Current object of my obsession: Critical Role

assuming ickythot a) is a wizard, b) isn’t multiclassed, and c) didn’t take the Toughness feat, his theoretical max hp (at lvl 20 with 20 con and 6s on every hit die) is 222. now, that’s just unreasonable, so for argument’s sake let’s say he rolled median hp, his con is 16 (high for a wizard), and we’ll keep him lvl 20. his max hp is now 130. respectable! we love glass cannons!

percy rolls initiative at +11, casts hex, and shoots first. percy is pissed as fuck and blows all three of his grit on violent shot, letting him add three additional damage dice while temporarily raising the misfire score for bad news to 8. he also makes it a sharpshooter shot, taking -5 to hit and +10 to damage. oof, that’ll be a hard shot, but no worries, it’s percy. bang! natural 20! cool!

bad news’ damage is 2d12. as a dm, i would rule that its ‘damage die’ is 2d12 rather than 1d12, but 5e’s rules designer disagrees, so we’ll go with that. it, uh, it turns out it doesn’t matter all that much.

percy rolls 2d12 + 3 additional d12s + 1d6 for hex, doubling that (’double the dice’) for the crit. he then adds 5 (his dexterity) and 10 (sharpshooter). the average result for that is 87. ikithon is looking pretty rough! but he’s a wizard, he’s still got tricks up his sleeve! just wait for the next round!

ikithon spends his turn running towards percy to try and get in range to meteor swarm him, probably, and then he takes 43 points of damage from hemorrhaging critical.

he is now at precisely zero hit points, falls to the ground, and dies ignominiously and unceremoniously. death in six seconds is probably better than he deserved, but hey, no mercy percy keeps it efficient. he’s got dinner to cook for the wife and kids!

why doesn’t ikithon just heal himself??? cause he’s a nerd, that’s why. you think this bastard man is friends with a lot of clerics? you think he’s learned healing magic from the local druid? nah. he’s a dumb wizard and i hate him

what if he brought friends??? don’t worry, guys– how fast can his friends run 800ft? probably not faster than a speeding bullet!!!

what if he makes his save on hex??? don’t worry, guys, there isn’t one! the warlock class is broken, and so is percival frederickstein von mussel klossowski de rolo iii, and so is keyleth’s heart!

what if he runs out of range after percy’s turn??? don’t worry guys, vex is there and she’s got a broom! or maybe she left that in pandemonium? doesn’t matter! trinket’s speed is 40ft! you can’t run from percy, bastard man!

what if percy forgets to hex him??? what if he’s got gloves of missile snaring??? what if percy rolls below average damage??? what if he doesn’t crit??? what if– 

The worst arrow in the world.

DMs I am giving you this knowledge in exchange for all the things I showed your players. Use it wisely.

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

One of my cats was pawing at the door and meowing loudly, an indication she REALLY needs to use the litter box.  I let her out and decide, hey, I’m hungry, and decide to the kitchen.  I forgot to shut the bedroom door. 

Next thing I hear is the group going completely silent.  My husband very calmly asks me to come over and help him gather our two cats up.  I go over to where the group is and my black cat, Cacoa, is rubbing up against the guy’s leg, purring, and doing her “let me on your lap” meow.  The other cat, Jasper, is sitting at the window, chilling out.  I go over and pick up Cacoa and tell the big dude she’s harmless, loves laps, and would be thrilled if he pet her.  Very slowly he touches my cat’s face, and she leans right into his hand.  He then pets her back and sighs because she’s really soft and purring like mad.  After a few minutes he asks how to pick her up and if it’s okay if she sits on his lap.

If I have a hair tie on my wrist, my darling sweet baby boy, love of my life and apple of my eye, can gingerly dig his teeth underneath and grab it in his mouth and then back up. and pull. And Snap the hell out of me with the elastic. Again, he is very gentle and precise, there are never teeth touching my skin. This is not a fluke, he managed this several times in various circumstances and positions.

Love it.

Oh my god

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

look my boys and i have an agenda

But there’s a world of difference between doing what you love for you, and doing what you love for a paycheck. 

I went to undergrad for graphic design and 3-D design–art and more art, I usually say–and I loved it. You know what I didn’t love? Trying to collect my fees from clients. Trying to meet unrealistic, over-simplified or over-specific briefs from people who didn’t know what they were talking about. Coming home, having worked creatively all day, with no creative juice left for the things I wanted to do.

You know what I would tell you instead? Do something that you can be interested in, with people you like.

