Well it would be a nice way to support Lemmy besides voluntary donations. You`d pay the Lemmy-Hosters and get something out of it that would be able to give back to the community (with gilding) at the same time.
Glad to see you! Didn't you say you were the only mod on /r/dndmemes? That must have been rough. Hopefully your stay here or wherever you end is goes well!
I’m not the only mod, there’s a solid group of who chat regularly in a discord, but I am historically the most active (although spicythuder is doing amazing work, if this was a competition they’d be winning rn lol) and do most of the public facing stuff.
So how do you expect it to shake out, btw? Do you think if there’s enough centaur cock on the sub they’ll be forced to let you stay? Are you expecting to get demodded regardless? I’m deeply curious.
Based is one that, as another user said, could go either way. Its original use is very alt-right, but today I personally probably see it used more in support of leftist ideals.
Cuck certainly is much more of a red flag. I have seen it used ironically by people whom I have reason to respect, but it’s far more likely to be the source of some serious questions.
I posted this under another comment but it was originally from a rapper Lil B the Based God
“Based means being yourself. Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do. Being positive. When I was younger, based was a negative term that meant like dopehead, or basehead. People used to make fun of me. They was like, ‘You’re based.’ They’d use it as a negative. And what I did was turn that negative into a positive. I started embracing it like, ‘Yeah, I’m based.’ I made it mine. I embedded it in my head. Based is positive.”
Aw man, imagine using technology to reduce the amount of time people had to spend working, rather than making rich people more money… what a crazy world.
It’s crazy. I’ve read in a few books (fiction, of course) that mention, in passing, that the 40 hour workweek was now replaced by a 32 hour workweek, or something similar.
When do we get to reap the benefits of all of these boosts to productivity?
In many ways, we have been. The average person has casual access to goods and services that would have been immensely inaccessible without industrialization. Consider the average car for example. The engine alone has hundreds of tightly toleranced parts working in a mechanical dance to harness thousands of controlled explosions per second. That doesn’t even touch on the complex support systems required for engine management or chassis/suspension. I can buy a well running used car for less than the cost of a month’s rent.
Compare that to the pre-industrial era, when a simple shirt would have taken a single person 500-600 hours in manual labor to make starting from raw wool. That’s more than three months’ work with a 40 hour work week.
It’s truly amazing that any minimum wage worker in the USA can buy multiple used cars, a monumentally complex piece of machinery by any historical standard, for less labor than it would take to get a new shirt a few hundred years ago.
That said, I do believe we have the capacity to get these benefits PLUS reduced work hours. We will see that when we demand better worker protections from lawmakers and stop equating a human’s value to society with the number of hours they work each week.
If you think we are materially worse off now than we were before the introduction of automation you are either pushing hardcore propaganda or absolutely delusional.
Real median middle class income has stayed effectively constant since the 1980s. However, with automation the variety of goods available at that income level have dramatically improved. This is the benefit that the consumer sees and pretending it’s not a real benefit is disingenuous at best.
Maybe if you shill for billionaires a bit harder they’ll give you one of their yachts.
“Real median middle class income has stayed effectively constant since the 1980s”
That’s the entire point that was being made in the first place! Productivity has increased massively, income has “stayed constant” - So, we’re working harder and producing more for the sole benefit of the rich.
While it’s true that new inventions do make people’s lives materially better, the point that’s being missed is… this is an inevitable consequence of the development of society, we’d have these new inventions regardless of our economic systems or choices of where to tax people, or economic policy. Those benefits aren’t caused by the widening wealth gap, and the wealth of billionaires isn’t required for new inventions to be made.
What we’re talking about here, specifically, is that people are producing more wealth, but not getting wealthier. The wealth of people has “effectively stayed constant since the 1980s” but the total wealth we’re creating has gone up significantly. It’s certainly nice that we have more things we can spend that wealth on, but that’s a distraction from the issue of where the rest of the wealth is going.
