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It did indeed, oh god it's coming back to me.

Sir John Franklin

Educate this creature as to the dominion of the empire

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A sign of good lore writing...

Is when the fanbase gets so invested in the fictional conflicts that you can no longer tell if they're being ironic about their positions or not.

How many Disco Elysium fans are actually communists?

Not me, but the revolutionaries still didn't commit enough war crimes.

And how many Elder Scrolls fans are actually racist?

Not me, but send all the elves, cats and lizards back to where they came from, Skyrim belongs to the Nords!

#the elder scrolls #morrowind #disco elysium #ulfric stormcloak did nothing wrong #skyrim #I wanted to use dunmer supremacy for the last punchline but I never actually played Morrowind and don't want to be a fake fan #But really though - nord racism doesn't hold a candle to dunmer racism

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The Ecology of Owlbears

The concept of 'monster ecology' when thinking about your RPG setting is quite common, I think. Much supplementary material written for Dungeons and Dragons over the years was on this topic - see AJ Pickett's vast library of monster lore videos where he helpfully brings the contents of these old magazines to the current generation of players.

However, a thing I've noticed is lacking in these writings - and I do not fault the writers for this necessarily - is that they don't include much thought as to how a particular monster interacts specifically with other creatures in its domain, and how populations of these monsters might engineer the ecosystem.

I imagine that this subject is under-explored, partially because not everyone is an ecology nerd, and partially because exactly how a monster interacts with and affects its environment depends on what that environment is, and what else lives in it. Unless you're reading setting-specific lore, this is probably left up in the air on purpose for the DM and players to fill in the blanks.

How HARD your setting is, in terms of truly considering the implications of what you put in it, also has an effect. I've realised that, for all the deep lore and violent themes, D&D (especially modern D&D) truly lends itself mostly to what I'd call 'cartoon fantasy', where we go off primarily vibes, bright colours, and whatever sounds cool. Despite this, I will continue to endeavour to create a hard setting, with as few worldbuilding plot holes as possible.

In particular, I've been thinking mainly about the iconic owlbear to exemplify thinking about monster ecology. The 5e Monster Manual actually does a decent job of describing a plausible way this creature lives, being a strictly nocturnal hypercarnivore of forested regions. The idea that it announces its presence to all the prey in the area to flush it into ideal hunting spots is... less plausible. I mean, you'd expect things to get on high alert and start quickly increasing their distance from you if you start screeching at them, unless you can throw your voice somehow.

But what I particularly like about this description is that it gives the owlbear a unique niche that is clearly different from a regular bear. With the head of an owl, we would expect the owlbear to be a hypercarnivore rather than a generalist forager, and we would expect it to take advantage of its keen sight and hearing to hunt prey in the cover of night. This lifestyle is more similar to that of big cats, which we tend not to associate that much to the temperate forests we usually associate owlbears with (lynx, pumas and Siberian tigers notwithstanding). Bears and owlbears thus live without competition.

This said, we run into a bit of a conflict. We expect the owlbear to survive as a sneaky predator of the night, but we also expect it to be an aggressive, monstrous bruiser that has a vendetta against everything and everyone it sees - that's why it's a big scary monster and not an animal. This is the fantasy of the owlbear, a big, scary predator that can kill anything, but its physiology just doesn't lend itself to successful hunting. Nature does not award extra points for being scary and angry.

Bears are not built for stealth or agility, even though they can run fast in a straight line. Reflected by this, the owlbear lacks stealth proficiency, and we'd thus expect it to fuck up a lot of its hunts. This is made worse by the assumedly high caloric needs of such a bulky predator, usually depicted as significantly larger than a brown bear. Given a few million years of evolution, we should expect owlbears to be a lot sleeker, lighter and cat-like rather than bear-like.

Obviously, the owlbear is not an evolved creature per se - the two possible origin stories put it as coming from the Feywild (a realm where style over substance can actually work) or being the result of arcane hybridisation experiments. Still, if we expect owlbears to be able to breed and establish populations, we should also expect natural selection and competition to act on them.