You don’t have to love it. Loving your work can be a lot, and it often means you have to live in your job 24/7. Some people can do that. Not everyone can, or should.  But if you can find work that’s interesting enough that it doesn’t feel tedious, and people you can enjoy spending your 9-5 with, and you can make money, that’s great! It means you can do the things you love for you.

I’m in law school now. It’s interesting work, and difficult, and I like doing it. I like how complicated it gets, and I like the stories it tells. But I don’t come home and read law journals for fun. I come home, and I sculpt, and I draw, and I paint, and I read. I do these things for me.

I chose to take a job that was not the most high-paying option available to me, because it wouldn’t require me to bill my time, I would have a better work-life balance, I found the work more engaging, and I really loved the office. It has paid off so much.

I get to walk to work, and most days I leave my laptop behind when I walk home at five. I have a little house with a little garden and a bunch of seedlings sprouting too early for spring. I have two stupid cats and two stupider doves and they make me happy. I put a little money into food and shelter for the neighborhood strays and name all my visiting opossums Harold. My art gets done when I feel inspiration striking, sometimes in the middle of the night, and I let my hobby fund itself without the pressure of deadlines. There is so much joy in making only what I want to. My sleep schedule has stabilized. For the first time in my life, I know the shape my days will take weeks and months away, because my routine is consistent, and I never knew what a peace that was. My job is predictable but never boring, interesting but not consuming, and it’s just a job. 

There are people who will tell you–people who have told me–that turning my back on an artistic career or a career you have “potential” in is selling out, or settling. 

But with the Earth getting warmer and spring coming sooner and winters being less harsh up North, the babies were starting to thaw out too early, so when the Ice Deer got to them, they’d been awake already and starved to death.

So there were only like, 300 Ice Deer left. They were bigger than elks, all white with blue antlers that even the females grew, and I realized the only solution would be to somehow lead them North every year when it started thawing. As a human I could check the weather and the ice in the North Pole and when it was time to go to the babies, even if the deer thought it was still winter.

So I had to devise a plan to get the Ice Deer to follow me North to their babies on time every spring, and it just became part of my life. I did other stuff and lived life as usual while keeping track of the weather near the end of winter and I’d be like, welp it’s time to lead the deer North, and I’d set out to find their winter home.

And a lot of people were like “this isn’t a permanent solution. We need to focus on climate change so it’s fixed for good.”

Lumberjacks, like most megafauna species generally require more space than the average hardware store, even a big box store could provide. The misconception is that Lumberjacks are a social species because of how they often work and live together.

This is a matter of necessity, not preference, and a survival technique for thriving under the LogBoss.

A “pack” of Lumberjacks, if not under the environmental pressure of a LogBoss will naturally disperse until they each have a wide territory.

Lumberjacks rarely fight for territory.

One on one, a Lumberjack could drive out a Dad or Lesbian, however the latter tend to travel in social packs.

Lumberjacks will passively retreat on the presence of large numbers of people. Kind of like Sasquatch.

Getting a “pack” of Lumberjacks assembled would be hard enough unless they were forced into a Hardware Store by a LogBoss. In that case, they would already be in a heightened and potentially agitated state far above their natural behavior. This artificial scenario can be likened to a circus animal running amok. If it had been in the wild, the incident would not have occurred.

Free-roaming Lumberjacks are the cryptids of the Hardware ecosystem. They are surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive.

Only experienced silverbacks or the boldest young Dads dare venture into a craft store for long without his mate or offspring to keep roving Craft Ladies at bay and guide him in this strange ecosystem. If a Dad enters with his mate and is separated from her, he will often scuttle for the seeming familiarity of Woodcrafts, Models, or Paints (the latter not to be confused with Fine Arts, unquestioned territory of art students), but he eyes Scrapbooking and Jewelry with trepidation and will usually venture into those exotic areas only in the company of females of his pack.

Lumberjacks are rarely spotted entering craft stores of their own volition, for while they do not fear it as Dads do, they know it is an environment unsuited for megafauna such as themselves.

Hardware store Lesbians generally adapt more easily to craft stores, although they may enlist another Lesbian of a subspecies more adapted to that environment to guide them until they find their niche. Lesbians have even been known to seek the aid of a Craft Lady, a native fauna that share similarities with Lesbians but are usually smaller and nimbler to suit their chosen habitat. Dads who witness this are often awed by the Lesbians’ temerity, for although larger, Dads are generally wary of the cunning and dexterous Craft Ladies and may mistake their enthusiastic pack greetings as predatory swarming.

Craft Ladies, secure in their ecological niche, have no fear of interlopers and take the presence of non-native beings in stride, although they may become territorial about scarcer resources.