If you actually look at people’s lives, “materially” and look past the inevitable march of technology, what else is happening? 70% of people are “living paycheck to paycheck”; poverty, and child poverty are massively increasing; many schools can’t afford to give children textbooks; and teachers have to buy school supplies out of their own meager paychecks; the cost of healthcare is increasing, leaving many unable to afford it (or in non-USA countries, where everyone can afford healthcare, waiting lists are increasing due to poor funding); Towns are bankrupt and can’t afford to repair infrastructure; the quality of most goods (clothes, houseware, and furniture especially) are decreasing to the point where they fall apart in a few years; and most public services are on the verge of collapse.
The cost of housing is so high that younger generations don’t even aspire to own a home any more, the cost of higher education is so high that people expect their student debts to never be paid.
So yes, it’s nice that we have Facetime and Playstations, Those things do make our lives better… but you have to consider, if the “increased productivity” of workers was going towards society and making our lives better instead of enriching billionaires, could we address some of this?
My dude, this is pretty uncontroversial, mainstream economics and sociology, which is being backed up by actual data. You are so terminally online, you are literally rejecting any message which isn’t wrapped in populist fan service. Do better. Touch grass.
Can you provide a single metric which demonstrates that modern humans are worse off than they were 200, 100, 50, 20 years ago?
Healthcare outcomes are worse. Healthcare is more expensive. Life expectancy is lower. Fewer people can afford to buy a home. Fewer people can afford to retire. Commutes are longer. People have to work more hours in a week to get by. A higher percentage of people are living paycheck to paycheck. Infrastructure is collapsing. Towns are in more debt. Higher education is VASTLY more expensive. Literacy rates have decreased. A vastly higher percentage of people work two jobs to make ends meet A vastly higher percentage of households require two working adults, rather than one working adult, to pay bills.
But sure go off about how it’s so great we have the Apple Vision Pro now.
There were some fairly major studies in the UK last year, across many companies and multiple industries, where they reduced the 5 day workweek to a 4 day workweek, whilst keeping the compensation of workers the same overall (i.e. salaried workers got the same salary, hourly workers got 25% more per hour)
The majority of companies involved in the study found that their workers were significantly healthier and happier after adjusting to the new schedule… and as a result significantly more “productive”. Profits even went up despite the reduced working time. Most of them elected to keep with the new system once the study ended.
Obviously you can’t do this with every industry, certain industries need 24/7 coverage or the like… you can’t run an ER 4 days out of 7 - but the takeaway is that it’d be better to employ more people for less time and pay them well - you’ll get better results than you will with an exhausted and depressed workforce
“Worker productivity” has been going up for 50 years, but compensation hasn’t been. That extra money goes into the pockets of the board and shareholders and CEOs.
80 years ago, the average CEO pay was about 20x the lowest pay in his company. Now, instead, we have billionaires.
on top of this, in the US, most workers have unpaid lunch breaks to some of us are stuck at work for 45 hour weeks, plus commute times are increasing over time so we’re practically spending 50+ hours a week committed to our job with the same pay from a decade ago
We have had ultra-rich people and major wealth inequality for most of American history. Rockefeller (1838-1937) amassed a fortune in the 1800s in excess of $400B inflation adjusted dollars. By most measures, he was the richest American of all time.
The second richest American of all time is up for debate but contenders include Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), Henry Ford (1863-1947), or Bill Gates (1955-present).
Wealth inequality has obviously grown over the past 50 years but it’s worth noting that wealth inequality in general is not a uniquely modern problem. It is also exaggerated by comparing to the 1970s, where wealth inequality was at a historical low point (see graph below)
I’m not talking about the single outliers at the top, but about the “billionaire class” in general, it’s a pretty modern concept. There’s a reason I said “Average” and not “Richest”
Yes, if we go back to before 1900 the wealthiest people had more of the pie, but this is largely a product of the bottom of society having, essentially, nothing. 1800s societies were capable of producing enough for (most people) to survive, and there wasn’t much excess “wealth” to go around. While the rich collected most of that, the difference is in the scale of “available resources.” It’s not a comparable system when most of your population are serfs.
