Spyke

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Characters I've been banned from playing [OC]

Image Transcription:

Title: "DND characters I've been banned from playing."

A drawing of a smiling woman with pointed ears and a blond updo looks at us. She wears a green dress like a folded leaf, with yellow and blacked striped tights underneath. Bees buzz around her.

Caption: "Swarm druid with beehive hairstyle, but it's a real beehive."

A drawing of a red-skinned person with horns and yellow eyes without pupils reads from a book. Cards float above their hand. Their robe bears a red B symbol, in the style of the D&D Beyond logo.

Caption: "Warlock who is directly pacted to Wizards Of The Coast."

A drawing of a zombie-like person in tattered clothes holding a staff made of bones looks at us. The staff glows green.

Caption: "Necromancer who raised themselves from the dead, and now has to maintain the spell."

A drawing of a person-sized mechanical snake with a drill bit for a tail and a piece of wire as a tongue.

Caption: "Warforged druid who wildshapes by physically reconfiguring their body."

A drawing of a large cloud of red and yellow energy, with a tiny silhouette of a person with arms outstretched at the center.

Caption: "Wizards."

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Pact of Meta Knowledge Warlock

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Format: Tumblr posts

chandra-nyalaar says: "my favorite d&d thing is when someone flubs like a really obvious perception roll or something and the DM gets to be like 'well, you're pretty sure you're in a room but you could be wrong.'"

animar-smol-of-elephants says: "it is either really wet of really dry, you're not entirely sure"

ugin-the-spirit-dragon says: "One time a guy in our party rolled a nat 20 on a perception check, but there was nothing around he didn't already see, so the DM said 'You're not quite sure, but for a few seconds it seems like you're standing on a giant's table, surrounded by 5 giants.Your party seems to look stiff and fake,and large papers and dice are strewn around you. Then, everything goes back to normal.'"

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What devices do you use for running games?

As a GM:

I host online for friends, so we use digital tools.

  • Foundry, hosted on my desktop computer, with these modules:
    • Dice So Nice, and several skins.
    • Dice Tray, to make rolling single dice easier.
    • Pathbuilder Importer mostly for my lazy players.
  • Obsidian, for when I'm running homebrew. But with the revamping of Foundry's journal system, I may stop using this.
  • Discord for game audio.

As a player:

I have a tablet PC with a pen. I take notes on Rnote (free, open source.) I used to use OneNote which was great because I could search my handwriting, but I stopped using Windows.

Historically, I always used physical dice because I was playing in-person. I did my PF1e character sheets manually by writing on the PDF in OneNote, but for PF2e I do enjoy Pathbuilder to help me plan it out. For actual play, I build my character sheet in Foundry (even if the GM isn't using it for the game) just to make everything easy for me to find.

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Remaster notes from PaizoCon

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At my table we added the Divine Lance change (ie, it can actually do damage to things,) as well as ignoring the Open trait, giving Rogues access to martial weapons and Wizards access to simple weapons. Other stuff we'll probably wait for the books to come out.

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Almost had a TPK last night in the Pathfinder 2e beginner box

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Absolutely agree. For absolute newbies I tend to nudge them toward playing as Merisiel or something similar for the first oneshot, just so they can get a feel for the basic rules before needing to master their character quirks. We of course had someone who had never played PF insist on playing an Inventor for their first character, and after we finished the oneshot they realized that they'd missed their main class feature the whole time and that's why they felt so ineffective. Whoops!

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5e fighters be like

Image transcription:

Format: 4 panel comic

Panel 1: A crow sits on a stool and speaks into a microphone. It says "Level 5: Extra Attack"

Panel 2: A heckler in the crowd in front of the crow shouts "Booo! Get better features!"

Panel 3: The crow sweats nervously

Panel 4: We see the note cards in the crow's wing-hands, which say "Level 11: Extra Attack times 2"

vart

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Using AI to generate character art

I've found that making a character in HeroForge and then plugging that into Dream.ai is the best way to do this. The HeroForge mini pose will help give the AI a good framework to build around, and you can tweak it with keywords in your prompt. This is how I made character art for my last few oneshot characters. :)

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What devices do you use for running games?

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Absolutely. I have been using tablet PCs since 2011, all of which have run desktop operating systems. My first was an ASUS that ran Windows 7, which I used for school and later for TTRPG. OneNote was excellent software which got me through that phase of my life.

I later upgraded to a laptop-type tablet instead of a slate with a Bluetooth keyboard. I find the format more convenient. The Yoga has been excellent for me — though I don't like the keyboard a lot as I'm used to the chunkier type. The pen has a battery so I do have to pause to charge it after a few hours of writing/drawing, but that has been nice because it forces me to take breaks (which can be hard when you have ADHD!) The pen is a bit narrow and now super ergonomic, but there are many compatible styluses out there that are larger.

As for software, I've switched to Linux as of many years ago and up until recently there were not many good apps out there for handwritten notes. Xournal++ is ugly but good for marking up PDFs. Rnote is a very new app, written in Rust and designed around GNOME design principles, so it looks very nice and is quite fast. It's not a 1:1 replacement for OneNote — it has basic file management but not as advanced as OneNote's notebooks and tabs and pages, and there is no OCR for searching within your handwriting. I would not use it to do worldbuilding, but it has been more than good enough for me to take rough notes as I play.

The downside of the Yoga is that it has soldered RAM, so you need to get one with good enough specs right off the bat. I purchased a 16GB model and it has been sufficient, though the processor is a downgrade from my last laptop. I still use my desktop for beefier jobs. One example of where it struggles is that when I played 5e with a group, if I rolled digital dice on DND Beyond the performance was quite slow. This seemed to be an issue for everyone on a laptop, though.