I thus suggest a little tweak to owlbears. They could stay large, but be more lightly built than usually depicted. They should have stealth proficiency, and be silent predators of the night, like owls. Perhaps their feathers even help dampen the sounds they make as they move through the woods? They may compete with other nocturnal large predators, if sharing their woods with big cats for example, but with their powerful builds, they always win fights against other predators and can steal their kills. Perhaps like bears, they also catch fish when they can, giving them a backup or supplementary food source.

Their reputation for aggression comes down to feeling vulnerable during the day when they should be sleeping, and lashing out furiously to neutralise threats. Being so heavily armed and requiring large solitary territories to get enough food, they likely resolve any conflict with deadly violence, except maybe against other owlbears.

In the end, we've ended up with something combining the niches of big cats, and the extinct short-faced bears which are thought to have specialised in winning confrontations against other predators to claim their kills.

In terms of how owlbears affect their environment, their reliance on sound and sight means animals must take extra care to be quiet and hidden while sleeping, or foraging at night, to not draw attention to themselves. Their typical prey may also take pains to avoid locations where they can be ambushed easily - a landscape of fear. Other large predators would take pains to avoid owlbears, which might target them for food or steal their kills, though maybe mesopredators like foxes would follow them in hopes of getting some of the carrion that the owlbear generates.

Local people, like humans and elves, would avoid going out in the woods at night. Elves, who don't need to sleep and are still active at night, would busy themselves with home tasks, and only the most wary and skilled would try going out to forage. Camping in owlbear territory would be a big no-no unless you can find somewhere where you can't be easily ambushed, and an armed sentry was up at all times. If travelling through owlbear territory, it may be worth pushing through the night, quietly if you can, to get out of there as quickly as possible. Sturdy shelters might be set up at intervals along the roads, specifically to keep people and their horses safe from owlbears. And it goes without saying that a dead owlbear would make an incredible trophy for a hunter.

#dungeons and dragons #Local nerd discovers that fantasy doesn't work like real life - tries to make it work anyway #nature doesn't give extra points for being scary #monsters need niches

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What is a soul, really?

Historically, we've had a habit of making stuff up to explain things we couldn't explain. The soul is a great way of explaining all that nebulous software that seems to go on in our nervous systems - memory, personality, et cetera. But now we understand that life is really just a fantastically complicated network of chemical reactions and electrical impulses. Where does this leave the concept of the soul, especially in fantasy fiction?

In fantasy fiction, the existence of a soul is often taken for granted, usually with little thought as to what the soul actually is. In D&D, souls are baked into the system, being the explanation for how you can resurrect people, and have a major place in the lore of various monsters, deities, fiends and magic items, and the cosmology as a whole.

However, with my background as a biology nerd, I am painfully aware that there is no mystical force keeping our brains ticking over, so I find the existence of souls and the assumptions that come with them a little annoying from a worldbuilding perspective. Perhaps it's time to reconsider what a soul actually is?

In an old worldbuilding project from when I was a teenager, before I got into D&D but still while I was a fan of fantasy video games, I set out to reimagine the soul. I conceptualised it as a kind of ethereal symbiotic organism that migrated to the world long ago from another world, at the same time that magic entered it (basically the Conjunction of the Spheres from The Witcher).

Souls attach themselves to living organisms for an unknown purpose, and people then learned to command their souls to produce magical effects. The protagonist of the terrible book I wrote in this world had an unusual soul, which could not be commanded conventionally, so it was assumed he had no soul at all - a common condition among the peasantry. Nay, instead it got riled up when it wanted to, and gave him superpowers under extreme danger and stress, because I didn't know how to actually write him as a competent combatant.

When it comes to my current world and D&D setting, Great Rock, I similarly wanted to redo souls, so they could broadly work with some of the important game mechanics like resurrection, but carry on with some of the design philosophy I had set up with the previous world.

Here I present the souls of Great Rock, as an emergent property of the chemical thrumming of life itself, mostly inspired by popular misunderstandings of what 'brain waves' are. As your body goes about living, it generates a force that interacts with the Weave and creates a full-body suit of magic that follows you in the ethereal plane. This soul contains a copy of your body's information - memories, personality, even muscle memory.

