"Reasons for concern" thread

Is anyone else sick of martials being overpowered?
>clear dungeon thanks to the few spells I know
>tome with a new spell in loot
>fighter rolls STR to take if from me to sell

Our last game started with us observing a gnoll rape camp where half orcs were being raped to death then eaten.

Pretty much continued on like that till we stopped inviting that gm back.

>GoT
>dark fantasy
Pic related

>Villains get impossible amounts of success & plot armor for even the most stupid of plans just because they're villains
Sounds like Ramsay in the latest season.

>series keeps reinforcing the idea that the north remembers and are special compared to the southerners
>roose makes it clear that his position of power in the north is entirely reliant of tywin lannister's willingness to support him
>roose really pushes the idea that ramsay has to act smart and not like a mad dog or he'll be put down like one

cue season 6
>the northerners don't just forget and betray the starks, they betray their own family aswell by submitting to the murderer of their sons and brothers
>tywin's dead for ages and the bolton's position doesn't change/actally becomes stronger
>ramsay acts like a mad dog and is rewarded for it by northern lords who have become even worse than the southern ones

How terrible the show has become.

Forgot pic.

>We're going to introduce a sanity system
>No, I've never read Lovecraft or played CoC

>DM pulls out premade adventure book
Maybe it's just that my typical dm used to do great work making his own games that when he starts doing this it just sucks

Have you watched the entire season yet? Shit goes fubar for Everyone, including Ramsay

I did. The big bad getting fucked up eventually is all well and good, but the way they made him the big bad and was absolutely horrid.

Ramsay wasn't punished for behaving like a mad dog (like we were told), Ramsay wasn't punished for fucking with the northern lords who always remember (like we were told), Ramsay wasn't punished after the one person legitmising the Bolton rule of the north died (like we were told). Ramsay was punished by borderline deus ex machina.

Kek
D&D losers never stop getting bullied.

>I based this thing coming up in the campaign after x thing I watched/read/played

This is bad.

>I based this thing that came up on materials X, Y, and Z that I read and some online discussion I had about how to do it well, and I didn't tell you until afterwards in case that would've set your expectations for something entirely different.

Is the mark of a good GM.

im hoping so much that the sixth book debunk all of that sixth season bullshit

George: I based this thing coming up in the book after that tv series they made

oh ffs. Ramsay died is such a '' hero beats bad guy after big battle'' that i thought what is was watching wasnt got but a fanfic made by some jon lover

>a fanfic made by some jon lover
that's literally what the tv series is

At some point of the series i started to wih every stark died.. seriously they started to be such a bunch of special snoflakes. Even that we didnt started to talk about that Arya bulshit that we had to watch

Oh, is that why all the armoured knights ride unbarded warhorses and no one sees backstabbers for what they are until it's too late? Just saying.

>Fantasy setting description.
>Agnosticism is common among intellectuals.
>Atheism is common among intellectuals.

I'm not even religious. This just sets off tons of red flags.

Sounds about right considering the show has been off-script for a while now.

There's a reason GRRM takes forever to put out books. His story is fucking labyrinthine; it'd be a fucking miracle if a TV studio was able to keep up with the quality of his work on the kind of timetable required for a television show.

[FEDORAS I N T E N S I F Y ]

Also the mark of a shit player.

Reminds me of that story going around about the guy who wanted to throw "glaives" except he meant the bladed chakram from DarkSector.

Zero interest in the setting of the campaign or the archetypes of the system, just gotta re-enact the latest episode of Naruto and the enemies of the plot provide convenient context for their power fantasy.

It's always the atheists I game with that make a big deal out of shit like this.

>I want to play a cleric but I don't really want to worship anything
>But being a cleric requires worshiping a deity...
>Yeah, but I really don't want to

Meanwhile the three or four Catholics/Christians at the table are perfectly fine with their characters praising Io or fucking Bahomet because it fits whoever they're playing.

she eventually got her way and became a cleric of Steak Sauce since we were playing a stupid game anyway and it was her first time, but I still don't understand why it was an issue.

