It's time to reconsider some games now that we have some practical experience in proper play that allows for Research & Development For Competitive Advantage to actually manifest on the table. Those two posted above are examples. You can include Heavy Gear and BattleTech. Because it is long past time to bust another myth- that this is exclusively the province of the publisher.
Run: August 25, 2026
Without The Clubhouse All This Is Impossible
More receipts that Normies Prefer Bots. This is going to play out the same way that mass-manufactured goods trumped the local craftsman. Normies want The Same, But Different. They want books, movies, music, etc. that are clearly within strict boundaries, but vary within those boundaries like shades of color in paint--Maroon vs. Raspberry, even though both are Red--and as we've seen in physical goods the capacity to churn out mass quantities of the same thing with quality equal to what a human craftsman can make on average always wins in competition. Book sales prove it, supported by Kindle Unlimited page reads. This is what the refusniks have to contend with: the Revealed Preferences of Normies have consistently shown that they prefer the mass product over the handcrafted one because, when given the choice, they choose the former over 80% of the time- usually over 90%. The hysteria over AI is just that; when they get the blind test, they choose the bot. You won't fix this by banning it; the savvy will just lie, the cunning will go where the bots aren't banned and do it there, and you still lose because the bot masters can and will Zerg rush you to win- which is already happening. Full industrialization of literature is here, like it or not. The only consolation to be had is that achieving the full power of this technology still requires real skill, acumen, and mastery of the craft. You need the eye, if not the hand, to make the most of what this offers. That D&D app that Jon Del Arroz made can be vibe-coded to Minimal Viable Product status, but it still needs a competent coder to go from Viable to Finished. Most people Thing That Works and as cheap as they can get it. They don't want, and will not buy, a hand-crafted version of what is mass-manufactured and available at Walmart- just ask all the axe and knife-makers. And the human writers that stand after AI culls the weak? They are going to be those properly conversant with the Old Masters- they are exactly the highly-skilled, well-read, and knowledge-possesed masters who can make the most of this technology. Which is not most of those whining about it- especially in OldPub. I look forward to see you drowned by superior bot-manufactured work, because that means we're closer to the literary analogs of Art Nouveau and Art Deco- two styles that cannot exist without mass industrialization and output.
Vidya continues to make the Cargo Cultist offering look as bad as it is. Light No Fire in particular is a threat to Temu D&D and even to Official D&D because you have a Domain Game. Better than others like it (Valheim, Enshrouded, Pax Dei, etc.), this threatens the Cargo Cult in particular because of--you guessed it--reduced friction compared to Cargo Cult play and it being full of fake and gay lameness. Want to play solo? You can. Want to get the boys together? You can. Build up your own domain? You can. Lots of what makes Vidya in general a superior alternative to Official D&D and Cargo Cultist knockoffs is here, is refined, and is going to be far easier to acquire and play (and get others to play with you) at a cheaper price compared to Cargo Cult non-gaming. Unlimited L Works, Cargo Cultists. All the Ls. All for you. All the time.
Level 1 - Kobolds This is my second attempt to earn a passing grade from Jeffro Johnson.