The soul can be severed from the body, but this doesn't actually affect your ability to live. You just go on living, and over time generate a new one. However, death itself is the most common way for a soul to sever from the body. Loose souls float in the ethereal 'cloud', dissipate over time, so there's a time limit on resurrection spells, and the longer you wait before being resurrected, the more memory and skill you lose upon regaining life.

I realised that with this setup, there may be anxiety over whether resurrection actually brings you back, or just makes a copy of you with your memories. This would make resurrection way more existentially terrifying than I really want it to be, so I decided your consciousness would indeed carry over. This has been proven in-world by the work of divination wizards who simulated the sensations of dying and being brought back to life, so they could observe the process in foresight rather than hindsight, and they did find the stream of thoughts that dies is the same one that get resurrected, much to everyone's relief.

Of course, this setup causes other worldbuilding assumptions to break down - do devils really want your soul anymore if it's not literally you? Maybe we can do away a little with the 'deal for your soul' trope anyway?

Another elephant in the room is what happens after death? In most D&D worlds, your soul goes to join your patron god or whatever plane corresponds with your alignment. Frankly, I think a world in which hell is proven to exist would be a world where people would be much more hesitant to be evil at all. And to bring in some of my personal real-life philosophy, I think the idea of an eternal afterlife makes this mortal life quite meaningless in comparison.

So, when you die in Great Rock, you just die. You're gone. Your consciousness abandons ship and sleeps in the soul, which is floating around somewhere in the ether waiting to decompose, or be forcibly re-implanted into your body as a resurrection spell heals that damage that killed you and jump-starts your vital processes. I have other plans for the cosmology and the outer planes anyway.

#I posted this at 1:00AM and must go to sleep #This is probably incoherent and full of holes #This might have been a mistake as I'm bending over backwards to make fantasy nonsense make sense #Which I increasingly realise is usually a waste of time

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American Extraplanars

CW: A European slagging off America

I've been thinking about accents. They're a great way to convey cultural differences across different parts of my world, and I draw from real world accents to signify the cultural background of characters when I'm playing and DMing.

In my world, most of the countries thus far established are heavily based on real ones. Graddeland is England, and Rama is France, Ralskyov is Russia, Hjelvord is Sweden, et cetera. But I ran into a slight problem of what to do with the USA.

See, a North America analogue exists in my world, but it's inhabited primarily by the Crelkowaa, analagous to the (diverse, continent-spanning cultures) of Native Americans. My 'Europeans' haven't invaded and made them a minority, for reasons I'm still working on, but the idea of Native American analogues being major players in my world is something I'm really keen on.

Of course, giving the Crelkowaa American accents would be immensely disrespectful to their real inspirations. But American accents also represent a wealth of opportunity and personality. Then it hit me - why not give American accents to fiends, or celestials, or both?

Especially with celestials, since in my world I like to think of celestials as ill-informed arrogant busybodies that like to police the world according to whatever god is commanding them, and may see themselves as its saviours, but they often make things worse with collateral damage or unintended consequences (or for some gods, entirely intended and selfish consequences), and most mortals would really rather they fucked off. A cheeky thematic link between 'divine intervention' and American foreign policy? That would be fun!

It could work well with fiends too. I especially like the idea of portraying devils like overly friendly east-coast fast-talking salesmen, trying to convince you that whatever they're offering is worth your soul. Think Alastor from Hazbin Hotel.

I also recognise that the American accent is derivative of what the English accent was at the time America was being colonised, but I absolutely refuse to ruin the analogue of my own country by making them talk like Americans!

Besides, I think most of the pressure I felt to give Americans somewhere to be in my world really just comes from the overwhelming dominance of American media and their superpowered role in the current geopolitical ecosystem. In the grand scheme of things, the USA is still a very young country, established by a genocidal invasion from another continent, with very little cultural identity of its own, and certainly none that's very old. I don't think it provides much to inspire fantasy worldbuilding, at least by my own methods and vision.

