Megalovania

Oh yeah, I wouldn’t say that Nintendo are paragons of virtue or anything. But they are far, FAR better at making games that offer a wide variety of experiences (edit: when compared to Sony/MS. Indies are king). Similarly, sure the Switch control scheme isn’t something nobody had ever conceived of before, but it’s very distinctly different from the Xbox/Playstation controllers.

They’ve got like… what, 7 or 8 IPs that they actively maintain, right? And about 10 more derelict but still iconic IPs. Plus some stuff made by other companies that’s exclusive to their hardware.

-Mario -Zelda -Pikmin -Splatoon (Hey look a gun game) -Fire Emblem -Donkey Kong Country -Super Smash Bros

Dedicated 3rd party: -Xenoblade -Pokemon

All these games have really different themes and gameplay styles and aesthetics, and that is the reason why I’m convinced that the Switch 2 is perfectly positioned to just completely take over the market the way the Wii did- Nintendo is large and competent enough to avoid the issues that plagued the PS5 launch and later life, and fresh enough to get people interested, unlike the Xbox.

Where Sony/MS have uhhh… Looks at the PS5 exclusive games… Looks at Halo/Call of Duty/Fortnite…

Pffff. The AAA industry is notorious for being about as stale as a three week old french baguette. If it isn’t a Gun Game made for chasing the most recent trends, then chances are they don’t even want to sniff at it. To say nothing of the absolutely egregious thirst for Profit that plagues a lot of titles. It’s one thing to be a $70 game, and another thing entirely to be a $70 game with a subscription, ingame puchases, and day 1 DLC.

Sony and Microsoft can have their pathetic little ‘arms race’ about processing power and framerates and 150GB+ games.

In the meantime, Nintendo is likely going to step right up with something that has a nice fresh, intuitive control scheme like the Wii or the Switch, with a solid release library that covers a variety of styles and appeals, and promptly curbstomp the living shit out of the competitors. The market is absolutely wide open for a smash hit console in the near future, coming off the backs of the PS5’s no-games failure and the fact I haven’t even heard about the Xbox in about 3 years.

Babe wake up, new forbidden snack just dropped

Walking Wake

Tbh as far as I know, the universe being a mystery IS one of the bigger problems for physics lads

Aw, RIP. Guess time comes for us all in the end, and I hadn’t been watching for nearly a decade. Congratulations for lasting as long as you did.

Actually, fun fact- pocketless may be less practical, but they work on a space vessel, something that has a lot of moving parts that require maintenance and must operate to very high standards.

IRL people that work in and around those conditions are generally not allowed pockets to prevent any kind of pocket junk falling into a machine and potentially jamming it, so this isn’t a practicality thing, it’s a SAFETY thing.

Ignore the fact that the Enterprise routinely takes immense amounts of punishment

Hot damn. I’ve seen friction between upper management before but it’s literally inconceivable to me that I would ever wake up and see that level of genuine hatred from like, one of my place’s senior management tweeted out to an ex-CEO.

I guess Bobby was a very special guy to the Blizzard crew, huh?

Yup. Mechanically, what do you even spend money on once you’ve got Platemail? A boat? A castle? Neither of those are especially likely to be of use to a roaming party of adventurers.

I think my favourite example of a really shitty 5e item (that was apparently quite good in previous editions) is the Ioun Stone. If I believe in official item prices (Very Rare items are worth around 50,000gp), then that means I’m paying that much for an item which…

-Has the same impact as a +1 weapon -Uses an Attunement Slot -CAN BE EASILY DESTROYED (Has 20hp, can be hit by enemy AoE attacks. For example… Fireball, dragon breath…)

That said, for what it’s worth, dragons aren’t the only thing I’ve homebrewed. Here, I made it standard practice to assign prices to all my magic items. Feel free to steal some!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15je74qMiYxSEnF43zp2UkEoSk3LqRymMbxruPVGQ-i4/edit

Actually yes, that’s what I do- I have a ‘sleeping unsafe’ houserule whereby sleeping overnight in a more dangerous setting such as on the road or in the forest only counts as a Short Rest, albeit preventing exhaustion. Getting a Long Rest requires that you sleep somewhere safer where there’s no need for a night watch.

That way, you don’t need to cram 7 whole events into 24 hours, since that’s narratively wack.

All you should know is that if you’re going to use this houserule, make sure your players know ahead of time so that spellcasters know that they mustn’t blow all their spellslots on the first big threat.

Ah, but I have to offer some nuance there- Balance is actually pretty good from levels 2 to 8 (level 1 HP issues lmao).

You’re absolutely right that RP chillers and munchkin power gamer builds are two entirely different breeds, but my point is that as a DM, I’ve seen firsthand what happens if you run a party through an adventure that goes 1-11. AC breaks down at higher levels because hit rates increase so much faster, Saving Throws become guaranteed failures at high level if you’re not proficient in them, and also Flat Damage Reduction isn’t a thing so action economy is pretty rampant.

Anyways I guess my point is that we ran into these balance issues with the pure players who just wanted to vibe. And that’s what makes them a serious issue to me. Some people have fun breaking games and I can respect that. The problem is when the game starts breaking when nobody was trying to break it.

