You’ll love this then: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/tourists-love-to-rub-the-bronze-balls-of-wall-streets-charging-bull-statue-why

Either he’s going to have a tough time in social situations, or she’s going to have an extremely tough time.

If my name was either exceptionally hard to say by another species, or if by them uttering my name it could bind me into their service or kill me or whatever, I’d probably go with whatever stupid name they came up with for me too.

I kinda wanna get a shirt like this for my super conservative in-laws’ Christmas white elephant. There’s a good chance one of them would wear it without realizing the satire.

You just made a favored enemy for life!

Good news! The 5e Artificer is the perfect class for spell flavoring and it’s actually written into their class description. From Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, page 11:

I love spells like this. The Animal Friendship spell component is “a morsel of food.” Like damn, I guess I’m a wizard.

I honestly wasn’t aware it was a Critical Role thing until I posted this.

Wow that fighter is awesome. I’ll add it to the list of characters I would play if I wasn’t a forever DM.

I love the interpretation of bards that they don’t actually cast magic, they just keep it so real that it borders on supernatural.

Ah, that’s chronomancy and you do NOT want me messing with time. Not after what will happen next time.

Damn, this gives me an idea for a PC: Raz is a novice dunamancer who believes he has the worst luck in the world until he realizes that his wealthy and successful alternate self has been manipulating fate to always be in HIS favor instead. Now the only thing Raz wants is to find and kill his other self and take back what fate owes him.

Ok, fine, I collapsed reality on an entire alternate universe ending them in the blink of an eye, but now Rog the barbarian is back to full health!

Brave and charismatic bard from my dad’s side, dragon from my mom’s side.

Published campaigns IMO are at their best when they’re like, “here’s a detailed world with interesting NPCs and here’s the villain’s master plan and the steps they’re taking to enact it”, and at their worst when they’re like “by now your players should have done A, B and C so they should go do D now.”

Agreed for the most part. You’ll still have the same situation in a published campaign where the players may be more interested in “side content” than the intended path (maybe more so since published campaigns tend to have specific things players need to do to move the story forward). I’ve personally run published adventures that very quickly veered into homebrew just because the players had different motivations than what the adventure path assumed.

Anyway, I think the original post was more of a generalized observation and wasn’t specifically meant to say published campaigns are better or worse than homebrew.

The real question is: how do you make combat balanced for both the OP gun wielding monk that dishes out 70 damage a round at lvl 7, and the two new people at the table that are lucky to get 15 damage in and are starting to feel a bit overshadowed?

Based on a true story