I don’t find it encouraging to say “oh well, this isn’t unique, look it used to be like this 100 years ago!” when 100 years ago the quality of life for regular people was abysmal.
The fact that your graphs show wealth inequality steadily growing is the major concern. We had a more equitable society in the 1970s by a long shot. Our current state isn’t inevitable, it’s a result of the policies we’ve implemented. With current trends, do we want our society to return to those dynamics of the1800s? In a world where we’ve so much automation and wealth in the world that we could care for everyone why do people still have to work 40+ hours a week just to get by?
Funny you should say “we” and “American History” though :) Maybe the American model is the problem here.
You said “now we have billionaires” like it’s a new phenomena. The graph I posted tracks the total wealth share of the top 1% wealthiest people, which is a much better picture of income inequality than the “average CEO”. Notice that the total wealth share went from 30% to 35% since its low in 1970, which is a much smaller change than the 200+x difference that people like to quote.
While inequality is growing, it’s not nearly as dramatic as people make it out to be and in 2023 we are far closer to that 1970s low than we were a century ago
In a world where we’ve so much automation and wealth in the world that we could care for everyone why do people still have to work 40+ hours a week just to get by?
I don’t disagree with you. Most people in white collar jobs realistically don’t get more than 5 hours a day of real productive work done to begin with. Why do we need to be at the office for 8 hours?
I just think it’s important to look at the data in an objective way. Instead of posting inflammatory comments on Lemmy that exaggerate the situation, you could try lobbying your representatives for better worker protections.
Funny you should say “we” and “American History” though :) Maybe the American model is the problem here.
Well, I’m American lol. But the trends are similar in almost every developed country so I don’t think this is an American problem.
Your first argument is, again, very American-centric - yes the rate that wealth inequality is growing in the USA is less pronounced than in other places, but it was always pretty bad in the USA. The argument that “trends are similar in almost every developed country” is also a little disingenuous - it’s true for the G8. In many European countries, they’re actually taxing the wealthy sensibly and putting that money into public services to make everyone’s lives better, the wealth gap is much smaller and the quality of life and happiness of regular people is better.
Again “a century ago” or longer doesn’t matter because it’s pre-industrial revolution. The total amount of “wealth to go around” was much smaller, and we were living under very different systems.
If a king or an emperor owns 50% of the wealth of a nation, and everyone else is equal, then yes, your graph will show “the top 1% have 50% of the wealth” but also your system is specifically designed to give all the money to one person. Arguing “well 100 or 200 years ago this was worse” is moot, because we’re comparing different systems… Unless your point is that our current system is also designed to deprive all wealth and comfort to the masses to enrich a select few, and we should be “thankful” that it’s less good at it.
We have to compare within the same system, and look for the best we can do. Unless you’re specifically arguing that the wealth distribution in the 1970s is unsustainable, then that’s an example of when we were capable of doing better, and it’s okay to find that as something to aspire and build towards.
Lobbying your representatives for better worker protections is a joke, especially in America. Many representatives in the USA don’t even hold surgeries, you can’t talk to them directly. You can write them a letter, which they ignore. Rich corporations pay our representatives massive donations to their campaigns (or in other countries, they pay them via more circuitous routes), and they get the policy that benefits them.
Here’s an example - Back at the start of the Trump administration, a bill was written by the house to make it legal for ISPs to sell your private information and browsing history to corporations for their own profits. A number of polling institutions went around and took some credible large-scale polls of public opinion about this. 98% of respondents opposed the bill. The legislation passed congress and is now law. Who’s “lobbying” of congress matters? individuals, or Comcast?
There are a very small number of US representatives who refuse to take money from large corporations - and those, in general, seem to hold the interests of the people to heart. Before “lobbying your representatives” can work, there needs to be widespread grassroots movements to elect more of these people. Until that happens, there aren’t representatives, there are rulers.