A Place Of Fraternity For Those Who Need It
This concept of friction needs to be seen in other contexts to grasp what Wizards of the Coast is after. Let's look next door at Blizzard Entertainment. You can see that friction is clearly on the mind of the Dangerhairs and Remorseful Trolls at Blizzard. While what I've embedded above is supposition, it is clearly informed supposition and likely is 80% correct given both present trends and past performance. The Retail game, the one that's all whatever it is coming out of the Political Commissar's Office there this week, is very much a disposable and seasonal game now; you play the patch, not the game, and if it weren't so loaded with Fear Of Missing Out triggers you'd be able to come and go at will (much like FF14). The argument being made here--that the new Classic rollout is to deliberately silo the legacy audience into their own paypig pen so that Retail can become whatever the Dangerhair Brigade wants it to be without fear or shame (or expectation of shouldering the company, i.e. consequence free if a failure) is mostly correct. What's wrong is the idea that this is where new players will go. No, that's for Retail. Why? Retail is being made increasingly frictionless. Normies, Casuals, Tourists- they go where friction doesn't exist. That's why WOTC wants them too. Make your game piss-easy to play--Free To Play, No Scheduling Your Fun, Lots Of Pay For Convenience (that is often Pay To Win in Asian titles; they love to flex like that for some reason)--and Normies (et. al.) swarm you, but are fickle and fair-weather so you need to keep them coming back frequently with new stuff. This is the basis for the Seasonal Model: MAXIMIZED NOVELTY! If Retail WOW goes this route, all of the things legacy players claim to hate (but, via Revealed Preferences, show that they do not) are going to be maxed out and present trends (such as AI party members) will be fully standardized such as by making their use mandatory for a first-time through an instanced content option (and it will be sold as "The Story Mode"). Crafting, gathering, etc. will be depreciated in favor of doubling-down further on Doing Stuff (dungeons, Delves, raids, PVP, etc.) that can take no more than an hour- and that's for clearing a raid, so for everything else it 30 minutes or less- often a lot less. In Tabletop, this translates to WOTC pivoting iteratively (drawing it out over years, not all at once via an edition change) to the things I mentioned: AI DMs and party members, gameplay being based on the Encounter and not Adventures or Campaigns (and Encounters being timed at 5-10 minutes so you can do them on a smoke break at work on your phone), paid enhancements for convenience (e.g. pay to Never Fail Saving Throws), and plenty of Branded tie-ins (oh look the Ninja archetype got a new subtype thanks to the Naruto/Boruto collab, and you can adventure out of the Hidden Leaf Village now) to keep drawing in new (and luring back lapsed) players. Frictionless Convenince means that All Content Is Always Available on the player's side. You want to play using the Newtype rules for the Psion class, have a background with the Swordmasters of Ginaz, be the daughter of Storm Shadow, and fight with a lightsaber? You can, because Restrictions Are Friction and Big Gaming doesn't want to scare the Normies. Frictionless Convenience on the Referee's side doesn't exist because WOTC's taken the Referee out back, shoved him into the ditch, and shot him in the head. The bots do that now, and so long as what the players want is Brand Safe it's AOK! Sure, the bots can only do what WOTC allows, but most Normies won't go beyond that anyway (and never have) so this is no drawback for WOTC. This also means that WOTC is, within a decade (maybe within five years), going to be like Blizzard in the hunting down of alternatives. Unlike Blizzard, WOTC won't be siccing Attack Lawyers on Your Temu D&D. What they will sic them on is attempts to breach their Walled Garden, in the form of trying to make content for The Only Game That Matters, and the Temu D&D crowd will do it because with the gates to the garden being shut and a gatekeeper installed it'll be like USAID money drying up: lots of people who front like they matter are going to start closing shop or lashing out because they can't suck off WOTC's teats or eat WOTC's scraps anymore. They are also going to find out how badly they needed WOTC for acquiring customers because this new Universes Beyond scheme kills their core offering: We Have The Fantasy WOTC Doesn't. Which brings me back to Ryan Dancey and his 1999 revelation of Network Effects. Part-and-parcel of that revelation is that Normies don't want to waste time relearning How To D&D. That's because they see ALL of Tabletop as D&D, and every Cargo Cultist pretending to be a publisher knows it- the more honest ones confess it. (Yes, MMOs are still the same way; all of them are WOW.) Every single difference is a point of friction. Points of friction add up to Quit Moments VERY FAST for Normies. That's why they never take up alternatives, but instead kitbash D&D into what they want- assuming they bother at all, and very few do. They instead just quit the hobby entirely, something that happened with increasing frequency over the last 50 years as competing media began being able to give them the less-frictive alternative media offerings that they wanted out of D&D but did not get. They didn't see any other Tabletop product as something other than a D&D knockoff, so they assumed that they were all the same and thus a waste of time. Oldfags did not do jack shit to dispel this mistaken notion. (They say they did, but their actions proved that they did not.) This is why WOTC's gambit will succeed if they can figure the tech end out. Now that vibe-coding is a thing, that's far more likely to happen such that I can count on it being the case; the Dangerhairs can vibe-code to Minimum Viable Product state, hand it off to someone who knows what he's doing with code (and it will be a man, since we know there is no woman or Jeet with the skills needed available over there) to finish it as Work For Hire, and then be on call when the H-1B maintaining it inevitably fucks it up (usually by subcontracing it to his cousins back home on the downlow against company regulations and in return for kickbacks). Yes, there will be the legacy game we know. It will be depreciated in perpetuity, siloed into its own paypig pen (because that's what buying PDFs and PODs on Drivethru is), in favor of the mobile-friendly game where you play by the Encounter and may or may not have other players in your party- like you will know or care, as you're in it for Phat Loot and whatever else counts as high status play by then and they will never listen to your pitches because they're moving between one-shotting Storm Shadow to farm for his sword, doing Ranked in Apex with the boys, stream-sniping Dr. Disrespect in Warzone for lulz, and having Netflix on a second monitor playing at 2x speed- and you want that guy (or gal, or whatever they think they are this week) to show up at a specific time and place to do the same fundamental activity, but slower? Bitch are you high? No, you Cargo Cultists get Unlimited L Works now due to this. There is a way out, but that means admitting Jeffro Johnson and the Bros were right about everything and you are nowhere near ready for that ego-death yet.
