Ahdok @ ahdok @ttrpg.network

I make comics sometimes: https://linktr.ee/ahdok

---

Read more

Posts

125

Comments

851

Joined

2 yr. ago

This was the most "androgynous" looking goblin I had...

Konsi's first two years of life were as a goblin in a goblin clan, so would have eaten the same as the rest of them, after that, the next four or so years of her life were as a street urchin in Waterdeep. She ate a lot of scavenged food from trash cans and rats.

She's definitely eaten beetles.

This is all fine. I'm not arguing that this is a problem for ONLY DnD... It's just that was the subject at hand, and it's a problem with DnD.

I’d say the bigger issue tends to be around certain players feeling creative or desperate and trying to lean into the plot/setting with less respect for the rules.

This is an interesting point, but I would not say that the problem is with "certain players."

DnD is heavily marketed and promoted as THE ttrpg. The default. The one for everyone. WotC talk about the game as being designed for an extremely broad pool of players, of many different styles. Players who want a more narrative experience, with less of a focus on rules are also a the target market for the system. If WotC say the game is for them, and the game doesn't handle what they want from it, then the problem is either with the game design, or with the game's promotion, marketing and reputation.

It's interesting that my post was largely about how DnD 5e fails to cater towards people who want a strict set of rules for simulations, and your argument is about how DnD fails to cater towards people who want a loose set of rules that can be bent. I'm a firm believer that when you try to please everyone, you please nobody, and this is DnD's biggest weakness as a system: If you have a strongly cohesive group of players who want a specific style, DnD will do an okay job at it, but there will always be a better system out there. It's the ready meal you put in the microwave because it's easy, not the specific gourmet restaurant that does that one dish you love perfectly.

DnD's not really trying to cater towards any specific niche though - the design wants to appeal to the widest audience possible. By trying to cater to every style, it means you can pull together a group of players with a range of preferences, and put them in the same game. That's a big part of why it's got so much ubiquity after all. The logistics of setting up a group to play are rough for a lot of people, and just being able to put a game together is easier when your system promises fun to a wider range of players.

I'm not seeing any mention of it, but I think a lot of people might be interested in Break! - it's specifically aiming to make a game that has the vibes of an "adventure of the week" system, where you learn of an ancient ruin, gear up, venture through the wilderness, explore a crumbling tomb for loot, then get back in time for dinner and an ale. - Basically I'm saying that the game is specifically designed to try and tell the kind of stories that DnD is designed for.

Where break differs from DnD is in it's approach to mechanics. Downtime, journeying, exploring an adventure site, and fighting are all their own small, light subsystems of rules, so there's clear guidelines for how to run each of them, and they're largely aimed at highlighting the cruical and interesting moments for each of those activities, while quickly glossing past the faff and monotony of what lies between.

I've lost track of the number of DnD campaigns I've played where the DM didn't really have a clear framework for what to do on a long journey, and resorted to just tossing a couple of random encounter fights in because it "felt necessary", but they never felt like they advanced the story or contributed anything interesting to the game.

It's also a game you can recruit random NPCs and the like to join you and follow you around, and when they run out of HP you check to see if you remembered to give them a name. The world knows that characters who have their own names are important to the story, and characters who are just "that random bandit mook who surrendered and we brought them along" are not. If the character doesn't have a name when they hit 0hp, they die on the spot.

Oh, and fights take 10 minutes, rather than 2 hours - so you can have one in the middle of a session without it becoming the whole session. Yum.

I would say that the main thing that "sucks" about DnD is that DnD has often been portrayed as appealing to the kind of nerdy rules-lawyers that like to argue "hey, the rules say (x) so I can do (ridiculous thing)" and end up in a big argument with their DM about what the rules do and do not say. A lot of my groups have been like this, and it's okay for a game to cater towards that specific playstyle.

I'm not trying to make a value judgement whether this is a good or a bad way to play a game. It's also just one of many ways to play the game. You can (and given the stuff I talk about below, perhaps you should!) play it differently, but regardless it is quite a common table-style that the various holders of the DnD IP have encouraged throughout its history.

What is a problem is that this kind of playstyle can often be quite acrimonious, especially when combined with adversarial DM styles, and arguments can get rather heated and angry. I've heard many a tale of a group that split up over a rules argument that left everyone at the table too angry and frustrated to stick together as a group.

DnD 4e made huge strides to mitigating these problems by having a whole lot of very tightly defined keywords and language which could almost always be resolved into a solid, consistent, official ruling. You had to do a lot of work to learn exactly how the language was being used, but it was possible to get a table of six rules lawyers to sit down and develop a shared understanding of what the rules meant - and know there was a right answer to any specific question.

DnD 5e has taken huge strides to re-introducing the uncertainty in the system, by very loosely defining how things work, or not providing official answers at all, preferring to go with a "the DM will make a ruling" approach. This can be a nightmare for groups that like to have a defined, correct, answer to things.

Now of course, many alternate systems take this stance as a given "The rules are a set of loose guidelines, the GM will run the game and just make up a lot of the rules on the spot." - and this has a lot of advantages. It makes it easier to write systems because you don't have to be completely rigorous, and it leaves the GM with the freedom to run the game they want, and it encourages players to not get hung up on the details - all healthy...

But DnD is in the unique position of already having proven with 4e that it can nail down a rigorous set of principles and a style guide that leaves ambiguity behind, courting a whole section of RPG players who desire that, and then retreating from that position with a new, fuzzier, system document.

Why is this a "problem" for DnD specifically? Well... I find it's extremely common on internet forums like this one for a person to say "I was in a game and (x) happened" and then immediately three different arguments spawn, running in separate directions, all founded on the premise that the poster is playing the game wrong or doesn't understand the rules. It's exhausting.