It’s not inflammatory to argue for better systems. It’s not a lie that while we’ve had a massive industrial revolution that increased the productivity of workers, those benefits have not been seen by the workers. We still work just as long, and just as hard, for an ever diminishing amount of the pie. You can say “oh but you have a fancy car” but… just look at the percentage of people who own their own home by generation. The current trends are extremely concerning and need to change.
A century ago was post Industrial Revolution and after the advent of mass production as a common means to produce goods. This was also past the time where many European countries had moved to a parliamentary system.
I’m not sure if you are just ignorant of history or what.
It’s not inflammatory to argue for better systems.
It’s inflammatory when the statistics are being presented in a misleading way, which you and many others are guilty of. We can discuss how to improve the system without that sort of thing and it’s not productive to actually seeing change get made.
It’s not a lie that while we’ve had a massive industrial revolution that increased the productivity of workers, those benefits have not been seen by the workers.
It certainly is. Our living conditions have consistently improved in many ways as a result of industrialization.
You can argue that we could see more benefit and I’d agree with you, but to act like the average person hasn’t benefitted from industrialization is disingenuous.
The main thrust of my argument is simply, and throughout, has been this:
In the last 50 years, “worker productivity” has increased dramatically. compensation has not. The increased wealth that we are all generating is not making our lives better - it’s going into the pockets of billionaires.
As you put it “the real median wage has not changed since 1980”. As you showed with the graph you posted, the increased wealth that is being generated is increasingly going to the wealthiest people. This is all the data we need to support my argument, and they’re both claims you have made.
The “improved living conditions” from better technology and industrial processes do not REQUIRE us to be giving all the extra wealth we’re generating to the wealthiest people. These would still exist if we were taxing billionaires and large companies more, enforcing better wages for regular people, and investing that wealth into social programs.
Yes I agree with most of this. If the original post I responded to had said this instead of misleading statistics and “now we have billionaires” like that class of people is a recent development I wouldn’t have said anything. We can make our arguments without those sort of rhetorical devices and people will take us more seriously if we do.
People like to look back with rose tinted glasses and act like things were so much better in the gold ole days. They weren’t and we are arguably better off now than in almost any other time in history. I see value in appreciating that fact.
That said, just because we have benefitted from automation and technology development doesn’t change that we could do better. I’d love to see more social safety nets, more affordable housing, reduced working hours, and so forth.
When we hit peak population. This will be the next historical epoch which dramatically changes the fabric of society, because it will lay bare the finite nature of surplus labor, as well as dramatically skew the ratio of workers to retirees. It won’t completely eliminate capitalism, but it will largely be the end of consumption driven economics, and will force more and more of this surplus productivity to go towards supporting populations instead of enriching a privileged few.
There will simply be no other option. In some places this will happen violently, but in many places it will be a slow but peaceful transition.
Yeah, IIRC a knight’s suit of armor and weapons alone were worth more than most people in medieval times would ever earn in their entire lifetime. Knights traveling on horseback were the modern day equivalent of a celebrity rolling around town in a Ferrari
Iron and steel were a precious metals at one point in time.
Funnily enough, not because iron isn’t abundant (it’s super abundant). Rather, because the medieval process of smelting required a LOT of fuel for even a small amount of iron.
I’ll echo the words of my friend, who is a permanent wheelchair user:
“Yes, I identify with my disability as part of who I am, but I would still take a cure without hesitation”
Yes, people with disabilities identify with their disability, so even in a fantasy setting I can see how their disability would be part of their character.
But every disabled person I know would figuratively leap at the opportunity to reverse their disability with magic. It is also basically impossible to use a wheelchair while holding something like a wand or a staff or a fireball in one hand, so if there’s enough magic around to push a wheelchair, there’s probably enough to make your legs work. That’s why somebody has a good reason not to expect a wheelchair in a fantasy world. I can see how somebody who doesn’t really know any disabled people would panic at the idea of a wheelchair being part of the narrative or something like that, and I can sympathize with it.
