Please for the love of god unmute

Evening Bat echolocating 🌖💚

I'm so glad media like Heated Rivarly exists for people who enjoy having fun. Personally, I hate fun so this show is not for me. If a movie or tv show leaves me happy it's simply not for me. In fact, it should make me feel worse than I did before watching it.

ok enough regular fujoshi media we need to investigate how writing about men fucking is actually proxy sex between women we need a story about two womens increasingly codependent and toxic online friendship built on writing slash fiction together escalating to doing sex roleplay on instant messengers pretending to be their favorite ship to get better at writing so they can really embody the mind of the characters obviously and talking one of the women thru her divorce and their weird emotionally blurred and toxic friendship as the more talented friend keeps leveraging her popularity and control over a major fanfic site in the fandom to keep control over the rapidly deteriorating friendship and they have weird phone sex and one of them realizes they are gay for real and gets a girlfriend whos jealous of how much time shes spending online and the friendship eventually explodes and one of them goes on to get published and the other woman shows up at her book signing and its the first time they have ever seen each other face to face but only one of them knows who the other is

Has this been done?

Running D&D in 2024 is like, the player community collectively convinced each other that dungeon crawls, resource management and attrition are bad, so now everyone runs games where characters can expect to get into one or two fights a day and characters are never stretched for resources, and most Reddit threads about D&D are GMs asking for help challenging their groups because of said ignoring of the resource management aspect and getting told that a good GM could make it work so obviously they must be a bad GM.

I should start making DM advice videos.

The title: "How to keep your party challenged and engaged"

The thumbnail: "Do this one weird trick!"

The content: "Grind them into paste in your meatgrinder."

"This forgotten method could save your D&D campaign" and the thumbnail has a guy thinking ponderously and the words "Dungeons & Dragons" are on the screen with the word "Dungeons" circled

With an arrow pointing to it.

"This forgotten method could save your D&D campaign"

#LITERALLY#the best d&d 5e game i ever ran lasted years and it was a megadungeon#we used encumberance and i made sure vision and light were important#and it was amazing!!! the PCs felt challenged even after breaking into the double-digit levels#people are afraid of numbers and they'll say shit like ''oh but i don't want to play with spreadsheets'' and it's like...#you don't need a spreadsheet for 5e you literally just change numbers on your character sheet. which is why the character sheet has room for#all those numbers. because that's how the game was designed to be played.#if you're not playing d&d with at least SOME dungeons then why are you playing d&d. just play a different game right?

I am kissing these tags mwah mwah mwah

#I don’t like encumberance bc i find it a little frustrating to do it in EXACT numbers however still within reason#i think tbh as long as your players are engaged and having fun that’s what’s important#some rules still are relevant but tbh what’s we play for is for the story so as long as the story is engaging and interesting#(which my last dm did FANTASTICALLY)#then it’s fine to use or not use whatever rules you like. that’s the whole point of the game - you can use or change or add what rules#you want to for your table!!#dnd is just the system and i disagree that you need to have dungeons. dnd is just the system and you can do what you want with it#that’s the beauty of trrpgs and why dnd is so popular imo. dms can change what they want#add in new mechanics that suit their worlds and characters and whatnot

These tags just demonstrate the issue that this post is about: people think D&D is a completely unopinionated game that you can just take whole systems out of without altering the gameplay. But D&D is a game that is opinionated about many things, resource management being one of them, and once you remove the resource management out of it you end up with a worse game with no tension and DMs suddenly having to fix a bunch of new problems that arise out of that, like having to suddenly figure out ways to challenge their party when tracking resources (this includes stuff like spell slots and daily uses of abilities) is no longer an issue except on a per-encounter level.

And honestly "DMs can change anything" is not unique to D&D. If I wanted to run a game that doesn't care about dungeon-crawling and resource management I would much rather run a different game. And I wish people in the D&D playerbase realized this as well, because not only is it bad for their game and its play culture, it also stifles creativity within the hobby.

All of which is to say: if you don't like resource management there are hundreds of games out there that don't care about resource management.

This sounds a whole lot like "You're having fun wrong!"

You can totally change any rule you don't like. In D&D, or any other game. You can change the rules in Sorry! if you want. You don't have to play Chutes and Ladders instead.

I've noticed over the years that WotC and Hasbro have changed the game from encouraging players and DMs to change rules they don't like, to severely discouraging them. (I assume this is to sell more minis, and now D&D One subscriptions.) We used to call people like that rules lawyers, and most of us stopped inviting them to our tables.

By all means play another game. I haven't given Hasbro any of my money since 3.5, and I don't intend to start. But don't complain about the way others are playing. The only way to do it wrong is by NOT having fun!

