watch your six chucklenuts

And when i notice one of them my eyes will always start to roll.

The diction's always slurry when they rush the complicated words, and adding many fricatives will turn it so cacophonous. The slanted rhymes are silly and they keep just making more and more, please someone stop the parodies of modern major general.

you are so right

Conversations in Italian, circa 1996 - 🍄🍄36

Is formatted to be as unconvincing to the nonbeliever as possible

You KNOW classic SF used the limited displays of CRT television and the static of transmitted signals the way theaters use stage makeup and lighting to make inexpensive props look great fine— take advantage of the medium! But it's hard to imagine how it looked if you've only seen Blu-ray HD restorations.

The standard aspect ratio for TV shows was 4:3 as they would be viewed on tube/box TV sets. So they didn't worry about those little details because they would get cropped out on the average TV screen anyway. Now, we watch them on widescreen sets and are amused by the glaring fourth wall breaks.

Mechanic: Crafting Pt 1, Weapons and Armor

Can we agree that crafting in 5th edition sucks? Actually cancel that, crafting in d&d has almost always sucked: 5th edition just went so far as to pretty much remove it from the game, to the point where tool kits are almost useless and the one class with crafting at its core just gets already established items in place of class abilities. 

I’m tired of having to quash my player’s dreams of making something cool or living out their fantasy as a blacksmith/master inventor/alchemist by saying “ sorry, the crafting system is dumb and/or nonexistent, you’re sorta stuck with what you’ve got”. Oh sure, you can hand wave a lot of things and I’ve tried a number of different 3rd party solutions, but they always seem to be either lackluster or tremendously clunky. 

I’m someone who cares a lot about GAME-FEEL, way more than I care about things like balance, and just about every crafting system I’ve encountered (core or otherwise) feels BAD in one way or another. Too often they slow the game down to a crawl for not much benefit, either making them irrelevant to ongoing adventures by requiring months of in-game time, or being so complex that they bring any session they’re brought up into to a grinding halt. 

So, here’s my absolutely bare bones crafting system so you can skip all the glut and get on with the fun: 

Items have a quality rating that sync up with the rarities of magic items: Mundane, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very rare, Legendary. 

To craft an item, you (or an npc you’re working with) need proficiency in the right toolset and a proficiency bonus based on the Quality of the item you’re trying to make (+2 for common, +3 for uncommon, etc) 

You’ll need a properly equipped workshop for the task at hand, and sufficient components for the project you’re attempting (more on this below the cut) 

An item requires a number of “work sessions” per grade of quality, each amounting to eight hours out of a day, though these days need not be contiguous. Each session requires the crafter to  make a skill check using the appropriate proficiency (or use my mini-game rules for extra special crafting projects) against a DC determined by the quality of the object: 10 for mundane, 15 for common, 20 for uncommon etc. 

If half or more of the item’s work sessions are successful by the end of the run, the item is complete! 

And that’s it, a light and simple crafting system that you can manage at the table but lets your players actually make the things they want to make. I have a lot more ideas that chain off this one, but I’ll save them for below the cut. With that in mind, here’s a few of the things I’d like to use these systems to solve: 

Giving your party a reason to visit craftspeople in town, and things to actually spend gold on 

Fixing Consumable magic items

Making weapons and armor more mechanically interesting than just stacking magical bonuses

Making toolkits actually useful and adding them to the player’s gameplay loop

introducing scaling weapon damage in a way to keep melee characters in-line with cantrip users. 

Using crafting materials as adventure hooks, & Loot rewards. 

Magical item upgrades to keep old favorites relevant into the late game. 

No such thing as a primitive belief my friend: humans are all varying levels of spiritual/superstitious, it only matters which idea systems hold sway over you or your culture at any one moment.

There's also been places and times in history where Christianity has been a pagan faith, or that urbanized doctrinal christians have lived alongside pagan offshoots of their mother faith.

Like, I think most players and GMs (especially those of us that come from the D&D paradigm) tend to think of the dice roll as representing how well the character does the thing. This seems intuitive, but it tends to make a character's perceived level of competency at the things they're supposed to be good at weirdly swingy, which might be undesirable unless you're aiming for a slapstick tone.

Like, your stats/skills/modifyiers/whatever the hell the game you're playing has/ already represent how good/bad your character is at doing certain stuff. So the die roll, being a luck-based number unrelated to these skills, probably shouldn't ALSO represent how well your character does the thing, but instead represent outside factors that influence the outcome of your action, such as something distravting your hero, the enemy jumping away to avoid the swing, or the lock you're trying to pick having a bit of rust that's giving you trouble.

That element of "unexpected complication" is how the game moves so fast, and is worth emulating in other games when it comes to polishing our storytelling skills.

In the case of the thief that's suddenly run face to face with the guard, what we've got there is a delicious escalation of stakes, because now we've forced the character outside their comfort zone (stealth) and into a situation where they'll have to rely on something riskier, be it talking their way out, violence, or trying to rush past an enemy on alert.