The continent of North America, though? Incredible landscapes! iconic wildlife! And from a European perspective, riddled with mystery and discovery. This combined with native cultures creates a gold mine of inspiration for monsters and magic. Paradoxically, while the USA doesn't make for particularly good fantasy, the continent of North America does, and its potential is largely wasted.

#Not to imply that Britain hasn't also made horrendous foreign policy decisions and making them token bad guys isn't 100% reasonable #But the difference is England is a REAL country #Not a country where half the population insists they're Irish #or German #or Italian #Or indeed English

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How big are kenku?

I think this could be considered a Mandela effect.

So, how big do you think kenku are? Small? About 3-4ft tall?

Well, this has arguably been retconned now, but in their original 5e iteration in Volo's Guide, and in their entry in the Monster Manual, they are medium sized. Volo's guide suggests their height to be about 5ft tall. Looking back, if the Forgotten Realms wiki is a reliable source, they have always been 5ft tall medium creatures since their inception in Monster Manual III for 3rd/3.5 edition.

Despite this, I see the community, and other players I know, consistently thinking of them as a small race. I believe the culprit is the way they are drawn. In all official artwork that I have seen, kenku have proportionally very large heads, short legs and big feet. The tendency of artsy players to 'cutefy' their characters when they draw them and post their works to the internet has further exagerrated this, with many artworks giving their kenku rounder bodies and thinner, more birdlike legs. There is nothing wrong with this! But I think the discussion of how big kenku actually are in your setting is worth discussing.

Knowing this, I once played a heavily-armoured kenku paladin named Norbus who I had to remind people was actually about short human-sized, not halfling-sized. Yet, these days I struggle to imagine him that tall. The proportions just seem so wrong.

The devs must have noticed - in Monsters of the Multiverse, they reprinted kenku can be small or medium at the player's choice.

I think for my setting I will make them explicitly a small race, about 4ft tall on average. This does make Norbus decidedly less intimidating and more comedic if I decide he exists in my world, but he was always a one-shot gimmick character anyway.

#kenku #dnd kenku #also they are never presented as anything other than rogues or wizards... #Kenku are full of other questions like how exactly their mimicry stuff works and how perfect their memories are. #Probably don't play them as written in Volo's cuz that will get annoying very quickly. I turn kenku on their head in my world. #Emphasise their creativity and improv skills as crow-men. Be constantly scheming to get more shiny things. #Corvidmaxxing

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Mental Outsourcing for DMs

Let the players help you!

DMs have to keep track of a LOT of stuff, especially in combat, especially when the fight involves multiple types of monsters, allied NPCs in the party, and the PCs of absent players. On top of this, any interesting combat will be more than damage numbers - it will involve spells, status conditions, terrain, et cetera. And you need to be switched-on for every turn, every round until the fight is resolved, improvising, strategising and flexing your rules muscles.

Meanwhile, the only thing a player typically has to keep track of is their own resources, and they often don't have to engage with the fight until it's their turn.

After running a game today that involved combat with multiple allied NPCs with their own sets of abilities, and feeling the mental strain of a complex combat that took forever just to get through the first round, it became obvious that I was struggling to keep things going smoothly.

A player of mine suggested after the session that I could have handed the NPCs to some of the players, so they would be the ones having to keep track of them, not me. This discussion then expanded into the issue of players controlling the characters of other players.

DMs often have different methods for dealing with the absence of one or more players. You could just find an excuse for them to not be in the party for the time being - Critical Role is known for doing this, and it's a good solution for player absences that are expected to last several sessions. However, you can't always really justify a PC leaving the group, leading to another tactic, to just keep the PC in physically but reduce their presence roleplay-wise, and control them in combat - good DMs often have access to their PC's character sheets anyway.

This second method comes with its own problems. If the PC is present for a major story beat involving them and their backstory, the player won't be there to roleplay it out and make their own decisions, making this a poor method depending on where you are in the campaign's story. Also, any character involved in combat is at risk of dying, and no player wants to find out that their character died while they weren't at the table.