On Tuesday of this past week, Wizards of the Coast confirmed what we all suspected about the Dark Sun revival. This was not a surprise. This was merely a disapponting confirmation of what was expected. The entire point of the product release is to push Communist propaganda, removing all of the nuance that existed in the former edition of the setting in the process; you can count on the writers imposing their inverted morality upon the setting's moral compass. The fantasy that is being sought here is the fantasy of the Party Vanguard establishing the Communist Uptopia. That is it being done in a wasted world where iron and steel is more scarce and precious than gold, where the conditions of life are so precarious that it only compares to Arakis, and as such the implied anarchy championed by the Revolution is Extinction with extra steps. You'd think that this was willful and deliberate on the part of WOTC and its partners, but no these Dangerhaired Dipshits are not that cunning or savvy. They are the Useful Idiots that get shot when the Revolution is achieved, the Genestealer Cultists that get eaten when the Tyranids arrive, the Chaos Cultists that get used as ritual fodder when their masters need to summon something with power into the world or meatshields when the Inquisition comes calling. They are the minions, not the masters. They are mask-off with this because they believe that they have achieved the Revolution, at least in Tabletop, and in this they are mostly correct in that because they hold the Network Effect and have successfully achieved an Enclosure of the Commons through erecting the technical architecture required to seal up the funnel that Cargo Cultists rely upon to acquire customers and thus 100% capture the commercial side of the hobby (and with it most of the hobbyist acquisition) into their Walled Garden. So long as this is deemed Brand Safe by WOTC's C-Suite this is going to continue. That is the only form of leverage you have left. You must convince, by word and deed, that this direction IS NOT SAFE FOR THE BRAND! If you are neither willing nor able to do that, then your only other option is to leave that entire model of hobby organization for the older model revived by the Bros. Or you can quit, which you will inevitably do if you do nothing because you're going to lose players over time and be unable to replace them. We are past the Collapse now. You either follow the majority into the Walled Garden, you change your ways and earn your place in the Clubhouse, or you're done. Choose before it is chosen for you.
This is the same docketed encounter discussed previously. Now that you’ve seen one potential outcome, what I present here is demonstration that any one enounter can have a wide variety of results, but also a method that adds complexity to the potential results that is not entirely in the hands of the person/people running the […]
The Face In The Frost Review, Part Two
Jon Del Arroz, writing at AI Central, wrote this on Monday this past week. VIDEO: Testing Abacus AI Agentic AI To Make Your Own Apps by Vox Day Read on Substack Therein he posted a video of himself demonstrating his use of Agentic AI. He showed the vibe-coded agent that lets him do solo play of Official D&D. Sit with that. This is exactly what Wizards of the Coast is pivoting towards. All of the signs, for over a year now, point this way. As WOTC is Big Corpo, this takes time to execute and not just because they have Danger-Haired Dipshits on staff. The rest of the company's operations need to be brought inline, and then the Narrative massaged to make acceptance of these changes a fait accompli. Jon showed--not told, SHOWED--how WOTC is going to kill the Cargo Cult. The reason? Frictionless convenience. That agent is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. It never says "No". It can add additional AI-controlled party members, run sessions wherever on the map and (once mobile-deployed) wherever you get reception, run for as long as you want, all the time. Cargo Cult Dexters have no leverage anymore. "Not at my table" gets you kicked to the curb; the bot is always there, doesn't cheat, doesn't fuck with the rules Because Reasons, and doesn't play favorites. As Cargo Cultists deal with attrition on the regular, recruiting replacements is required; agents like this kill that deader than disco because you will NOT convince the Casuals, Tourists, and Normies that WOTC targets to put up with friction of any kind once they are aware that agents like this exist. The Cargo Cult model dies whimpering due to this. Only the Clubhouse, rooted on Braunstein, can compete because it doesn't try to fight WOTC on its own terms.