(Also there’s the whole issue with Magic Items not being priced or treated as available in 5th edition)

Certainly!

This will be a slightly edited excerpt from this homebrew I’ve been making here, for Fully Playable Actual Dragons- I deemed the only way to make the dragons actually FEEL like dragons was to build them to start at level 10-11, with the first 10 levels representing the features from their race as a dragon- but that in turn meant that I needed to actually start fixing high level play, as well as writing out a guide in my homebrew for other DMs to help guide them if they wanted to allow a dragon PC. (This template is still a work in progress on the balance front, I’d be honoured if you use it and I’ve been tinkering with it for months, but please don’t expect it to be perfect)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eFc2qQTY9P3ym9fyMNYHC_mIogpt9kNrOdm5n_yj1cs/edit

So as preamble, the game balance gets pretty awkward from levels 9 to 12 (which is almost certainly why BG3 caps out at level 12), and completely breaks at level 13.

This is for a few reasons, but there are two main stinkers.

AC at higher levels of DnD does not keep up with hit rates. In official content, then the highest AC given to any creature is 25, seen on the Tarrasque and Tiamat. This ignores the fact that three main things can raise hit rates, and only two things raise AC- Magic items, Ability Scores, and Proficiency. Having no way to add proficiency to AC means it becomes badly irrelevant beyond 13th level for most tank builds, and the problem is only made worse by the fact that the game puts magical armour at a truly massive premium compared to magic weapons.

Below, I’ve created a table of levels against the suggested non-boosted AC for an average creature of that threat rating, which doesn’t factor in magic armour, spells, or AC-boosting class features, but DOES assume that opponents will have level-appropriate stats and proficiencies, and that players will be outfitted with level-appropriate magic items (acquiring enough +3 weapons for the entire party at around level 12). AC should be raised by a further 2-4 points for an enemy with high AC, and if it’s a low AC enemy, just use official numbers lol.

Remember, dragons are meant to be high AC, and Challenge Rating is a fucking awful system, so most adult dragons need a bit of an AC buff.

1: 15 (Compare to an ‘optimized’ first level AC tank, a fighter with chain mail, a shield, and Defence Style- they have 19AC, which is within that 2-4 points for a fairly balanced High AC)

2: 15

3: 16

4: 16

5: 17

6: 17

7: 18

8: 18

9: 19

10: 19

11: 20

12: 20

13: 21 (At this point, martial humanoids should have their first +3 weapon, and a hit modifier of about +13, which can easily shred vanilla Tiamat with a little Advantage)

14: 21

15: 22

16: 22 (Raphael from BG3 is here. He has 26AC and more HP than the Tarrasque, and he’s not considered unfair as a threat to a party of level 11 to 12 PCs, just tanky.)

17: 23

18: 23

19: 24

20: 25 (Tiamat should have 28 to 29 AC in order to come across as reasonably durable for the strongest villain in DnD)

To finish this point, DO NOT think that every enemy must have this much AC or a hitrate to match. If your players have characters (dragon or humanoid) who have 21AC, then never be afraid to give an encounter a swarm of weaker foes who have a measly +5 or +6 to hit. Players fucking love getting attacked ten times and being told that 9 out of 10 arrows simply bounce off them harmlessly, and the tenth that hits them doesn’t do that much damage (This can also help with both encounter pacing and the game’s narrative).

Saving Throws get even more broken than AC at higher levels, and are quite possibly the main reason that BG3 and other official content tends to cap out at level 12. If you don’t have proficiency in a DC19 Save, then your chances of passing are horrifically low, even with a pretty solid ability score to draw on- but +2 to the save from a 15 in Wisdom absolutely won’t cut it. This is why Draconic Indomitability (which is pretty much the same as a Fighter’s Indomitable) exists, as most Wisdom and Intelligence Saves at high levels are effectively instant kills if your enemies are smart about using them. And even then, Indomitable is flawed- Advantage is much less effective with a low base chance of success.

For these reasons, I highly suggest that you introduce your own homebrew for your humanoid players designed to allow them to get some bonuses to their Saving Throws- either make a version of Epic Resistance that doesn’t require them to have Draconic Indomitability, or a magic item that gives them a bonus to saving throws (this won’t be quite as necessary if someone is running a high-charisma Paladin)

Kind of checks out for me. OneDnD got utterly kneecapped by their Pinkerton shit, after they pulled that jackass stunt then community goodwill was at an all-time low, and introducing a system to replace a popular system is REALLY hard even under ideal circumstances, so it’s not a surprise that I’m far from the only DM that hasn’t given OneDnD the time of day.

Couple that up with the rampant powercreep in new 5e books and the utter mediocrity of most premade modules’ storytelling and content (although tbf the true power and appeal of DnD is for a DM to make a world that’s alive and can react to you saying and doing anything, and putting that into a module’s story is also extremely difficult), then I and most other core fans that I know have just been homebrewing absolutely all our content for literally years, even going so far as to manually fix higher levels of play with our own errata (as the game is notorious for being completely dysfunctional in terms of balance once you get past level 9)