I'm sorry but this is such a pissing on the poor reading comprehension take.

This post is about observations of a play culture where people clearly are not having fun, as attested to by hundreds of GMs trying to run the game in a way it's not optimized towards and suddenly having to do a bunch of work to patch over those newly discovered issues! That's what the first post in this chain is about: people have self-inflicted a playstyle onto themselves which simply does not harmonize with D&D, but because the current play culture of D&D doesn't consider the GM's fun a factor they need to deal with toxic memes like "a good GM can fix it" when they shouldn't, in fact, have to fix things if the game were fit to purpose!

So yes, this post is about people who clearly are, by your definition, having fun wrong while playing D&D, because they have made the job of running the game way too stressful for themselves! And the purpose of this post is to say "You don't have to run the game like that. You can just take the game at its own word and let the game take the reins. That way you, the GM, will also have to do less game design on the fly."

Also while this old post is going across the dash: the idea that WotC is somehow trying to discourage people from changing the rules they don't like is demonstrably false. The current culture of play of D&D is very much based around the idea that the latest edition of D&D very much gives explicit license to people to change the rules they don't like and treats this as a somehow unique feature. Meanwhile the emergent player culture of the game sees the license to change the rules of the game as their first line of defense against any criticisms of sloppy game design or lack of clear design goals. WotC and the D&D community both cultivate the idea that it's okay to change any rules you don't like and the fact that you can means that any issues you have with the game are your fault.

Also also: someone in the tags was like "sometimes people really don't want to play a dungeon crawl and it feels unfair to jump one on them, so what do I do" and my personal suggestion is that you run something other than the dungeon game for them. Seriously, if you take D&D out of the dungeon it gets uncomfortable. There are hundreds of fantasy games out there and while many of them do feature dungeons a lot of them are much more conducive to non-dungeon-related gameplay than the dungeon game.

#i do think 5e is capable of running a political game though#i wouldnt know ive GMed

D&D 5e is capable of running a political game in the sense that the game won't actively prevent you from doing so, but this is the absolute bare minimum in terms of actually having support for running a political game. In the context of a political game D&D characters can fall back on a bare bones social skill system and if your gameplay is mostly politicking you will have to suspend disbelief for the fact that the player characters will be largely growing in terms of combat effectiveness. In these ways, yes, you can absolutely run a political game in D&D 5e, but the game itself will end up doing very little of the heavy lifting and such gameplay will ultimately end up being something where the group (and most likely the GM) does most of the work to make it function at all.

You know what D&D 5e does have lots of mechanical support for so that the group won't have to do most of the work? Fighting monsters in dungeons. There are other games that will serve you much better if you want to run a political game.

Like, due to the nature of the possibility space in TTRPGs, there is very little that TTRPGs can actually prevent you from doing. I could run a dungeon crawl in Monsterhearts. It would be extremely silly and shortsighted of me to do so when games that much better support that playstyle exist and if I were to argue "I do think Monsterhearts is capable of running a dungeon crawl" people would think it's a really weird statement to make. This statement, however, is taken as gospel by many D&D player when applied to D&D's supposed flexibility, which is, I'm sorry to say, mostly a marketing lie.

D&D players are still out here in 2025 metaphorically trying to run every possible video game as a DLC for Bloons Tower Defence.

EDIT: found the post

This is also the thing that causes the dreaded "martial-caster gap" that you hear so much about in D&D spaces. Statistically, according to multiple polls I have found, most groups (some polls suggest anywhere from 75-90%) are in 4 encounters or less in a day, which drastically changes the power level of a spell caster that is designed to have their resources stretched over 8 encounters in a day. 8 encounters.

No no, hang on, I don't think you read that with enough emphasis.

8 encounters in a day. That's what WOTC balanced the game around.

I'm not here to tell anyone their fun is wrong. But as previously stated by @thydungeongal, if you aren't playing the game the way it's designed and that causes problems and affects your fun at the table, then you probably shouldn't be playing that system. D&D is not designed to be the end all be all, it is marketed to be the end all be all. But the way that most of us (this I don't have statistics for, this is more a vibe-check from the community) play is broad-sweeping narratives focused around the feel of epic fantasy, not slogs through resource-wasting encounters day in and out. D&D is explicitly not designed to do that. But we treat it like it's the only game there is.