>Cleric of Steak Sauce
"Lo shall I summon 57 tangy flavours of wrath with a twist of lemon and a hint of charcoal upon ye foul, unseasoned unbelievers!"

I want to play this now.

>Zero interest in the setting of the campaign or the archetypes of the system, just gotta re-enact the latest episode of Naruto and the enemies of the plot provide convenient context for their power fantasy.

Just sayin', he was probably playing Warcraft. Throwing glaives have been a Night Elf thing for a pretty long time and it's the only instance I've seen them called that.

Nah in the story it was confirmed it was DarkSector.

What is a Steak Clerics Turn Undead like?

You gotta Turn Undead so they cook evenly

I was thinking more like in addition or instead of Turning Undead, the Steak Cleric turns Vegetarians/Herbivores.

It'd still work against a decent amount of animals, and maybe against some unexpected people too. Also all monks.

Quite opposite of what I got.

>Atheist, created a priest character
>All other players at least visiting church time to time
>One of them likes esoterics
>One takes Orthodox Christianity a little too serious
>They keep make fun of my character because worshipping to anything is stupid and naive. Mostly OOC, but it tends to break out IC too
>Tried to talk about it, asked if I played something wrong in their opinion
>No, everything is fine, it's just stupid to worship some 'imaginary friend'

And that's how figure of God-Emperor of Mankind was reduced to imaginary friend. It feels like it's more about people being giant dicks, not their religion choices.

>playing 40k
>Imperial humans make fun of worshiping Big E

Purge them, user.

>Not just rolling 4 dice at once
I would disown this plebian at once

I was waiting for Manderly. I wanted to watch him kick ass but all I found was that a teleporting Arya stole his cookbook & a little shit they named Lyanna went & talked shit about the best thing from Book 5. DwD Davos IV is still one of my favorite chapters in ASOIAF thanks to Pieman. Fuck that plot armored shit Ramsay, what battles has the bastard of Bolton won that anyone should fear him? Fuck that Lyanna, she didn't get her throat slit for the Starks. Fuck D&D, they fucked up hard.

It's a "No True Scotsman" argument, but I'm going to say it anyway:
An atheist is an atheist because he sees no evidence for the existence of god or gods - he approaches things with reason and rationality, and as such accepts only those things with evidence for their existence.

Faced with a world in which gods most certainly exist, and are definitely observable, the same world view would see him accept them as fact.

I'm an atheist - an "evangelical" atheist for sure. But playing a game of let's pretend involves suspension of disbelief. If one accepts the existence of dragons, ghosts, vampires and other beings of a supernatural nature, then the acceptance of fantasy gods comes with that.

So my point is this: an atheist playing DnD, or any fantasy RPG, would accept the existence of gods within the setting without question. To do otherwise just demonstrates their own lack of rationality and failure as an atheist.

As far as sanity systems go, CoC isn't really the best.

Well to be fair there are other good source materials for insanity systems

>Whining about "self-righterous" characters
I haven't ever met a situation where it couldn't be boiled down to "waaaah waaaah why can't I be a cunt it's not fair !"

Nah, an atheist in a fantasy setting with provable Gods is just wrong. There's a trope for it, Flat-Earth Atheist.

I like something from Wasteland 2 that says something about atheists, you can choose your religion, "Atheist" and "None" are two separate options.

You're confusing atheism with skepticism. In a world with solid, concrete proof of god(s), being an atheist would be such an indefensible position that there probably wouldn't be a proper word for it. Atheism is literally defined by a stalwart disbelief in the concept of god. An agnostic would be closer to what you described, as someone who is open to the possibility of god yet doesn't worship or properly believe in one.

Yeah its not like there aren't super powerful immortal beings with magic on par with creation itself but AREN'T deities running around in your typical fantasy campaign setting's cosmology or anything.

Atheists in fantasy make perfect fucking sense, you just have to play them as "the gods are just super wizards with a chip on their shoulder" rather than "the gods don't exist."

Yeah, when I was talking about atheists, I meant the player being an atheist, not the character.

I call bullshit.

i dunno
as an athiest myself it baffles me how some of them act.

i mean i used to have a superiority complex about my aethiesm but i grew out of it when i was fucking 13

I don't know, I've had pretty decent games with premade campaigns. None of them reached S-tier,but I've seen consistent As and Bs.