What is? Being deaf isn’t a language. Sign language absolutely is a language, or to be more accurate, it’s a whole class of languages, because ASL is as different from AusLan or BSL as English is from Spanish or German.
And like any language, it’s more than just a set of definitions and rules of grammar. It carries culture.
The only people I have ever seen claim that disabilities aren’t so bad and you can live completely normal etc. are people with no disabilities at all. I’m not disabled, my eyesight is just shit and I don’t know what I’d be willing to do to get normal eyesight. Just to get rid of a pair of glasses. I can’t imagine the lengths someone actually disabled would go to in order to get a cure.
"I’m not disabled, my eyesight is just shit and I don’t know what I’d be willing to do to get normal eyesight. Just to get rid of a pair of glasses."
I apparently would pay someone a large sum of money to zap my eyes with a laser using a giant machine with only the vague promise that after the laser burns heal, your vision will be better.
Technically not burning. Even though (and nobody warned me of this before my procedure) it sure af smells like something is burning while the laser shines down on your exposed retina, that’s actually the smell of vaporised cornea.
TL;DR: laser vaporisation, not laser burning. Much more metal.
Nitpick: “large sum of money” - at least here laser treatment is pretty cheap (less than 1k for both eyes)
1: My eyesight is too bad for laser treatment, by the time my eyesight would be corrected there would be nothing left of my cornea and likely retina as well.
1.5: I still have options available to me that, as you point out, just involve throwing more money at the problem
2: me having that option is beside the point. The point is that even just a minor nuisance like glasses is enough to seriously fuck with someone’s (perceived) quality of life, never mind something that actually severely impacts your daily life.
at least here laser treatment is pretty cheap (less than 1k for both eyes)
I’m not sure where you are, but that’s exceptionally cheap. I got it done in Vietnam for about $2k for both eyes. Here in Australia it would be more like $4k per eye.
I suppose the health insurance covers a lot of it, but given the quotes my mother and I (well mine was more a “would cost this much but no can do with your eyes kiddo”) got respectively plus what the health insurance likely paid/pays the “normal” price would still be ~1.5k-2k for both eyes.
I’m in the same boat, and I’ve learned that the answer is I don’t want the smell of burning eyeball lingering in my mind no matter how well I see afterwards.
It's a bit of a double-edged sword. Representation is great, because it makes us feel less like a shame to be ignored or scorned - but also, being disabled fucking sucks, kind of by definition, and it's hard to take seriously people who peddle the 'handicapable' stuff. I don't need any toxic positivity in my life, thanks.
It is also basically impossible to use a wheelchair while holding something in one hand, so if there’s enough magic around to push a wheelchair, there’s probably enough to make your legs work.
First, off the top, you can stop your wheelchair, use your hand(s) for something else, and then start moving again.
Second, you’re making a lot of assumptions about the magic system. Every magic system has limitations. What if healing is a clerical spell, not a magic spell, and there are no clerics around? Maybe the nearest cleric who can heal is many miles away, perhaps over dangerous terrain inhabited by bandits, monsters, etc. Maybe the spell requires some very specific and difficult-to-obtain materials. Or maybe the spell is very high-level, requiring many years to learn, so clerics or mages charge a very high fee for this service. Any of these, or a combination, could be a reason why a disabled person (or a family member on their behalf) is questing.
Maybe the knowledge of the healing magic was held by some ancient civilization and it was lost when that civilization fell, but the disabled character has found a clue to where some ancient ruins could be unearthed where the secret might be found.
Or maybe the GM just says “Yeah, spells can’t do that in this setting.”
In our world we do have the magic to push a wheelchair around, and it’s not even hard to do this. Tinkerers can cast the spell of self-propelling wheelchair in their garages.
But magicing someone’s legs to work is still a far way off.
(Remember, when magic is well explained and documented, and people get used to it, they tend to call it technology.)