This can be mitigated. Firstly, if a player can't be there for a session they really need to be in, I cancel the game and find something else to do with the group, like a one-shot with different characters (good if you know about the absence well in advance), playing another game (especially a rules-light RPG with little prep) or just watching a movie or having a chat (I'm still promising my group we will watch Dungeons and Dragons 2000, the shitty one with Jeremy Irons.)

Mitigating the second problem comes mainly from an agreement among that group that anyone handling another player's character do so responsibly and respectfully and will be very careful to keep that character alive, even if that means the PC starts making out-of-character decisions. The DM can also give that character plot armour by having enemies attack them less often, or letting them survive situations that would normally require passing some hard checks. (Example, the party just barely escape an old mine full of monsters, but the barbarian got left behind in the chaos. As the rest of the party starts lamenting his loss, he staggers out of the entrance, having somehow survived, covered in the blood of himself and his enemies, and collapses unconscious.)

Of course, I was already doing this when I was controlling absent players' characters as the DM. All I need to do is give another player access to that character sheet, and let them play it out. In combat, that player now gets to control two characters on different initiatives, allowing them to get a taste of something different while also getting to engage even more than usual in the game.

I'm going to try establishing a common repository for character sheets in my group, which would get updated at least for each level-up that occurs. If a player has to skip a session, I can then just ask them for their status in terms of resources (HP, spell slots, etc.) to quickly remake their character sheet and hand it to whoever else is willing to use it.

#Writing this at midnight so probably not well structured or written #This post is actually about how to deal with absent players lol #Seriously do something with the group still if you cancel the session. People put time aside for this!

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Players: Stop giving us your toughest situations.

DM: You are my strongest guys.

a DMs whole job is to put some guys in a situation

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The soyjak cleric of Lehronne vs the chad cleric of Equavus.

You were either there for this session, or you weren't.

I made this in MS Paint.

#The politics of gods and mortals feed into each other #The dude on the right is basically Victor Saltzpyre from Warhammer Vermintide. I'll draw him properly later. #HERESY

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A practical method for resolving surprise in 5e

Surprise too complicated? Use a spreadsheet!

Surprise is one of the most commonly misunderstood concepts in 5e. There is no 'surprise round' if one side gets the jump on the other, although it can turn out to appear that way. No, surprise is best thought of as a CONDITION, that applies to individual players or monsters on the battlefield. If you are surprised, you skip your first turn in combat, then you are no longer surprised and can make reactions for the rest of the first round. Simple as.

What isn't 'simple as' is resolving who is and is not surprised, an especially unattractive task given that combat has just started, and you want to jump into the action before everyone gets bored. Just resolving initiative is bad enough!

The problem of initiative killing the mood is what prompted me to find a system to resolve it as quickly and painlessly as possible, and while thinking about the rules earlier today, I realised I could apply similar principles to surprise.

Every session that I DM, I keep a spreadsheet (Google Sheets, Excel, whatever) on my laptop. Here, I can easily keep track of the initiative order. In one column, I list the numbers 25 to 1, going downwards. Next to this, I list the actors on the battlefield. I ask my players to roll initiative, but not to call it out until I ask for it. Meanwhile, I roll the initiative of the monsters and place them as appropriate on the list. Then I ask each player for initiative, one at a time. I can then use subsequent columns to keep track of how many rounds have passed, and who has taken their turn.

When it comes to surprise, I have a similar setup. On a central column, I list 25-1. To the left of that, the 'seekers', who are not actively seeking, but that is what I will call them as the English language seems to lack a word for 'someone who is being snuck up on'. (Stalkee?) There is also a column next to the seekers to indicate who is and isn't surprised, though this info could be inputted into the initiative tracker instead by crossing off their turn.

To the right of the number column, I place the results of the stealth checks by the sneakers. I will demonstrate with a group of 8 monsters attempting to ambush the party with a group stealth check. The monsters will have a +0 stealth modifier for simplicity.

