Recent content by humble minion

I’ve had … mixed experiences. I hosted a couple of sessions a while back for a new group assembled off a Facebook ‘looking for group’ post in my area. I’m a bit off the grid so players had to connect to my wi-fi for access to dndbeyond etc. Which was fine. Fast forward to the next day, and...

AI generated stuff is a no second chances dealbreaker for me. I’ve seen a lot of crowdfunding campaigns that use autogenerated illustration, but this is the first I’ve seen that uses generated TEXT too, which strikes me as a bit of a nadir.

Ooh, looks interesting, are we finally going to get a serious 5e treatment of feudal Japan? <checks campaign page> AI writing and art. Barf.

I’m not going to be able to look at this for a day or so, but I’m honestly surprised and very happy that they’re trying.

The economics of minis from heroforge etc, or even the time efficiency of painting, kinda depends on purpose of course. The PCs in my game are mostly represented by custom-painted minis, carefully chosen by the players. But as a DM, sometimes you just need a bunch of monsters to chuck on the...

Sigh. My copy has been sitting around in Australian customs, and now at a fulfilment centre, for literal months now.

This is what I do. Old tv laid flat on the table displaying the map as image, miniatures on the map. It works ok, means I don’t have to mess around with vtt tools when running a tabletop game. It gets awkward when the maps get big though, or when you want to have fog of war or to progressively...

Yeah, in my current largely-PHB standard Dragonlance game I mostly use History for this sort of thing, occasionally asking for Investigation checks instead when asking about hidden stuff or specific individuals (a bit like the old 3e Gather Information skill). Plus I usually allow background as...

This is a gap I’ve noticed in my embryonic setting project set in roughly this time period/tech level. Commerce, law, politics, that sort of thing. Probably one skill can safely cover them all, we don’t want to bloat the skill list too much. You could do it with a background, of course, that’s a...

I wouldn’t be getting PoDs of the old box sets, agreed. The maps etc just don’t work - but how much do you need maps of the infinite planes anyway? I’d be sticking with the pdf versions of those. The maps etc are still a mess, but it’s the source material from the books that you want.

My main reservation about the new WotC Planescape set is that it just doesn't do the planes very well. Which is a strange thing to say about a Planescape product, admittedly. But it really depends what you want out of your Planescape game. WotC 5e planescape is an excellent Sigil resource...

You could do it. A class that's all about muddling though and getting by, with no special talents but the touch of fate and Being A Designated Main Character. But a class based around luck and destiny and Just Not Dying, perhaps the halfling's Luck ability, a bunch of re-rolls, the persuasion...

I’ve played a roll20 game but we found the voice feature to be basically nonfunctional. Continual dropouts, and absolute refusal to work for all players at once. We ended up switching it off and running the game on roll20 but the voice over a Facebook messenger call.

Agreed. I know I’m a broken record on this, but WotC needs to bite the bullet and write up a class that is primarily about the pet, with thematics/details customisable in the same way that the pact/patron/invocation choices let you customise a warlock. Tacking a pet on to a pre-existing class...

I suspect this might be a bigger deal for a lot of people who were deeply involved in the hobby at the time. Back then, Gygax’s name was in everything, he’d stick his oar in on debates in Dragon. He’d created the whole hobby, he was the face of the hobby and it gave him a level of aura. I was 8...