Why The Bros Get This Right
Funster made an attempt. If you want a summary: Creators have a responsibility to protect the integrity of their work The problem is that Copyright Law is corpo-driven, specifically driven by the Devil Mouse, and so there is only one way to achieve this objective: to use the tools of the corpo world to build the structure necessary to compel post-mortem execution of this duty of care. Funster, being typical of men in the hobby, has no idea what that means. Most working in the corpo world don't either, not even in WOTC or Hasbro's C-Suite. Their lawyers do. The bare minimum is an Offshore Asset Protection Trust based in the Cook Islands, Nevis, or Belize. That Trust then holds a CI or Nevis LLC; this is the operational element at the core of the structure, to which all other elements append as subsidiaries. The premium version is a Private Interest Foundation in Panama or the European Equivalent in Lietchstein, which then has a LLC within it in CI or Nevis. The purpose here is to have rock-solid protection against 1st World civil suits. These are jurisdictions and legal structures that, when properly erected, tell judges to pound sand. Principles are expensive and make enemeies, enemies that use lawfare; this structure stops that cold. You then want a US (or UK for British or European-based operations) LLC to be the Local Office that actually does the work under contract from the Trust as Work For Hire. The Trust exercises Brand Control over the property under rules that you--as creator--establish in your lifetime, rules that survive your death and become the private law of the Trust thereafter. The canon is closed and the rules carved in stone. The Trust then owns and enforces Trademarks, registers and renews Copyrights as they can (and enforces them), and if Patents apply those too are filed and enforced. Cook Islanda, Panama, and Liechtenstein all have mature and long-standing reputations for integrity as Trustees- CI's in particular are Licensened and Bonded, so they have real money on the line to incentivize them against doing fuckery. In short, we can do this. It's just not cheap, easy, or convenient to do so; this structure is $30-50K to set up and about 10% annually to maintain, so it's not worth it to bother unless you've got something that is commercially successful, has been for many years, and could for many more after you're gone. George Lucas should have done this. George Martin should do this. Most in Tabletop? Not even worth trying the Temu version that's entirely domestic (Wyoming LLC held by South Dakota Trust, easily bustable by a US judge if he can hold you or your trustee in Contempt). That is assuming that you own it. In the case of anything done for TSR or WOTC, you don't; that's Work For Hire, so they own it and as it is their property they can enshitify it if they want to and all you can do about it that means anything is to not buy it and not give any traffic to it. Is it worth it? I'm going to wear the black hat here: if you can't afford the structure, it's not. Macris can justify doing this. Siembieda can. The Pundit? LOLno, and that goes for most in Tabletop, and quite frankly we're better off because it is so.
You are wrong about AI and writing. The technology now exists for the ambitious and the skilled to make one-man publishers of themselves. Videos (and channels) like this show you how by demonstrating the tools and their use. This is a growing field. If you're still thinking about what Chat GPT could do six months ago, you are already out of date and wrong about everything. It is now possible for one man to draft, revise, edit, polish, and finish manuscripts at a speed which OldPub cannot match. That same man can do this multiple times per week, each one with a unique authorial voice, and yet each one will 100% hit the Revealed Preferences of the readers of that specific Product Category. He can do this while devising the covers himself, formatting the books himself, making the audiobooks himself, and even automating all of the PR work to his email list (usually via Substack) and uploading to the storefronts he uses in addition to his own author site(s). He can, if he wants to, get to a point where he can drop a novel a week per pen-name because readers read in series and read in binges. If he wanted to space out releases he can do that too, usually by format (ebook, audio, paperback, hardcover and usually in that order). This shift requires a different set of skills. Being a copymonkey is not enough anymore; you have to have business management skills, especially the full Public Relations suite (which includes Advertising and Marketing), which means your job is now Project Management- you're the Producer, the Publisher, and not just the grunt shitting out copy. Jason vibe-coded Story Hacker. He's no programmer, and yet he delivered a valuable specialist tool that he offers to his members. Expect more of this going forward, especially if the pressure to cut the balls off the big models continues and thus forces the development of specialist LLMs that lack such neutering. And if you think this doesn't apply to non-fiction work, you are already very wrong; Advertising is already wholly taken over by LLM-powered campaigns, which means Marketing already is, and as such it is already happening that other forms of non-fiction are now being done by LLM-powered production workflows overseen by human management. Now all that needs to be done is to bring the costs down so that those with the time, but not the money, can fully exploit this potential. Jon Del Arroz made it plain: you have to be public-facing to succeed now, which means you can't be a copymonkey- you have to be The Man In Command.