“Not even hard” and “costs as much as a car” aren’t mutually exclusive when it comes to the field of medicine, especially in the US. Many drugs cost pharmaceutical companies pennies to manufacture, but they still sell them for hundreds per pill simply because they can. Medical equipment often employs similar price gouging for no other reason than to profit as much as possible from people who have little choice but to pay.
Well, the second pill costs them pennies to make; the first one cost them tens of millions of dollars in investments. The cost of research, development, and FDA-required testing is very high. Not to mention the facilities, cleanrooms, equipment, personnel, software, etc to manufacture, package, and distribute. And they dump a lot of that $ into the NEXT drug or device that could save or greatly improve many someones' lives.
I'm not saying they should be as expensive as they are - greed plays a big role in patent-squatting and these companies also spend a lot to purchase and kill competitor products giving patients no other options. These are all problems we should address. In a heavily regulated industry, having no competition is a recipe for inflated costs. But stating that it costs them pennies to manufacture these medicines and devices is intentionally ignoring a big piece of the equation & arguing in bad faith is not going to help make the situation any better.
Not sure how you are qualifying "often" here? I've worked on both the industry and government side of this equation and the vast majority of companies I've worked for or with are not receiving grants for research & development. Many of the grants given out are for procurement of the drug/device to government agencies (e.g., military, VA, etc) at a fixed rate and therefore cover generic branding costs, etc. so that the "more expensive" version is reserved for higher paying customers (spoiler: it's the same product). It's shady AF, but that's where most of the $ goes from these grants.
To be fair, I haven't worked for Pfizer, J&J, GSK etc. The big boys are definitely getting some kick backs, but they also deal in so many divisions that the grants are a drop in the bucket compared to profits. The bigger issue is that these are the same companies that are buying up the IP from the smaller players and burying them so that they don't compete with their money makers. IMHO, it should be illegal to sit on a patent for some period of time without commercializing or letting the IP go... So many useful medicines never see the light of day because they've already invested millions into an inferior product. Competition is good for the consumer, but in some of these arenas it's a virtual monopoly. What do we expect to happen ?🤷♀️
My friend talked a lot about the forces at work. Not all of it was simple capitalism. Disabled people are notoriously hard to design for because each disabled person is different and has different needs. This kind of business is not scalable and disabled people are already a minority. Even proper hand wheelchairs are fucking expensive cuz only a couple companies make them.
That does make sense. But still, making a powered chair is not at all technologically difficult. You need the chair, two motors and an input system that works for the user.
Sure, if there’s a lot of bespoke parts and manual labour, coupled with basically no economy of scale, it’s going to be expensive. But it’s not difficult.
(Remember, when magic is well explained and documented, and people get used to it, they tend to call it technology.)
Depends on the kind of magic. Magic machines that do wondrous things? Sure, technology. Magic where you manipulate energies with the power of thought and will alone? I'ma stick with magic, thank you.
This reminds me of when I had a player take the keen mind feat and it was an absolute God-send for drip feeding lore. “Kat, you’ve seen this shape before, the bartender had a symbol like this on their ring”
I had to drop in a few irrelevant observations to balance it out, but it was great.
Contact Other Plane is also one of my favourite spells a player could take at my table. It makes them get lore questions answered for practically nothing.
I even turned the spell into a small sidequest where he goes to the same entity everytime, trades memories to it in exchange for it digging informations better than what the spell normally provides.
It’s why it’s better to say Yes and rather than No
Just a little tip: If you use a browser (PC or mobile), you can simply write !noncredibledefense and it will automatically convert the link so that people directly can subscribe regardless on which server they are.
How does that work when two instances can have communities/magazines with the same name?
And that still wouldn't directly let me subscribe since it takes me to sh.itjust.works when I'm on Kbin. I'm also using the PWA but I imagine I'll switch back to straight browser.
While this can be a little confusing at first, after a while 1 or 2 similar communities will became the mainstream ones where most traffic will go while the others will be way smaller and a little more niche.
Sorry that the link doesn’t work for you. Kbin is a different platform and I have no experience with it.