Carnyx the tiefling bard, Nadani the triton warlock and Sigbritt the elf wizard are not surprised, as 4 monsters beat their PP, but 4 monsters also failed it. I'm not sure what the official ruling is on a 50/50, but I'll rule that the number of successful sneakers must exceed the unsuccessful ones to surprise the seeker. Skarthi the tiefling ranger is also not surprised (don't ask me why a ranger only has +1 perception. My data may be outdated.)

Gastblod the orc barbarian has a PP of 10, and one of the monsters rolled a 10. Meets it beats it, so 5 out of the 8 monsters beat his PP and he is thus surprised. The same is true for Vanessa the human paladin, who would also have suffered -5 to her PP if this was in dim light or darkness (darkness causes you to fail any perception check relying on sight due to imposing the blinded condition, but detecting sneakers has as much to do with hearing as sight, so I'd simply impose the disadvantage).

Now, the monsters strike! Roll initiative, and anyone who is surprised skips their first turn. But what if the players are getting the jump on the monsters? Same procedure. I'll simply add the monsters to my current setup, with the PCs as permanent fixtures I can ignore for this time. Off the top of my head, I'll use an ogre, a mind flayer, and an adult red dragon. What these three are doing in the same room I don't know. I also checked their PP scores to calm any pedants.

This party is not suited for stealth, with Skarthi as the only high-dexterity character and Vanessa having disadvantage on her stealth check due to her heavy armour. The adult red dragon has an incredible PP of 23, so of course she is not surprised. Neither is the mind flayer. The ogre on the other hand was beaten 4 times out of 6, so spends his first turn finishing picking his nose before picking up his club.

Never mind, ogre. This party is only level 5. The dragon doesn't need your help. The mind flayer realises this and just spends its first turn levitating away to watch the carnage, asking the dragon to at least keep one brain intact.

#dungeons and dragons #dungeon master #Sorry Carnyx I killed you AGAIN #Take the Alert feat if you hate this #I hope I made no grievous rules errors but the PHB is very unhelpful with anything stealth related

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Alicia J. Kutchaw

Forest Salmon Run

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False Positives in Perception Checks

The players won't know what they're missing!

When designing a dungeon earlier this week I had an idea inspired by the 'failing forward' technique that Matt Colville talks about in the linked video (though he prefers not to call it that). Certain elements of the dungeon required a successful perception check, but I realised that if I call for a perception check and the PC fails, this creates two problems

a) Skill dogpiling. The other players will notice that the first player missed something, and will start looking for it themselves.

b) The player in question now knows they missed something, potentially something important, leading to frustration and paranoia. This creates a dissonance from the game world, where the PC doesn't know that they missed anything.

I came up with a solution: Provide a different description of the thing if the perception check is failed. This is also inspired by Disco Elysium, where failing a check sometimes leads to one of the skills making an incorrect conclusion or changing the dialogue options in the next stage in a conversation. The information you provide on a failed check may be still helpful but less important, it may be innocuous or it could be something wrong and harmful. This can give the player the impression that they actually passed the check, and they and the rest of the players won't get suspicious.

The only problem with this approach is that it doesn't work if the player rolled so low that they know there's no way they passed the check. In this case they'll know I'm not giving the full story, but at least getting something out of the check is more interesting than saying 'you don't notice anything important'.

As an additional note, skill dogpiling in perception can also be avoided by calling for a group perception check when multiple characters are in the presence of the subject of the check.

For example, my dungeon had a hidden back door in that would allow the PCs to skip the first combat encounter and reach the boss quicker. However, the back door was so well covered by foliage that it required a DC 18 perception check to find. When the party was checking out the perimeter of the building, I called for a group perception check as they reached the back wall. They failed, so I instead pointed out the bird droppings on the leaves of the bushes, drawing their eyes up to a bird's nest on top of the building, which they would later investigate to find a helpful magic item for defeating the boss with. The players were none the wiser, only realising they missed something when they found the back door from the inside of the building.

#dungeons and dragons #dungeon master #VOLITION (impossible): Don't bring up Disco Elysium - FAILED. #I could make a whole other post about what Disco Elyisum teaches us about DMing and adventure design. #Don't constantly roll checks for your players or tell them what to think though #Youtube

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What's the deal with wisdom?