Run: August 18, 2026
Players Care About What They Invest In
In the AD&D campaign I currently play in, we ran out of time to carry out a mass combat within the session. So, the DM put the forces on the board for people to play out in downtime through the docketing approach pioneered by Serious DM, and discussed in Umbros. Without going into everything, our […]
The most "Machodor Sessions" image ever created Introduction Following up on information gathered from Firenewt slavers in the previous session, the adventurers assembled a team and returned to the Pizza Slice of Doom for the first time in over a year. When they were last there, they had defeated the Lovecraftian horrors that had taken it over. Who, or what, would they find on their return? (Another restocking exercise for my favourite dungeon.) Timekeeping This session began on April 9th 2026, with the player characters adventuring all day and returning to Minas Mandalf. Downtime for these characters begins on the 10th. Player Characters Present Sheamus (Level 9 Irish Fighter Lord from Brovenloft, rider of the Rocket Cycle and wielder of the Drewblade) with henchmen McScales (Lizardman F7), Colin Farel (F2), Sinead O'Connor (C2) Steelvein (Level 7 Fighter, Henchman of Giuseppe, mutant) with henchman Rhoikos (M6) Connor Lugh (Dual class bard hopeful Fighter Level 5 Thief Level 1, strummer of Fochlucan Bandore) Downtime Giuseppe and some other characters continued recovering from their bout with the Mezzodaemon in Cthugarak. Sheamus recruited some new henchmen in Minas Mandalf in preparation for the delve into the Pizza Slice of Doom. Session Report The heroes dug through their old backpacks in search of maps they had made on previous journeys into the piece of the crashed Hawkman sky city known as the Pizza Slice of Doom. While they did that, I was doing the equivalent with my physical maps. Once they were ready they took everyone they could fit on the Rocket Cycle and flew off into a nice clear spring morning. By late morning they were approaching their destination, trepidation grew as they passed the cyclopean city sited on the glacier atop the dormant volcano. Mel Gibson's eyes watched impassively as they went. From the air they could see that someone had dismantled the abandoned Irish lift platform, setting up part of it right at the "mouth" of the Pizza Slice. Clearly this rope was being used by some denizen of the place to come and go. They went in and, for practice's sake, had Connor, who had never been here before, check the doors for traps. There was some wry asides about him being "no Slippery Pete," but he got the job done. There was nostalgia all around as the players remembered their way around the maintenance level, passing well-known locations like the place Sever intimidated a pair of nine-foot-tall Boobries, the place they were attacked by metallic beetles, and the place Sever accidentally killed a PC he suspected at the time might have been Slippery Pete in disguise. Ah, good times. But their interest was piqued at something new: evidence that someone had been cleaning the place up, even going so far as to put up a warning sign over what had once been an open pit. Soon they had retraced their steps to the level and area where they had been ambushed by Old Ones riding Shoggoths. Sheamus was jumpy, and remembered various terrible things that he had been trying not to remember for over a year. One of these was the presence of a large number of cyclopean stones of the kind previously only seen in the city outside. I peered at my map very closely before I could make out that I had written "groined ceiling" in this corridor. That was enough to bring back the memories, but by now most of these stones had gone, returned to the city outside, perhaps. Who knows. In any case, the party was able to advance in a direction that had been blocked off before, and as they cautiously explored, a group of Lizardmen rounded the corner and took them by surprise. Encounter #1: Clopper Dapnab Highlights: Lizardman leader Clopper Dapnab was overwhelmed to see McScales with the party. He lowered his Hawkman weapon and looked them over. It seems that in his absence Sheamus's henchman had developed quite a reputation as the "lucky hatchling" among the remaining Lizardmen. Clopper explained the situation in the quadrant of the crashed Sky City known as the Pizza Slice of Doom. All of this was done in the Lizardman language, so what it actually sounded like was this: "Oie! OIE! Yousa hair! Yousa actually... meesa been tinken yousa was a story, but yousa REAL! Da lucky hatchling. Longo