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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Check out Disboard, and search for 5e or avrae (and optionally play by post) to find a discord server to play on.

    There are plenty of small Discord servers that use a bot called Avrae to automate the crunchy mechanics of d&d 5e, with things like char sheets, initiative, monsters and combat, and even maps. Some servers are slow paced, where everyone is expected to act once per ~24 hours, so you get a nice asynchronous game going where you have time to learn your character’s abilities, bot commands, etc, all while typing up your roleplay that matches the mechanics of your turn. That format is great for learning and getting the hang of things in the system, IMO, because you have a ton of time to ask questions in a chat channel to have others help you. Other servers will do sync events, where you sign up for an event with a specific star time, hop into a voice channel, and play with ~5 minute turn timers to really crunch through some combat quickly. This is great once you have the basics of Avrae down (and by extension, the mechanica of 5e).

    That’s usually a “westmarches” format, where the server has a large number of players who queue up for events, but each event can only accommodate a small number of players from the top of the queue. You get grouped with random others this way (contrast that to “campaign” play where you stay with the same players for many consecutive sessions). IMO westmarches really helps get you acclimated to D&D through broad exposure to lots of classes, monsters, mechanics, RP styles, etc. And it works really well for someone who is casual!


  • No need for the entire rehash–feel free to just cherry pick some votes from her track record that her base expected her to vote one way, but she voted another. Since she’s apparently done so again and again and again, that shouldn’t be too hard for you, as you seem to follow her career closely. When politicians do that kind of thing frequently enough to build a reputation, someone usually compiles those instances. A link to such a compilation would also work to sway your detractors.











  • I enjoyed watching Harmonquest, the episodes of which have parts video of the table and parts animated story. It’s a comedy show, for the most part, which genre appeals to me. Past, that, I enjoy a good actual play podcast, sans video, like BomBARDed or NaDDPod, both of which are also comedic stories.

    Just watching a group play a game can indeed be boring. But if that game is just a format for the genre of entertainment you already enjoy, that’s the appeal.



  • In 5e: Simon the Devious and the Leather Skins (from What We Do In The Shadows) as a Dhampir Hexblade Warlock with Pact of the Chain.

    Between the chain familiar (Count Rapula), a zombie from Undying Servitude (Ken the Accountant), Summon Undead (Blagvlad the Exsanguinator, or Desdemona the Shrieker, or Impussa) and an Accursed Specter (Carol), you have a 4-person posse by level 6. It grows situationally or permanently when you gain access to Danse Macabre, Create Undead, and Finger of Death.

    Mechanically, you’re done by 13, and can either finish off with Bard (probably Whispers) or Paladin (Oathbreaker). Either way, take Inspiring Leader once you’ve maxed Cha, and then go get yourself that cursed witch’s hat!




  • Post office too. Really any government office where the public is allowed inside.

    Underpaid workers trying to explain bureaucratic minutiae (for which they are not responsible) every single day to people who are not versed in that minutiae, do not want to learn it, cannot learn it, and are preemptively frustrated that they have to have this interaction in the first place. There is no winning–mental health isn’t cheap, do the workers’ resilience only lasts for so many years/months/days before they default to hating the clients, and the clients don’t trust publicly available instructions, thus dooming themselves to the shitty interactions.

    The only way to fix this is to take both people out of the equation–preprocess everything that might need to happen for everyone, to the point of turning every transaction into a single trasaction. That requires for every city, county, state, national, international agency to federate, so that you never have to file multiple documents to do a thing.


  • FearfulSalad@ttrpg.networktoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy are folks so anti-capitalist?
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    1 year ago

    Capitalism has been touted as superior to the alternatives (Socialism, Communism, etc) b/c it has been claimed to be “self-regulating” and “self-correcting” and “even if we don’t understand why, it fixes itself”–basically the only choice among bad ones that, given our collective small brains, has any chance of sustaining itself and society in the absence of an ability of individuals or government to do so intentionally.

    What it really is is an opportunity to stay anonymous while gaming the system, all the while convincing everyone else that they too can game the system (thereby being gamed). It is not a net benefit to society when taken to extremes.

    Capitalism is great for the consumer in the micro. If there is a coffee shop on your street that sucks, and you start a coffee shop two blocks away to compete with it with your better coffee, you are participating in the version of capitalism that “works as intended.”

    It doesn’t work in the macro. When, instead of continuing to manage your mom & pop business that barely breaks even, you vertically integrate, buy up or otherwise destroy your competition, and then reduce the quality of your product to bare minimums in favor of profits and shareholder value and growth, you take capitalism to an extreme that makes everyone else (the consumers, the workers, the would-be-competitors) have a worse quality of life.

    People prefer better quality of life. Capitalism in the modern age is so far in that macro extreme that it no longer makes people’s lives better. East Palestine train derailment as an example… why would they prioritize safety over cost cutting? Bam, a town is cancerous. It’s not unreasonable for people to point at a corruptible system and blame it for the corruption that exists.

    Problem is, people are corruptible, so whatever alternative we think is better, someone will come along and ruin it for personal gain.



  • RE Battlemaps: strongly opposed to allowing them. Lemmy.world already has a battlemaps community. Ttrpg.network is welcome to make such a community too, I suppose. That content works for many more ttrpgs than dnd, so putting it in its own space makes more sense than allowing it in here.

    RE artwork, if someone wants to post a hand-drawn scene of their group’s epic win/loss against the bbeg, that’s cool. I think we like seeing dnd success stories from folks, and a picture can be worth a thousand words. But, if that person is open for commissions, I would strongly prefer not to know about it.

    IMO advertising needs to be segregated to opt-in communities kept exclusively for that purpose, much like LFG posts get their own space to mot pollute the general discussion.

    (Similarly, links out to other sites that have comment sections, like youtube, should IMO be required to have actual supporting text content worthy of discussion, as without it they are just more advertising. That’s outside the scope of the original discussion tho.)

    Edit: RE homebrew–IMO it too should be sequestered, as it represents a divergence from everyone else’s frame of reference.