5e's Wisdom is a mechanical and narrative mess

Wisdom has always been one of D&D 5e's most confusing concepts for new players, and for many of us, that confusion never really goes away, even if we know technically what it does.

Some people say that 'intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing it doesn't belong in a fruit salad'. I completely disagree. That is also intelligence. It's just a different kind of knowledge. Bob World Builder (video linked below) has this sentiment and it helped me think further about what wisdom really is.

Truth is, back in the Original Dungeons and Dragons by Gygax and Arneson (and you can find this book online to check), on page 10, it says 'wisdom rating will act much as that for intelligence'. What does this mean? Wisdom and intelligence originally had no distinction, other than being for clerics or wizards!

Fast-forward to 5e, now wisdom is distinct from intelligence, with its own set of skills, and is used to represent one's intuition and awareness of the world around them. This is a good thing - especially for classes like monk and ranger, having a way to measure your 'instinct' mechanically supports part of the core fantasy. However, if this stat was made fresh, without being tied to historical wisdom, would it still be called wisdom? I would call it something like 'instinct' or 'wiles'.

Despite the shift, high-wisdom characters are still generally thought of as 'wise', whatever that means. The 5e PHB, page 13, suggests that Bruenor (the example used to teach new players how to build a character) should have high wisdom to reflect his age and experience, so it seems we still haven't entirely escaped the classical concept of wisdom.

This also leads me to wonder why wisdom should even apply to clerics anymore. The PHB makes a decent attempt of this: 'the ability to cast cleric spells relies on devotion and an intuitive sense of a deity's wishes' (page 56). Now, 'devotion' sounds like charisma to me, but that's a topic for another time. The idea that an instinctive awareness of your god is needed to be a good cleric sits fine with me. It's vague and abstract, but most things are when dealing with gods and magic - two things that (in my secular, scientific opinion) don't have a frame of reference in reality.

Let us consider other wisdom-based classes while we're at it. Druids were originally a type of cleric in older editions but have since become their own class. Wisdom thus has a legacy reason to apply to them, though the new concept of wisdom does work well with a mage who draws their power from the primal forces that surround them. Same thing for rangers, who also benefit mechanically from wisdom as part of many key skills like survival and animal handling (though we'll come back to skills in a moment). Monks also benefit from wisdom as hyper awareness of their inner selves and their surroundings is part of their core fantasy, and seems to be the source of their ki powers.

I will next consider wisdom-based skills. Firstly it's important to note that the PHB does say that skills can be applied to other ability scores than the one they are typically assigned to, depending on how the character goes about using that skill. This is good to know, because most wisdom skills could easily be intelligence skills.

Animal handling may have an instinctive component - some people are just better with animals than others. But you can also learn how to approach and handle an animal properly from taught guidance - which movements and sounds to make or avoid, angle of approach, etc. Mechanically, it makes sense in wisdom because it's a skill you expect wisdom-based characters to have - druids and the like. But there's definitely a place for anyone to have it, like a knight or travelling bard who regularly interacts with horses.

Insight - your ability to read people - is an interesting one from an autistic perspective. While it seems that neurotypical people have an instinct for nonverbal social cues, many people like me had to learn it actively, often painfully, having never been explicitly taught it. I'd say I have decent insight these days, but definitely through intelligence, not 'wisdom'.

I can see why medicine is wisdom. Partially because most support classes are wisdom based, and because you could rationalise having a 'feel' for what the problem is when diagnosing an injury or disease, but I'd much rather my doctor diagnosed and treated me through learned expertise than just feeling it out like a medieval doctor who made it up as they went along, attached leeches to me and prayed to god I'd feel better.

Survival is a very broad skill, especially in my campaign style where trekking through the wilderness is a regular activity. It covers everything from avoiding natural hazards, tracking, predicting the weather, navigating without getting lost, etc. Some of this is well covered by wisdom - spatial awareness and listening to your instinct is important for survival. But more technical components like identifying signs of a particular beast or navigating by the stars are learned and studied skills, implying intelligence.