time, yesa? Berry longo time." But I will spare readers a full session report rendered in this fashion, "Meesa nice DM". At the start of the session I recapped the background of this place for Connor's player. The Pizza Slice of Doom is the name given by the locals to a part of the crashed sky city, which was once run by King Vultan and his Hawkmen, with Lizardmen as slaves. Then the Old Ones took over and enslaved the remaining Hawkmen and Lizardmen. Then heroes from Machodor killed the Old Ones, incidentally freeing the Lizardmen, who were happy to take over the place and began to live in peace, even bearing new young. Clopper then went on to bemoan the invasion by Purple Worms from deep below, which rampaged around inside the structure. In doing so, some of them were exposed to the gloopy-goopy stuff, the same radioactive waste that Slippery Pete was exposed to that made him shrink down to halfling size. However, the effect of this material on the worms was dramatically different: three worms in particular became much more powerful, and have made their home on the middle level of the part of the PSoD the Lizardmen were living on. This resulted in the 1,000 or so Lizardmen being split into groups: 300 or so with Clopper, unable to reach the 600 or so, including women and young, in the lower level, and leaving perhaps 100 Lizardmen somewhere in the middle level, if they were in fact still alive there. Right before the worms made themselves known, however, Firenewts had used their tunnels into the PSoD from the lava tube below to invade and capture Lizardman slaves. From all this the heroes realised that if they could take care of the problem of the mutant worms, they would not only help a potential ally faction in the Lizardmen, something that appealed to Sheamus in particular, but they might also find another way into the lava tube. Clopper was beside himself: "... Yousa sayen yousa gonna fight dem. All tree of dem. If yousa serious, and yousa LOOKIN serious, meesa show you da way." He roughly sketched out the layout, accessible from the drain in the area the adventurers had taken canoes down in past sessions. The giant worms were territorial and did not work together; each had a different name among the Lizardmen: Da Crusher, known to bring the roof down on its prey; Da Bleeder, known for creating wounds that keep bleeding, and also for pretending to be dead; and Da Gaper, unpredictable, fond of lying in wait to attack from below, and possessed of something else Clopper could not rightly explain. The party made day way their way down to the lower level and found that the water there had long since receded; they were able to walk along the bottom of what had once been a river. Once again there was reminiscing, this time about the session Gurt was swallowed by a Purple Worm. At last they found the new area, an entire ecosystem. Though it was clear that the main passage was the most likely location to encounter a worm, the party hugged the wall and peered down the smaller side passages as they passed. Right near the second side passage they heard ahead of them a strange sound, like a tree falling over slowly into soft wet soil. Instead of continuing toward the sound, they went down the side passage, finding that it terminated in a collapse after 60 feet. However, right beside the blockage was a door, so they set Connor to work on it. No sooner had the thief eased the door open with a soft whoosh than he saw the room ahead: no bigger than a broom closet, and filled with debris and vegetation almost to the threshold. Then some of the vegetation moved! Combat #1: 2 Shambling Mounds Rounds: 7 and a surprise segment Result: Party win Highlights: The party had no ranger this week, and were surprised on two occasions. Make of that what you will. This time it was going to cost them. It could have cost them Connor, but at the last second, after I had rolled and hit him twice as it happened, I remembered to check his Dexterity. Sure enough, it was high enough to negate the segment of surprise. In fact, everyone nearby but Sheamus had a Dexterity bonus, so the attack had to fall on him. He managed to avoid being hit twice, which was very important, as being hit twice by a Shambling Mound would take him out of the fight completely. The first full round of combat followed, and the trio of Sheamus, McScales, and Steelvein, all with three attacks every two rounds, smashed into the mound of moving vegetation as Connor scrambled out of the front rank to the back of the group. He was just in time to see the other mound of vegetation