“You are using Bonetti’s Defense against me, ah?”

Boring possibility: the DM thinks halflings and gnomes are largely redundant, and picked one to ban.

Or the one shot involves outsiders getting involved with a halfling community in trouble!

Kender, who were similar to halflings and I think are now a variant, were notorious for this. Their schtick is that they “borrow” things from their party members, not understanding that it’s theft. It gave assholes license to be assholes under the guise of roleplay, until the table inevitably needs a talk.

We are officially thinking about this more than the episode did

Like others have said, the rules are… bad. Especially the latest edition. A couple of the older editions are “favorites,” but still mixed bags, and lots of people just take the setting and use it in another system entirely.

There’s a Shadowrun actual play podcast called NeoScum that I loved (now concluded), and it began with “It’s like D&D mixed with Bladerunner!” and ended with “Fuck this, fuck Shadowrun, the universe rearranges itself so we can play a different game.” They even had a goofy recurring bit they would do whenever they had to stop play to look up rules or calculate something, which happened constantly. It’s also not a player issue, since they’ve switched to Call of Cthulhu for another story (Gutter) and just don’t have that problem.

Nobody hates Shadowrun more than the people who love Shadowrun. :P

As a rule, no, but I’ll make some rare exceptions.

It has to be a small studio, I have to be pretty sure I’ll like their next game, and I have to have enjoyed their past game enough that it’s worth throwing them a few extra bucks.

For instance, I’m going to pre-order Slay the Spire 2.

• Mega Crit is an indie studio.

• I thought StS1 was exquisite, so I’m optimistic about a sequel from the same people.

• I playes StS1 for hundreds of hours, so even if the sequel is a whiff, I’d have got my money’s worth from them.

Similar goes for The Haunted Chocolatier, since I played the heck out of Stardew Valley.

I’m annoyed that I expect Hollywood executive, as always, will take the wrong lesson from it. They’ll see it underperformed and think people don’t want a D&D movie, rather than that they shouldn’t have released it between John Wick and Mario.

I played the heck out of NWN when I was a teenager!

…by which I mean I was excited by the character options, so I ended up restarting it over and over again. I’ve done the Waterdhavian Creatures quest so many times I burnt out. :P

I should go back and actually beat the game.

I’ve made a habit of saying “Look, [city] was a powderkeg ready to go off before we even got there.” It’s come up in multiple campaigns.

/u/DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca is right on the money. Mana paces the game, so anything that can break that is super good. In an otherwise even matchup, if one player has a Lotus while the other doesn’t, that can easily make the game. It’s not going to win the game in and of itself, but it’s a huge enabler to play the thing that will win you the game, before your opponent can reasonably do anything about it.

On top of that, it’s literally good in all decks. It’s been banned in every format besides Vintage, where it’s restricted to one (and not including casual/fan formats). It had to be banned partly for power reasons, but also because it makes deck-building less diverse. There’s no deck that wouldn’t want a Lotus if it could have one, much less four.

It’s also part of the Reserved List. After WotC overprinted cards, they essentially promised not to reprint certain ones. I think it’s a dumb decision, but they’ve annoyingly stuck to it (and players are worse off for it). Black Lotus is on that list. And it was alreadly limited in printings, because it was a rare card, and a bit of a design mistake.

It’s also simply an iconic card. Despite being a design mistake, it’s a major part of Magic history, and gets referenced all the time. To some extent, it’s famous for being famous. That makes it the biggest prize for collectors.

So, all this together, it has an incredibly high demand, a very limited supply, and no indication of a reprint anytime soon.

So I printed off a proxy at a professional card printer for 30¢. :)

“If you’d rather play D&D, are you willing to DM while I recharge?”

In my group, yes. :| We actually have plenty of players willing to run games.

That said, they’re also willing to try out new games, so it all works out just fine. :)

It’s really the crux of a lot of issues with D&D, from table problems to game problems to publisher problems.

And as a player who wants to do that too, I keep in mind that the DM is also playing the game and wants to have a good time.

I know, right? But it’s not. You can check it out here.

I forgot to mention. He thinks that there is no game, besides LARPing, that could possibly appeal to women (who he consistently refers to as “females”), so it is a waste of time for anyone to try.

For those wondering if Gygax grew beyond this kind of thinking, no, he didn’t. There’s an infamous forum post of his from 2005 where he calls himself a “biological determinist,” and says that “females” are generally incapable of enjoying RPGs as much as men “because of a difference in brain function.” Could it be that, for some reason, the women he played with just didn’t enjoy the games he ran? No! It must be that RPGs are simply beyond their female brains!

Also, anyone have links to a copy of the issue of Europa cited in the article? I’d love a primary document to cite in the future.

Huh. I kind of do this in between sessions. I like to read a few pages, maybe a chapter or two, from whatever rulebook, just so I’m constantly brushing up on the rules.

You can also check the modlogs. They can be really revealing.

To go one step further, it’s not just that their customers will fill in the gaps, they’ll also take the blame.

The DM struggles with a products that provides them with little to no support? “Skill issue. You just need a good DM.”

The DM works doggedly to fill in and paper over the gaps? Sure, they’ll appreciate the DM, but WotC gets some credit because “This module is so much fun!”

Fun fact/wet blanket:

Actually those are just coins, which can sometimes be triangular in the Forgotten Realms.

Interestingly (to me at least), the only specific example I found was the Sembian silver piece, or “hawk.” In the image, we also see what looks like copper and gold, too, at the minimum.