I did the gaybro liches before. It was a PF1 game where 3 of the party members wanted to be goblins. We had an Alchemist (burny), a Barbarian (Bitey) and a gunslinger (shooty). The last player wanted to a be human witch. The player was kind of dumb, but the character got gang pressed into trying to wrangle these goblins in spite of being an immoral shitheel herself. The first adventure (which is the only one they did before the game petered out for other reasons) was they were sent to rescue the local children from an Ogre who was kidnapping them from a village. They discovered that he was very erudite and literate (think Cave guy from Freakzoid) and he was trying to teach the children how to read. The villagers were very angry objectors to the written word. The next adventure (which I had notes for somewhere) was going to pit them against a dragon who had been kidnapping princesses. The players would discover he was a giant nerd, and was treating them well; he just needed them for his army build for wargames against other dragons.

Okay, so fine you get the tone; the liches were two wizards who were like, no homo gym bros in life, who made each other their phylacteries. My plan was to have the players find a diary and they would learn the joke; that was only one of them was gay. The diary would have no surviving identifying marks, so they wouldn’t know which one

One of those moves never miss. One only has a 55 percent hit rate.

is santa an elf?

So I think you’re right in a lot of ways. But I think your understating a few things.

First, OGL. OGL was great for 3.x edition. It spawned a cottage industry of 3rd party content creators, which by the end of the life cycle, had created content that which was smoother and more refined in the engine than anything WotC ever produced. This allowed 3.x to dig in and become immensely established. The problem is is that it cuts both ways; in 4e era, WotC’s biggest competitor was actually Paizo.

I liked 4e, I think its better than 5e. But WotC became way harsher on piracy and 3rd party content in that era. The way powers were structured and templates, it became impossible to keep up with everything without their builder spoon feeding it to you. They were really pushing their “adventure tools.” These were buggy, half of them never came to fruition, and they didn’t run on mac (even though they were browser based). They only stopped pushing them after they bought a third party site (D&D beyond, which I actually ban from my games). I’m just saying that 3.5 was an accessibility dream, and 4e was actually behind lock and key.

Meanwhile Paizo had the immensely easier job of selling 3.5 weirdos back 3.5, and WotC couldn’t stop them because of the OGL. For a while, I thought Paizo was actually doing worse damage to the industry; I was afraid no one would want to innovate if people were just going to play 3.x until the end of time. I guess I was right, because 5e is basically 3.5 will all the interesting parts cut off. And thats why WotC was trying to kill the OGL last year, in the weird way they did. They want the control, but they want the 3rd party support too.

The other thing you understated was just how many grognards there were for 3.x. I literally had a 5e baby pitch to me a cyberpunk 2077 game that he would run in starfinder, but 3.x guys refused to try out 4e. Their complaints were as many as they were meaningless. Orcs aren’t core? All classes get spells? I can see the WoW recharge timers! A lot of enfranchised gamers simply did not want to play a new game, and then PF came along, and they did not have to. I saw it happen in my game group, but this also was borne out in paizo’s ascendancy in this era.

I want to say one thing to your point @Colalextrast@lemmynsfw.com, that 4e had too much bloat; 3.x had a ton of bloat as well. At least every power in 4e was like, functional. 3.x had dozens of base classes and hundreds of prestige classes that were traps. Hundreds of feats that were not good. I think 1200 officially published spells (at least you could swap those out). The only reason 3.x combat wasn’t a crawl was because it was rocket tag; high level spellcasters usually end the fight in one move.

I play 3.5 for a few years. One of my groups swore by it. It was… textured. When you call it a steaming pile of shit, I see your point and honestly agree with you. But I will say it was… completely what it was. It wasn’t well designed, but it was immensely interesting. 5e is all of 3.x, but with the interesting parts sanded down. In my estimation, that makes 5e the lesser game.

It gets worse than that, and its weird no one has brought this up. This is going to be difficult to explain, because I have never actually played AD&D, only read it. There is a fighter feature called percentile strength, there the fighter has a percentage next to his strength score. This is only ever for strengths of 18, and the best was an 100, notated at 18/00. So Why mentioned this kind (face it) stupid and archaic rule?

"in the Strength Table I, the range 18/01-50 is noted as “Maximum strength possible for a female human or male gnome character.”

They are just going to make contraception behind locked doors/ only available to married partners, if at all available.

NYC is also the tip top that US public transit gets.

Kind of. The housing prices are rock bottom. there is also a sense of community that is utterly lacking in the airless suburbs. Seriously, there are some subs in places like Novi or Farmington that were built in the 80s and are completely lacking in sidewalks. Compared to that, some neighborhoods in Detroit have affordable homes, neighbors, and urban prairie. Seriously, Ive been to farms on land left to seed.

Also, there is a wave of gentrification coming through… Mostly on the riverfront and along the Cass Corridor into Midtown. The Illitches and the Rocket Mortgage guy have both invested enormous quantities into fixing up that zone, and at least before the pandemic, there was really a sense that a recovery had begun. A lot of white people have been drawn to the area and a lot of old industrial or commercial have been redone into luxury apartments. And honestly, the corner of Jefferson and Woodward on a summer weekend is insanely nice these days.

I want to point out that there are still rough scrabble areas in Detroit, like Brightmoor. But down by Hart Plaza? Wayne State? The Fox? You’ll be fine.

ConservativesofTikTok hehe.

Okay first thing: there is no mainstream left in US politics. AOC and Bernie taper off at a hair left of center. I don’t even dislike them. And normally that would be fine, but the right does include flamboyant, very loud fascists. So the right has no counter weight, and what there is are Centrist Libs, who long for days of “reaching across the isle”, and “order,” and “civility” While people talk about Fascists projecting, the Libs are too; they think everyone approaches politics in good faith. They don’t realize the fascist uses their invitation to get in, and civility as a mask to play the game. The fascist uses any means they can to gain power, and then disposes of the libs when they don’t need them anymore. The libs are left, like Eddard Stark holding a piece of paper, with their dicks in the breeze.

This last piece of this is that there is an aspect of the left that matches what you say, the so called “dirt bag left,” streamers like Vaush and Hassan Abi, and Chapo Trap House. They are in fact quite controversy prone, and I don’t think they are good people, but I think they do match the general vibe of your statement.

Ban fossil fuel subsidies

I think you mean Abolish Cars

When concentration camps are on the ballot, be prepared to do a little more than vote.

We have moved well beyond the taxing stage. We need a giant wood chipper

I mean, you aren’t wrong. Normally I would give that honor to an uncommon or a rare, but I still am having trouble trying to figure out how often this will show up with the new pack collation. Also, why is this even on the bonus sheet? What other format is this even good in?

This… this might be the best limited card for the set

Vote, and then prepare for direct action

lol enjoy paying for every book twice. I use 5etools, and I encourage my players to do the same.

I’m old enough to remember the debacle with D&Dinsider. I got such better service with piracy than my friends did behind the paywall. All of their development promises turned out to be shit also. To this day, I’ve banned ddb from my games.

Its okay to play DnD and Magic. But its not okay to give WotC money. Remember when they sent literal Pinkertons after a guy. Or when they tried to end the OGL. That was all last year.

Theft is moral. Paying corporation for the privilege of being stolen from is not.

who argued X men was never woke?