I just finished playing through a short Runequest campaign, and it's certainly an interesting system and setting. It's extremely "oldschool" in feel (probably stemming from the fact that it's been around for forever.)

The big struggle with Runequest and Glorantha is that there's just so MUCH of it, and a lot of the setting is rather dry. It's a little like reading a history book, except you have to learn what everything means, because it's a self-contained setting. I feel it appeals quite strongly to people who want a lot of "lore" and history in their game, and who want to really get into the weeds of what a political marrage between these two clan leaders means for future trade agreements and military alliances. People who like their fantasy stories to have an index in the back of character names with a pronunciation guide, and their family trees and stuff.

Like... the first hour of character creation was rolling through d20 tables that randomized the eventual fates of each PC's grandparents through various wars and major historical events, so we could determine stuff like "is your family famous?" and "how much do you hate wolf pirates?"

Anyway, here's my girl Tikaret, she's a priestess of Issaries, and she discovered one of his lost aspects on a heroquest once.

You're right that it's not clear in the spell text exactly how to handle this, (a common theme with 5e stuff.) - However I'm remembering having a discussion a whole while back about "how old is the new body?" and finding a Sage Advice post saying it's however old that species is when it reaches adulthood, so I was basing my claim off that.

On average, it's cheaper to use reincarnate, you just provide a bodypart, and, so long as you didn't die of old age, reincarnate will make you a new "newly-adult" body. It's more expensive than Clone in materials, but much lower level, and if you roll a long lived race like an elf, gnome, or dwarf, you get a lot more mileage out of it before having to go around again.

I've been meaning to ask for a while, do you have any official character art reference sheets for Angela (and/or the others?)

Your Laeral is very similar to the way I run Laeral in my games, which is lovely. I think she's a good character, the tragic "I live forever" schtick works well on a genuinely good, intellegent, competent leader type.

I do always feel that she makes friends with the PCs too easily in most of my games. (I have a similar problem running Vajra... which at least evens itself out a bit whenever the PCs suggest having the two of them meet up...) - but also, if you do (good-aligned) adventures out of Waterdeep for long enough, you should probably end up friends with both of them.

It's actually a significant issue in Waterdeep's setting that she can't just planeshift and visit Khelben, because of where his soul is.

(It's not somewhere you can planeshift to...)

The villains in question were running a business at a street faire in Waterdeep. We had pegged their group as suspicious in general, and figured this was some kind of cover to pass on covert messages or meet with other villains that we were tracking. Wanting to get an opportunity to get a good look at them, and stake them out to see who they were meeting, we showed up and spent some time hanging around keeping an eye on their activities. (They had not met us and we had no reason to think they would suspect us of foul play.)

After a couple of hours of not much happening, we started passing shifts around keeping an eye on them, and Konsi went on a walk around the stalls at the faire, where some gnomes from the temple of Gond were making candyfloss with some kind of contraption. Faelys has a massive sweet tooth, and Konsi (who was magically disguised as a gnome so as not to cause concern in the streets of Waterdeep) figured it'd be really cool to learn to make candyfloss, so she asked the gnomes how the machine worked. They refused to tell her, but she was determined to figure it out, so she watched them operate the machine for a while to try and learn what she could about it.

As a part of this investigation, she cast detect magic, to see if the machine was in any way magical (it wasn't, it was purely mechanical) - so, a little despondant, she returned to the group staking out the villains, only to discover that all of them had magical illusion auras - as they were all wearing magical disguise amulets.

Thanks so much, it means a lot to artists to hear this kind of thing :)

It's going to be hectic in the next few months, so I may be a bit sporadic, but everything will be back to normal by the end of October, and I should be able to knuckle down and focus on drawing a lot more!

Heraldry be like that sometimes.

Generally speaking, this is something that an experienced GM can handle in session zero. An important part of session zero is establishing expectations for the style of game to be played: Things like "are the player characters friends?" "Is PvP encouraged or discouraged?" "Do I as a DM want the characters to stick together?" etc etc.

Generally when running DnD, I request of my players to design characters who:

1. Have a disposition to get along well with their companions. (this can be for any reason: because they're like that with everyone, or because they're loyal to the group, or because they view it as useful to have some friendly scapegoats nearby or any other motivation.)
2. Be the kind of person who will go on adventures and take risks. (This can be because they're a daredevil, or because they're desperate, or because they're devoted to their duty, or any other motivation.)

Fundamentally, most DnD games are the story of a group of friends going on adventures together. If your DnD game is the story of a group of friends going on adventures, then it's extremely beneficial for your players to build characters who will be friends, and who will go on adventures. Together.

It's going well, I think. We're on top of it. I'm not panicking.

There's a Konsi in the invitation art. I'll colour her in so y'all can spot her.

The drawing prompt was "existential dread" The runic scribble around her is actually just all her negative thoughts - they're more readable in the light version.

I like that kind of thing in a lot of settings, especially more philosophical or metaphorical settings.

DnD always feels to me like it's a world where the metaphysics are defined by the players having an hour long argument at the table about "what RAW says", while people look up rules in books. Back in my 3.5 days, someone would manage to find a ruling in an obscure 3rd party book, in 4th edition, you'd find some hard definition in the source material. In 5th edition, someone will find a tweet from Crawford, and the table will agree it's stupid and decide the opposite is always true.

For my experiences in D&D, the question of "whether x counts as y" is a definition that sticks to the universe itself - there aren't many examples of metaphysics in D&D where the answer varies by intent. (I'm sure there are some though!)

Caveat: As with everything I say about D&D rules and definitions, this is not advice, just how I think of things, and the objective correct answer is always "whatever works at your table."

Konsi did once break the plot of an adventure wide open by having the right detection magic running, for entirely unrelated reasons. Just realized the plot-twist 10 sessions early...