The feeling I got was that the directors focused on the Starks to get anything done and everyone else was jobbed to Bolton. Stannis Baratheon, an impressive campaigner and military veteran was beaten like it was nothing (yeah, who would ever guard their food stores in a siege). The Manderlys did nothing. The whole idea that Bolton was in charge of a group of families that were barely loyal (at that) and the whole thing was a powder keg? Meh, we will just have Jon handle it. Freys getting a facefull of karmic justice? Let's have Arya go full ninja on them. Everyone in the North who isn't a stark is basically useless, is what I'm getting.

I still find the mess in Dorne worse, but the North could have been done better.

Hm, I played some PF with a guy who is a pretty committed atheist and he wanted to play a Cleric because it's not the thing he would normally do.

I think it's just the people you play with. Or, as you mentioned, the girl was just new to RPing and not comfortable.

>None of them reached S-tier,but I've seen consistent As and Bs.

I've never ran a module, but I love one shot adventures. And figure my players would love them for the continous progression they offer. Supernatural did it the best for the first and second season. A bunch of story archs that were connected by more than just names, but less than a thick drama based plot only meant to suck up 15 minutes of show time.

>an impressive campaigner and military veteran was beaten like it was nothing (yeah, who would ever guard their food stores in a siege)
Things like that, and the failure to write them in a good way, is what makes me think GRRM could really take some time to read Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

As far as writing with a large focus on large-scale military action goes while still maintaining a stalwart focus on the major characters behind it, he's gonna have to look into something like that rather than your average fantasy novel to really get the writing down.

user, GRRM doesn't write a show. He writes the books, in which Stanis has mainly been gathering allies and trudging slowly across the North. It's the show that has everyone go full retard and teleport into battles.

If you were complaining about the books, ignore me.

Considering he's using the show as an excuse for delays in the books at this point he better fucking be working on some of it.

>Cleric with the flavor town domain

Nah, that's just where their god lives. Also their holy symbol is sunglasses and their ritual robes have fire patterns on them.

He's just brunt out. He had ideas when he was writing the first three and knew what he wanted to do, now he's just trying to force the books together out of nothing. The show is an excuse.

>brunt
That was supposed to be burnt.

What would praying to Dude Ravioli get me?

Also the captcha was appropriately pizza

Inedible eggs.

>can cook minute rice in 59 seconds
hol up now

>cooks minute rice in 59 seconds

No man should have this much power

That's the power of radioactive burgers for you

>tfw Manderly was reduced to a fat lard too scared of the killer of his son(s) to do anything but sit on the sidelines
Bah.

>transqueer

When you could have used trans fat.

>can cook minute rice in 59 seconds

I'm more concerned about if burger fluid is something he secretes or if it represents changing burger preference

kek

>pic for thread

>tfw Lyanna isn't baked into a pie for offending his royal pieness

>59 seconds
>not 58 seconds

Perhaps he traded the extra second for the planet destroying finger lasers

>He doesn't time skip

>"Oh, you took necrotic damage? That means you lose that much from your maximum hitpoints!"
>But it's a Beholder Zombie, it shaved off half my health! Anyway to cure it?
>"Nope!"
>Also, all level 7 get in unavoidable fight with CR13 Vampire, expected to win.

>being that fat
>wearing all black
>in New Mexico
Nigga, how does he survive that?!
I mean, I can stand heat pretty good, but how isn't he getting cooked like a brazen bull?

sounds like a bad deal desu

A real example of a faustian bargain

Maybe for that one person. I'm an Apatheist and love playing highly religious paladins and war clerics. I find religion culturally interesting much like how one might find different forms of government or different styles of weapons and armour interesting.

I don't get that.
Mostly because every atheist I know goes full DEUS VULT when a god is introduced.
Either that, or becomes an antitheist, because man this god made the world shit.

you know, depending on how shit the setting is.

Paladins don't even need to serve a deity though. Paladins devoted to a specific deity are actually meant to be the exception, which is why you're meant to check if a deity even has paladin orders.