Try other games. Daggerheart and Draw Steel just dropped and both of them look incredible. I also think both of them handle the epic fantasy narrative better than D&D does, but I haven't had a chance to try either one yet so bear with me. I fall victim to this too, since I have pretty much only played D&D and Pathfinder 1E. I haven't even played PF2E, though I do think it looks like fun. We owe it to ourselves to try other games that will help us fit in with the stories we want to tell and the style we want to play, but we never actually do because D&D has such a chokehold on the market. Go try something new and see if you like it. And if you're going to play D&D, maybe try playing it the way it's intended if you want to challenge your players?

@we-are-barbarian the 5e DMG (2014) suggested 6 to 8 "medium or hard" encounters per adventuring day, and had an XP budget thingy to calculate totals.

Needless to say, nobody noticed this section and nobody played like that. It was completely ignored. I think the 5.5 design team was aware that despite the DMG's advice, most people did like 2 or 3 encounters per day, but I can't fathom how that factored in their design process.

All I know is that the 2024 DMG gives zero guidelines on the adventuring day, or the frequency of rests. Despite the fact that long rests still reset all the players' (innate) resources, the DM isn't asked to consider anything "per day", neither encounters nor XPs. To put it another way, resource management is no longer officially supported. Your DM can make it happen, but without any help from this edition.

it pisses me off so bad when someone's like "oh, you've identified a collection of racist/transmisogynistic/antisemetic/etc tropes in this character? and you're criticizing it? well YOU'RE the REAL bigot for associating those tropes with those demographics in the first place!" like it's some kind of gotcha moment and not an immediate indication that i'm doing the equivalent of playing chess with a pigeon

"premarin?" don't you mean "horsefem?"

i'm convinced this is only failing to do numbers because the sundry history-illiterate rubes of the tumblr dash don't fucking know what premarin is

Botryoidal Hematite

this rock is creepy as fuck

it looks like a fragment of an Old God nightmare

@oceanaromantic

@hextalker @unnervez

So fun story, even though we’re used to seeing silver-colored hematite (pictured), the “hema” part of the name actually means “blood”, because there are blood-red varieties: hematite contains high amounts of iron. At certain times in history, hematite was used as a red dye.

“Ochre is a clay that is colored by varying amounts of hematite, varying between 20% and 70%. Red ochre contains unhydrated hematite, whereas yellow ochre contains hydrated hematite. The principal use of ochre is for tinting with a permanent color.“

“Botryoidal Hematite“ means that it looks bubbly. Here’s some botryoidal chrysocolla with smaller balls of sparkly malachite!:

"botryoidal" means "shaped like a bunch of grapes."

for some people, this knowledge will make the rocks seem less creepy. "that's not a multiocular flesh stone, it's forbidden grape!"

for me, unfortunately, it has made bunches of grapes squicky. like plucking an eye from the eyevine and feeling it burst between your molars.

👋 Hi Wellies,

First—

Check, Please! has been optioned for a film/television adaptation. A while ago, actually—and that’s lovely. Nevertheless, the vast majority of options do not become television because it takes a million things going right to get projects off the ground.

That being said.

Ahem.

Speaking of getting projects off the ground...

From when Bitty first stepped out into the rink at Faber, to when he kissed the ice at graduation, we've all been part of this fun, weird, magical world of Samwell hockey. But when I left the world of Samwell hockey, I left knowing Jack and Bitty's story was done. Bitty's journey as the first openly gay NCAA Division I hockey captain was done. We baked the last pie; we shut off the lights at the kegster; the story was complete.

…But as I looked around I realized, I had one more story to tell.

Which is why I'm thrilled to announce that a brand new volume of Check, Please! will be serialized in 2026. Dozens of new comics, exciting update drops, your favorite characters with brand new storylines, and characters you've yet to meet.

Hello, Internet Land—SMH is coming home.

This fifth year of Check, Please! will be filled with shenanigans, drama, hockey, pies, Haus parties, and a new message of acceptance that is near and dear to me. And it's been brewing over the last year and half! But with the latest boom in queer hockey stories, I figured, hey! ¯\(ツ)/¯ Here's another one to look forward to. :)

Marginalized athletes still face harmful bigotry, and for this reason, queer sports stories are more important than ever. I love Samwell hockey and how each of you has embraced this roster of athletes.

There's so much more to come.

Ngozi 🏒🥧❤️

=

MORE NEWS? SURE:

dilute black (blue) mackerel tortoiseshell tabby (torbie)

Don't pay money to see Marty Supreme because some of that money will go to Kevin O'Leary and he will use that money to put Kevin O'Leary in more things.

Toucan discovers a traffic cam. video

Today is the day this toucan discovered a traffic cam

you can only reblog it today

Missed this last year by 50 effing minutes.

Hell yeah I’m scheduling this again.