through. and then! discovered a way to speedrun vampire power levels via a ghost booty call! and then invented vampire mindflayers, just bc she hadn’t broken enough records that week. 

she’s an excellent foil for Strahd, an ambitious, intelligent, and politically savvy woman who took the vampirism deal (literally the only other character to do so besides Strahd) with the full knowledge of what it entailed; as a means to an end, not an impulsive sacrifice. most of the material she’s got (and even in older editions there isn’t much) positions her as a middle-strength villain, but honestly i want to see her as a lesser-of-many-evils ally.

[nonsenseofyesteryear]

half-formed thought/headcanon type thing for assassination classroom: kunugigaoka high school does some sort of teacher appreciation thing where students have to write a letter to a teacher who's positively impacted them. but it has to be a teacher who is currently at the school. karma struggles to pick someone. after all, the teacher who he wants to thank the most is gone. so he like, sits and maybe calls up nagisa to complain because he can't figure out which teacher to thank and getting transferred to class 3E was really the best thing to happen to him. and then he has a lightbulb moment! he writes his letter and then hand-delivers it to the homeroom teacher who transferred him to the E class. said teacher Does Not Know How to React.

[fumiko-matsubara]

Sensing vs Intuition: Explaining the stark differences in Chiba and Hayami's sniping methods using MBTI

I'm back at it again with another essay :D

To put it simply, these two cognitive functions basically determine how each person chooses to absorb and process information. And for Chiba and Hayami, out of all the countless differences that they have, this is by far their biggest.

Sensing is when a person heavily relies on their five senses to absorb as much information about their surroundings as they can. They are extremely observant, sensitive, and they tend to have a wide field of vision, noticing details around them that a lot of people tend to miss. They rely on solid facts and prefer to live in the moment, rather than anticipating the unseen future.

Chiba is a strong sensing type. He has superior spatial awareness, which he uses to accurately determine the distance between point A and point B based from what he could see. He uses his sense of touch to determine the direction and strength of the wind blowing, while taking the light weight of the BB pellets into account.

Hence, he was able to easily take out Kataoka during the 3E civil war even though she was hidden from view and was over 300 feet away. This makes his long distance sniping terrifying, as he almost never misses.

Intuition, on the contrary, is when a person see patterns everywhere and uses that to speculate (guess) what was going to happen next. They can easily make instant decisions because they tend to jump into conclusions immediately after connecting bits of information together.

And because they've been doing this for most of their lives that it comes naturally to them, they're pretty good at guessing what was to come, or at least they feel good about making that guess... even if they have a track record of being wrong.

Hayami is an intuitive type. It might not be most suitable for a sniper to perceive information that way, but it's her superior kinetic vision that makes her pattern recognition ability extremely reliable when it comes to hitting moving targets or hitting targets while in an unstable position, at a near perfect timing.

Basically, Hayami's entire thing is:

"It doesn't have to be extremely accurate like Chiba's. As long as I can shoot and hit at any given moment, it's should be good enough."

A little bit to the left, a little up here, around there, and etc. ー unlike Chiba who takes his sweet time making a bunch of detailed calculations in his head so he could accurately shoot, Hayami doesn't think much about these details. She only estimates where she thinks her bullet will hit and just shoots from there. If it hits, then that's that. If it doesn't, she can just find another opportunity to try again.

Like I said, not really a fitting method for a sniper. Her lack of range and accuracy has been pointed out by people. But it's her "shoot and go" method that allows her to move freely in a specific battlefield like the 3E civil war.

And that covers it!

I could honestly talk more about how Chiba and Hayami's Sensing vs Intuition way of absorbing information isn't just exclusive to their contrasting sniping method, but also extends to their daily lives, how they interact with people, and how they face their problems.

To put it simply, Chiba is a realist while Hayami is a visionary. But this one is a topic I could talk about in another time.