protip: don’t cross them off, write who they are on the list (eg “Rivermeadow blacksmith”) so you can remember when the players come back to them a million sessions later

Found the bard

I like the mental image of a dwarf ship that’s 6 ft tall and got 47 masts to make up for it.

Imagine the emotional and physical damage of taking your first shit in thousands of years.

DMing has helped practice a lot of business skills…communication, organization, running a meeting. Making pretty documents in google docs :P

Hm. Well, don’t feel obliged to hew to existing genre definitions.

Also, I’d still urge you to sit down and make a list of design goals, eg what you like about the experience of playing war games or ttrpgs, and then make rules to match, rather than starting with making the rules or choosing which ones to duplicate from existing games.

I think it’s a false dichotomy. You want to decide what your design goals are, the kind of vibe you’re trying to generate, and then create systems that support that vibe.

No one actually plays dnd like that though…

Jokes on you, we play every rpg!

Bards aren’t just “a talented musician” they literally use magic. They’re basically wizards that went the liberal arts path in college.

A war could always just end by the bad guy (from your perspective) winning decisively.

I think as a teenager I played a lot of Bards because being likeable and everyone doing what you say is kind of nice when you’re an awkward disempowered kid, but nowadays I mix it up. Mostly just because playing the same character repeatedly would get kind of boring for me, and I want to explore different territory, even if it’s on the level of “original the hedgehog donut steal”

That’s kind of funny in a terrible way when you consider that a lot of security research is pentesting.

Therapist: “Also you’re fat”

Patient: [incoherent sobbing]

Therapist: “Ok so you’re insecure about that too, try to work on that…”

I only implement restrictions when there’s actually a problem. Haven’t needed to in a long time

Some people, especially kids (no shade, I’m mostly talking about myself when I was younger) have difficulties focusing on the game when the distraction machine is in front of them, leading to DMs restricting or banning their use.

Mac and cheese for dinner is lame and lazy too, but also fucking delicious. TTRPGS are something your friends put together for you out of love, not necessarily some clinically perfect professional product. And to extend the metaphor, if you go to a dinner party and start bitching about your friend not plating the food like a Michelin star place, you’re an asshole.

There are lots of places that will print for you (eg https://www.shapeways.com/), but it’s cheaper and easier than ever to print your own right now! You can get a cheapo chinese printer for a hundred bucks, or an excellent Bambu for $250 (https://us.store.bambulab.com/products/a1-mini) Then you feed your model into something called a Slicer which will let you adjust all those parameters to your heart’s content (Flashprint is beginner friendly, Cura or Orcaslicer are more advanced options, all free) You’ll also need a roll of filament ($13-$20 for one roll, enough to print hundreds of minis) and then you just hit start and see how it goes! If your print fails, nbd, it’s like a fraction of a cent of plastic, just tweak and try again!

The material you want to use is called PLA, it’s cheap and easy to work with. Note that all the above prices are in USD, it’s likely more expensive to get shipped to Australia, but a lot of it comes straight from China so you never know. Feel free to message me with any questions or troubleshooting help

I’ve always just treated it as a natural 3D extension of the 2D grid rules

I believe that’s how it’s handled in D&D too, or at least how my table has always done it. I meant more as a practical matter, you’re very unlikely to have a vertical wall grid and some kind of stand of the correct height for your minis, so you can’t just count squares like you would for horizontal movement. That’s when the Pythagorean Theorem comes up in my experience.

That’s fair. Perhaps another style of DMing and/or a different system are more your speed.