Recent content by Clint_L

But your fanfic is okay? Your tone sounds very antagonistic towards players who dare to have a backstory. Maybe that is what garners the angry responses? And are these total strangers, or are these your friends? If the latter, then that seems like a serious problem. If the former, then how did...

NO!!! And it has to be on a bun, and you have to be able to eat it with your hands. These are non-negotiable for me.

I agree: isn't the whole point of the adventuring party that they are all exceptional? Drizz't was the only good Drow, etc.

The novel is fun, but more character driven than The Martian. Which is a problem, because Weir is a pretty limited writer in that regard, by his own admission. On the other hand, Gosling is a phenomenal character actor, so I am hopeful that he can elevate the material.

Fair enough. I've never encountered that sentiment, myself. Generally, I find players are very happy that someone else has done the work and are more than happy to work with the DM...when they even bother coming up with a substantial backstory at all. And then there are those occasional players...

That's not RAW. CHEATER!!!! ;) Edit: My own table ignored those rules, as well. And then Unearthed Arcana really loosened them anyway.

I don't like that your argument is ultimately about the motivations of the players, and in a distinctly disparaging way ("crown of uniqueness"). That's like describing the DM's motivations in this case as being motivated by a selfish need to impose their own taste as the law, without any...

I don't worry about party composition, except in the case of a few species that I don't like because I think they ruin game balance at low levels (e.g. aarakroa), and that's about a specific ability not the species itself. Otherwise, I let the players have at it, with the caveat that the...

I disagree, though I suppose it depends on the system and the table. In, say, 5e, critical successes/misses on attacks aren't that exciting; they're just more damage or no damage. It's critical successes or failures on abilitiy checks that are exciting, but how many important ability checks do...

A nat 20 always succeeds where success is a reasonable option. So, for example, if you say that your black ops specialist is going to perform open heart surgery to save the witness, there is no roll. They just fail. But assuming success is possible, you not only succeed, but as DM I typically...

Oh, I agree. The sad thing is that I am aware of it but still occasionally find myself doing it. I mostly keep it internal, at least.

I mean, yeah, if you can get Margot Robbie for anything you hire her. She's amazing in everything she plays. Edit: though I think Gadot was good as WW, at least in the first solo film. I didn't see the sequel, and the problems with BvS weren't because of her.

Especially older folks...like most of us. It's one of those things where I realize that I've become my dad. I'll complain about the price of a slice of pizza or something and my kid will roll his eyes.

In my current home game, they've attained level 7 relatively quickly (it's been about 9 months) and I've suggested to the players that I would like to radically slow the pace. Everyone loves their character and have unlocked the key abilities that they wanted as their character vision, so I now...

I've learned that if I want to know the optimal build for a class/sub-class, I should pay particular attention to one particular pundit on this site, @ECMO3. I'm not a hardcore optimizer, but I enjoy thinking about these things, for whatever quirky reasons my brain has, and they both do the math...