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Happy Thursday the 20th

happy Thursday the 20th

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Reblog in lieu of fuck media companies.

Screaming crying because I hate every piracy guide I come across on here.

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Reblog to make this person say flip in a funny voice in their head.

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i'm only a few books in i just get the impression this might be where we're headed

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Europeans watching Americans fix their Healthcare Problem™ using their Gun Violence Problem:

all's well here in the United States

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Give them the forbidden sushi 

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might i request. goldfish poll

Great idea.

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So I've only red one redwall book way back when but the scale is wierd right.

Like it's not an Abby for mice since I remember when the little dude goes up to the attic for the magic sword he can't just take the stairs it's a whole journey

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To go back to your original post, a big part of what made the 5E Ranger prior to the Tasha’s rework a joke is the fact that the Ranger was a class designed to engage with a bunch of rules which were designed to be ignored, and wasn’t really good at doing much outside of that. There are so many ways to trivialize the tracking and survival rules in 5e that it genuinely isn’t even funny.

It's often remarked how D&D 5e's play culture has this sort of disinterest bordering on contempt for actually knowing the rules, often even extending to the DM themselves. I've seen a lot of different ideas for why this is, but one reason I rarely see discussed is that actually, a lot of 5e's rules are not meant to be used.

Encumbrance is a great example of this. 5e contains granular weights for all the items that you might have in your inventory, and rules for how much you can carry based on your strength score, and they've set these carry capacities high enough that you should never actually need to think about them. And that's deliberate, the designers have explicitly said that they've set carrying capacity high enough that it shouldn't come up in normal play. So for a starting DM, you see all these weights, you see all the rules for how much people can carry or drag, and you've played Fallout, you know how this works. And then if you try to actually enforce that, you find that it's insanely tedious, and it basically never actually matters, so you drop it.

Foraging is the example of this that bothers me most. There's a whole system for this! A table of foraging DCs, and math for how much food you can find, and how long you can go without food, etc. But the math is set up so that a person with no survival proficiency and a +0 to WIS, in a hostile environment, will still forage enough food to be fine, and the starvation rules are so generous that even a run of bad luck is unlikely to matter. So a DM who actually tries to use these rules will quickly find that they add nothing but bookkeeping. You're rolling a bunch of checks every day of travel for something that is purpose built not to matter. And that's before you add in all the ways to trivialize or circumvent this.

These rules don't exist to be used, that is not their purpose. These rules exist because the designers were scared of the backlash to 4e, and wanted to make sure that the game had all the rules that D&D "should" have. But they didn't actually want these mechanics. They didn't want the bookkeeping, they didn't care about that style of play, but they couldn't just say, "this game isn't about that" for fear of angering traditionalists. And unfortunately the way they handled this was by putting in rules that are bad, that actively fight anyone who wants to use that style of play and act as a trap to people who take the rules in good faith.

And this means that knowing what rules are not supposed to be used is an actual skill 5e DMs develop. Part of being a good 5e DM is being able to tell the real rules that will improve your game from the fake rules that are there to placate angry forum posters. And that's just an awful position to put DMs in (especially new DMs), but it's pretty unsurprising that it creates a certain contempt for knowing the rules as written.

You should have contempt for some of the rules as written. The designers did.

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A Jacobin, in this time period, is a radical French republican (they were basically the dudes who did the French Revolution), Lawrence is effectively calling Temeraire a liberal (derogatory, from a reactionary monarchist POV).

That’s also why he made the crack in the first book wherein he brought up “taxation without representation.”

Basically whenever Lawrence mentions something politically in reference to Temeraire, it usually has something to do with likening him to the early liberal/radical republican movements of the late 18th or early 19th century.

AHHH I LOVE TEMERAIRE'S THOUGHTS ON PHILOSOPHY AND LIBERTY AND STUFF.

Such an analogy for all the marginalized outcast and feared. Yes dear it is unjust that dragons are only accepted or permitted any rights or liberties when they fall within what is convenient and comfortable for humans

Also I really need to look up what a Jacobin is at this point 😁

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I am begging 5e players to Try A Different System. Anima or BESM or Fabula Ultima or Sword World or whatever. I guarantee that they will do whatever milquetoast generic isekai fantasy anime setting that you conceived over the course of a 36-hour weeb stupor better than 5e can.

No

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Playing Lancer for the first time and starting at LL 1 or 3 (forget which - DM wants us to have access to more mechs) give me propaganda on your favorite big fuckoff robots

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It is very funny to me that George R.R. “What is Aragorn, son of Arathorn’s tax policy” Martin completely floundered the second he had to write a culture that wasn’t an echo of his own (or, more accurately, a mudcore riff on his own) because he refused to do any research.

i think it must be important for writers to read an absolutely shit book every once in a while, that series of blog posts roasting game of thrones gave me a spark of worldbuilding joy long dormant

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Now that’s a green I can get behind!

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HA SHERMAN

Harrison Armory’s Sherman is the second most common frame in Union space for a damn good reason.

Found somewhere halfway between the Tokugawa, the Genghis, the Barbarossa, and the Everest, the Sherman is a mech that a does it all. Whether you want a close-up brawler, a hard-hitting mid-range striker, or a stand-off artillery platform, a Sherman can do it. With a high heat and repair cap, and a large pool of hit points, the Sherman is not a frame that goes down easy. That high heat cap lets it use many of the more powerful weapons available to itself and many other mechs to their maximum efficiency, and its armor means that it can stay in the fire for longer than its competitors.

With the same hardpoint layout as the Everest, when you trade up to the Sherman, you won’t even have to give up your beloved charge blade/assault rifle/HMG combo, but you will want to, anyways. With one of the most overpowered heavy mount weapons, the ANDROMEDA-Pattern Heavy Laser Rifle, a solid pure-damage superheavy, the Tachyon Lance, and a perfectly acceptable burn-causing main mount weapon, the SOL-Pattern Laser Rifle, this laser-slinging monster has the damage output to get the job done, without even looking into another license. And all of that is without factoring in the ZONE-FOCUS MK IV SOLIDCORE, an integrated main mount laser cannon with up to superheavy damage, custom mounted on every instance of the frame.

With the weapons out of the way, it’s vital to acknowledge that the Sherman is a frame that likes to run hot, hit hard, and hit often, that’s why two of the systems, the RSU and Reactor Stabilizer, that come included with the frame are focused on making it easier to stabilize and deal with heat, on top of the always active Nuclear Cavalier trait of Mathur Stop, pushing you right back into the danger zone, so that +1d6 damage never goes away. And once a scene, with the ASURA-class NHP, you get to take an extra turn on your turn, giving you an action surge that will allow you to seriously lay down the hurt on whatever poor sap is in front of you.

All in all, the Sherman is a frame that knows its own strengths, and it knows how to play to them, too. Some things just are superior by design, and the Sherman is one of them.

Playing Lancer for the first time and starting at LL 1 or 3 (forget which - DM wants us to have access to more mechs) give me propaganda on your favorite big fuckoff robots

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It’s a good green, but I think it could be a little more green.