shambling down the corridor towards them; they were trapped between the two. The creatures were incredibly hardy, translating to AC 0 and half damage from melee weapons. The front three had been confident, but another monster on their rear spelled trouble. Connor weathered the initial round, only being hit once. Sheamus's new henchmen Colin and Sinead jumped to help. The cleric readied a cure light wounds spell for the next round, but the monsters won initiative (they won five out of the seven rounds) and she was hit twice and swallowed up by the creature, dead. Round four the same thing happened to Connor, but unlike Sinead he still had some hit points left and was fighting for breath on the inside of the monster. By the start of round five the front rank had killed the first of the two creatures: Rhoikos was actually the MVP here with a constant stream of magic missiles, against which the Shambling Mound had no special resistance. But now Steelvein's mutation kicked in; he had to stop fighting and eat something. This was the first time it had happened since acquiring a Sword of Dancing, so incredibly he could stop for a break and still have the sword fight on for him. This was just as well, as Sheamus was next to be swallowed whole by the same Shambling Mound that had killed Sinead and was currently killed Connor; causing me to wonder if there is some sort of limit to how many people can be eaten by one in the same battle. Rhoikos declared he was going to cast invisibility on himself next round. Round seven started, and the party won initiative, crucial, since it wasn't a multi-attack round; Connor was going to die if the creature survived it, and Sheamus was not looking much better either. McScales saved the day with his spear, and the party breathed a collective sigh of relief that the toll had not been worse than a single casualty, sad as it was for Sheamus's new henchmen to fall so soon. It wasn't a total loss, however, as poking around inside the vegetable matter in the room turned up some shiny jewellery, and a timely detect magic from Rhoikos turned up a potion and a ring. But they were battered; there was no way they could continue and take on the mutated Purple Worms, and so they retreated to where Clopper waited, explaining to him what had happened and how they would need to try again in the future. "Da mutant purple worms issa still down dere. Deysa not goen anywhere. Yousa comen back right? Yousa just... yousa bringen more people next time, okeyday?" Those words rang in their ears all the way back to Minas Mandalf. Session Statistics: Wilderness travel: 60 Miles Downtime begins on: 04/10/26 Combats: 1 Rooms mapped: 3 Combat rounds: 7 Losses: Sinead Treasure & Items Jewellery * 4 12,000 platinum + gems 5000 gold +gems 2000 silver+gems 13,000 platinum +gems Potion of Diminution 300xp Ring of Protection +2 or more 3000xp Rhoikos 3000xp 32,000gp equivalent Monsters 2 Shambling Mounds 4610 39,910 XP & 32,000 GP Assignment Sheamus (E) 9099 xp & 8000gp and McScales (E) 4549& 4000gp and Colin (E) (E) 4549& 4000gp Steelvein (E) 9099 xp & 8000gp and Rhoikos (E) 3549 xp & 0 gp Connor (E) 9099 xp & 8000gp Graveyard Sinead O'Connor (Henchman Cleric Level 2), Nothing compares to be engulfed and consumed by a Shambling Mound in session #153 Gurt the Green (Paladin Level 7), drew the Void card from the Deck of Many Things in downtime after session #147 Rhoikos (Henchman Magic-User Level 6), caught in the explosion of the dying gem coin golem in session #147 RAISED FROM THE DEAD Marco Valtieri (Fighter Level 4), immolated and burnt to a crisp by Vyrathax in Lord Inferno's Lair in session #146 Oblate (Illusionist Level 3), killed and eaten by the Nathruk in the Skalrath in session #140 Eniac (Magic-User level 1), killed by a poisoned Grothak spear in session #137 Rhoikos (Henchman Magic-User level 4), smashed by a Mummy fist in session #126. RAISED FROM THE DEAD Thomas (Henchman Cleric level 6), Killed by a Symbol of Death in session #126. RAISED FROM THE DEAD Josef Ironbeard (Dwarf Fighter level 1), Killed by a Symbol of Death in session #126. Matthias Steelvein (Henchman Fighter level 4), Killed by a Symbol of Death in session #126. RAISED FROM THE DEAD Sever the Wrathful (Ranger level 9), Killed by two pains in the Annis in session #122. RAISED FROM THE DEAD Anri (Henchman Magic-User level 4), found dead with a ghastly chest wound in the Ice Castle, with her heart missing she was unable to be revived, in downtime after session #122 Symeon (Henchman Cleric level 2), Only strong enough to wear studded leather, he was torn to