Perception, uniquely, I think is the only skill that perfectly fits into the modern D&D concept of wisdom. It plays on your attentiveness to surroundings, pattern recognition, gut feelings that something is off or out of sight.

At the end of it all, my main question is this: why still call it wisdom? It's not wisdom in the conventional everyday sense of the word. Perhaps renaming it to something else would prevent the inevitable intelligence-wisdom confusion that every new player faces, but at this point wisdom is such a fundamental and iconic part of D&D that I don't see this change being made any time soon.

Oh, I haven't gotten into wisdom saving throws, but that's a whole other can of worms I won't get into with this post. Still, if I make a post about saving throws, the sentiments I made in this post will carry over.

#dungeons and dragons #the quest to make D&D5e make sense continues #I'm getting dangerously close to committing Pathfinder #Youtube

[dicesmasher]

5e: Thoughts on the Yo-Yoing Problem

Yo-yoing: Bouncing up and down from 0HP

The D&D YouTuber Pack Tactics recently released a very interesting video about yo-yoing, the the ineffectiveness of a common homebrew rule to remedy it. It got me thinking about how I can approach the problem differently.

Yo-yoing is when a PC has been brought to 0HP in combat, is brought back on their feet by a healer feeding them very little healing, usually with something like Healing Word (1d4+spellmod) and immediately gets knocked down again on the monster's next turn, potentially leading to a cycle of going up and down like a yo-yo. This is problematic for two main reasons. a) It is not fun for anyone involved and b) it quickly breaks immersion when you try to in-universe rationalise how someone can be repeatedly brought within an inch of their life and it creates what amounts to an inconvience. There are no real consequences for dropping to zero (unless you use the optional injury rules in the DMG, which nobody does cause they suck).

A common homebrew fix for this problem is to introduce more consequences for dropping to 0HP, incentivising the players to avoid doing so in the first place. Pack Tactics focuses on the idea of adding levels of exhaustion when you go down, though they focus specifically on the vanilla 5e exhaustion mechanics, while I would rather use the new exhaustion system where there are 10 levels of exhaustion, each applying a cumulative -1 to all your d20 rolls.

Regardless, Pack Tactics points out that this doesn't really address the problem because some characters are going to drop to 0HP anyway, especially obligate melee fighters like paladins and barbarians. Implementing more consequences for dropping to 0HP may help to fix immersion, but it does not stop yo-yoing or make fights any more fun, especially for the melee fighters who rely on their d20 rolls to be effective, while the casters can broadly ignore exhaustion by forcing enemies to make saving throws instead.

Pack Tactics suggests that preventing yo-yoing may actually lie in buffing healing to keep up with damaging effects in battle, also citing potential upcoming changes to 5.5e, where many healing spells are doing up to twice the healing that they did in original 5e.

It's worth noting that I think the optimiser's perspective that Pack Tactics provides to RPG discourse is extremely valuable, but I often disagree with their conclusions as I do not approach the game from an optimising standpoint, and am less concerned with optimisation and more with immersion and fun through roleplaying and storytelling.

I'm personally skeptical of making healing more powerful, seeing the massive worldbuilding implications it already has - I think another way to potentially address yo-yoing is to flip around, and make encounters EASIER. Now, I know 5e is already known for being much more forgiving than other editions, but if easier encounters were combined with harsh consequences for dropping to 0HP, this would make dropping to 0HP more rare, but more scary and dramatic when it does happen. Monsters should be more willing to hit downed PCs and force them to fail death saves. Some animalistic monsters may attempt to drag away and eat unconscious PCs.

Besides, combat should be more than two sides trying to pile damage on each other. Combat provides opportunities for roleplaying, story beats, creativity and acquisition of material and informational resources. I think easier combats may open up opportunities as the players are no longer concerned with optimising their character builds.

I will discuss more ideas around homebrew dying mechanics in another post, but I must leave for now. Thanks for reading.

#dungeons and dragons #dnd homebrew #Youtube

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Entering tumblr

"Eleanor, what is this place?"

"This is tumblr, Misty. You'll fit right in."

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