They serve the very idea of Goodness and Law and the pure elemental alignment of it.

Why else did you think he is always on the verge of death?

NEMESIS has the best sanity system I've seen in any RPG

Paranoia has the best sanity progression I've seen in any RPG.

So THAT'S how Deedlit got pregnant!

>"rule zero, user. I can throw out whatever rules I want, whenever I want."

>"What you did wasn't good, so you're moving down to chaotic neutral"
>"well I'm chaotic, so i ignore the guard"

And the one I've seen for myself...

>"I wander down the dungeon corridor alone and unarmed"
>"I eldritch blast the pack of 5 unknown hostiles that are reaching for the triggers to their suicide vests."

(He survived but lost his armor, money and spell focus.)
That's the system from Unknown Armies my dude
Nemesis seems cool I'll have to run a game someday.

>Fuck you Gordon from school

s-sauce???

Except you don't need to worship a deity. You can be a Cleric of Self-Help. (seriously)

That bit of amusing truth aside, you (and everyone else who has problems with this) play with some very insecure people who are not confident in their own relationship with religion. A lot of those are "atheists," but not all atheists are inconfident in their relationship with religion.

Personally, I live for revenge. Hail Vidar!

Honestly if we're talking from a purely logical point, agnosticism is impossible in a setting with divine magic/miracles and manifesting gods, because the lack of clarity of what the gnostic force is is nonexistant.

Atheism as far as it is denial of the existence of a theistic force because of lack of evidence is also impossible because..... the evidence is there.

So really ultimately you're left with only 2 logical options: Unfaithful, who simply decide not to worship anything but don't deny their existence, and Antitheists, who actively oppose the deities and deny their divine nature.

There's a little more factional subgroups in settings where those idiots DIDN'T turn Asmodeus into a Deity and he was still just (rumored to be) the Prime Evil force of the entire cosmos but not officially deified so that things like devil worshippers were also anti-deity, but that's mostly it.

There is absolutely nothing preventing ambiguity from existing even in situations where we understand all of the facts; it's why the US criminal courts operate on the "beyond all reasonable doubt" standard.

For example, if you cast a spell without praying to any particular deity, could anyone say beyond all reasonable doubt that a specific one was providing the spell energy? (No, for the rhetorically challenged.)

Which makes agnosticism -- the Cleric of Happy Thoughts, by extension -- not just possible but demands its existence.

Atheism in the face of transparent divine intervention is probably better thought of as cultivated ignorance or dissonance. Likely most people would just look upon an atheist as sad, or too concerned with mortal affairs.

I should note that you will, by any stretch of the imagination, successfully argue in favor of deism by "winning" or even making an argument about gods in a fantasy world.

I don't think I've played editions that allow clerics to be unspecific.

Paladins absolutely, and its actually supposed to be the exception for them to not be just worshipping the alignment itself. Druids get the Nature Itself option. But Clerics? They've always had to be specific and carry the symbols, follow the rites and pray at the appropriate times.

Considering that "unspecific" clerics were established in Mentzer's 1983 red box set (that would later become Rules Cyclopedia), and that later versions of D&D were pretty liberal with what DMs were and weren't "allowed" to do, odds are pretty good that you've probably played an edition that "allows it."

But I suspect what you meant to say was that you've never played with a DM that allows it.

Literally every edition has allowed it. It was specifically presented as an option in 3.5 and 4. (And maybe 5 but I don't know.)

The Cleric aligns themselves to a cause (and self-betterment is a valid cause, especially for evil ones) and let's call it ambient divine power backs their spells.

We can't all be right, but you do you.

>It's going to be a serious social campaign

never again

Hm, I think I might remember something like this.

They pick 2 relevant domains and a time to routinely pray for spells and spontaneously convert/crosscast based on alignment (neutral chooses at start) or something? I could've sworn that was at least something you'd have to specifically allow like a UA variant or so.

Nope. It's basically freeform cleric.

Pick a good cause (like being a Time Cop) and you can get whatever goofy Faerun domains you want.

I avoid FR like the plague, specifically because of its Pantheon. Mystra, most of all.