shreds by Troglodytes in session #121 Paul (Henchman Paladin level 3) Effected by the Imprisonment spell touch attack from a Styx Devil in session #117. Might not be dead, but is definitely at least six feet under for all intents and purposes. Gurt the Green (Paladin level 6) killed by a poison needle trap in session #114 RAISED FROM THE DEAD (with a roll of 94!) Solaire the Fallen (Henchman Fighter (paladin) level 3) killed by Stone Giants acting as catapults in session #114 Paul (Henchman Paladin level 1), reduced to 0 hit points by white dragon breath when climbing down a rope ladder in session #108. Killed not by the fall; but by the sudden stop at the bottom. RAISED FROM THE DEAD Ignatius the Smiter (Cleric level 1), horrifically mutilated and killed by double hit from a Shoggoth in session #106 Domby (Henchman with Dex 5), double surprised and turned into a pin cushion in session #87 Luke (Half elf Fighter/Cleric level 1), tragically killed by a normal hydra while trying to cauterise one of its neck stumps in session #86 Gurt the Green (Paladin level 3), killed by a hydra bite in session #86 RAISED FROM THE DEAD Pleasance (Footman level 0), killed by a phase spider bite in session #81 Siegward (Henchman Fighter level 1), killed by a phase spider bite in session #81 Tawadros (Henchman Fighter level 4), killed by a phase spider bite in session #81 RAISED FROM THE DEAD Patria (Footman level 0), killed by a two headed snake bite in session #81 Deltacron (Dwarf Fighter/Thief level 1/1), threw his last flask of oil at, and was level drained to death by, a Vampire in session #76 Petrov the Prestidigitator (Magic-user level 1), wrong place, wrong time; killed by Sever the Ranger in session #72 RAISED FROM THE DEAD Petrov the Prestidigitator (Magic-user level 1), killed again by the toxic gas of an Achaierai in session #72 Red (Paladin Level 1), always popular with the ladies, he was eaten up by a female Roc in the Pizza Slice of Doom during session #67 Jacques Ocular (Magic User level 1), a fat green worm burrowed into his head and turned him into a Son Of Kyuss in Brovenloft in Session #43 Pino (Dwarf Footman level 0), Killed by a Frost Giant axe to the head in session #39 Paro (Dwarf Fighter/Thief level 2/2) Killed by Winter Wolves and frozen in session #39 Zabib (1/2 Elf Fighter/Magic User level 1/1), Killed by Frost Giant rocks in downtime prior to session #39
DD did a Dumb. Vitality/Wounds got rejected for a fucking reason, retard: it was more bothersome than the problem it claimed to solve. Consider the normal way it works: Roll Damage, Track Hit Points. Crits don't matter unless and until they impose additional effects; recovery is equally standardized. Now: Did I crit? No? Roll damage, Track VP. Yes? Track WP. Took WP? Complications on recovery. What happens next? Anyone serious about being effective optimized for crits. This happened in previous WOTC Star Wars editions. It happened with Spycraft (and its deratives such as FantasyCraft), and it happens every single time this is implemented because PEOPLE FOLLOW INCENTIVES YOU FUCKING MORON! What did you do with this? You introduced a means to bypass the ordinary damage capacity mechanic, which rewards those who are better able to achieve that bypass effect with superior combat performance, which incentivizes players to optimize for achieving most-consistent-bypass-performance and thus compels opposition to do the same lest all sense of challenge disappear. Congratulations! You just made the game into Stealth Archer Rocket Tag. Everyone has to become a Stealth Monkey just to stay alive. Combat comes down to Who Can Detect Whom First; the losers get Alpha Struck with Overkill levels of Firepower and get the Swifty One-Shot Macro treatment. When players saw this in action 20ish years ago, they rejected it en masse which is why it disappeared from d20 Star Wars and Spycraft ended up losing hard to competing offerings. No, it didn't make the game more fun. No, it didn't speed up gameplay. No, it wasn't fun to be on the wrong side of. No, it got boring to be on the shooting side of in short order too. It also lead to Narrative Faggotry when things went against the players, further degrading the integrity of the game and the hobby. You should have been bitch-slapped for even thinking about this failed idea, DD. It failed for damned good reasons, such that even the obstensible source (HERO) is notorious for being janky and wonky in the execution of it- thus part of why HERO remains obscure to this day vs. The Only Game That Ever Fucking Mattered. Oldfags, man. Not even once.