Each !noncredibledefense is followed by an @, then the name of the instance. The first is @ then sh.itjust.works, the second is @ then lemmy.world. All one word, similar to an email address.
The @ points your browser to the community on the right instance. As for the link taking you to the base instance while on kbin, it’s because kbin uses /m/ instead of /c/ as a separator like Lemmy. So for you to visit that NCD from kbin, the link would be kbin.social/m/noncredibledefense@sh.itjust.works. Also it looks like kbin is still having problems receiving updates from lemmy and vice versa.
FYI, there are a shit ton of third party apps and extensions for viewing Lemmy however you want. No idea what type of device you’re using, but for iOS I like Memmy.
Have you heard of TV tropes? It's a wiki of ... well, tropes in story telling (warning: for some people following a single link to https://tvtropes.org/ means they find themselves half a day later with 32 tabs open and having read up on all kind of story tropes while having forgotten what time is).
On the one hand it will help you recognize the tropes and figure out how many of them are used in all story telling (yes, even the good ones), but on the other hand it can help appreciate that it's not the tropes or the broad strokes that make up a story, but how well it's told.
There's a reason there are so many movies/stories/plays that are just re-tellings of some Shakespear play or another: it doesn't matter that the outcome is known from the start. The journey and how well it's told is what's important.
So basically: "Oh yeah, that guy's gonna betray me. I wonder how and why exactly!"
I think part of the problem is that videogame writers are almost never willing to lie to the player. Characters will mislead you by being selective about what they say, and sometimes a character is mistaken about something and unintentionally gives you false information, but I can count on one hand the times a character has deliberately fed me falsehoods.
Having been a GM for almost two decades, this has somewhat ruined being a player in p&p rpgs for me.
I joined a new long-term fantasy campaign. Me and another forever GM plus 3 rookie players.
The first adventure starts and the group gets hired by some guy to retrieve an item from a dungeon while insisting to come along with us.
Me and the other forever GM looked at each other: That dude is going to betray us and become the BBEG of this campaign!
The rookie players looked puzzled.
The GM sat there pale and grey.
Of course we were right. Dude grabbed the item, teleported away and started his reign of terror. But we just chuckled and went along with it, much to the GM’s relief.
A changeling might use a different name for each mask and persona and adopt new names as easily as they change faces. The true name of a changeling tends to be simple and monosyllabic; however, there are often accents to a changeling’s name that are expressed through shapeshifting, something single-skins will likely miss. So, two changelings might have the name Jin, but one is Jin-with-vivid-blue-eyes and one is Jin-with-golden-nails.
I’m more concerned about why your changeling father is trying to conceal the fact that he is your father from you. It’s not like changelings pick a shape and then stick to it forever. He could literally just flick his blue eyes or golden nails or whatever and you would know that it’s your dad.
Edit: Wait is this a meta meme about some dude banging his dad?
Mending was my first thought, admittedly because of Harry Potter And The Natural Twenty. D&D munchkin gets mis-summoned into Hogwarts, and spends a few hours every evening doing all the stuff the rules as written say his character can fit into an evening. He’s still incapable of any magic the school teaches, but now he’s got a bag of tricks a mile deep, and his robes look fucking incredible.
They’re making a joke, riffing off the “you let the magic smoke out” joke used in hardware repair. The “magic smoke” is when the chip fries and needs to be replaced, and mending can only physically repair magic items.
Eldritch pacts are meant to be agreements between a master and an apprentice, kind of like the Sith, or tradesmen in real life. The Warlock receives knowledge and resources from the Patron, and the Patron gets the Warlock’s service in return. If the pact is broken, the Warlock loses the ability to continue to learn from the Patron, leverage their resources and influence, etc., but they do not lose the knowledge they’ve already learned (unless that was a specific stipulation in the pact).
In the playtests of old Warlocks were intelligence casters and some of the flavor stayed. Made more sense to be a researcher that strikes a deal for knowledge while a charisma one would be more inclined to bargain for straight up power.
Oftentimes warlock levels don’t make sense given what happens in-game. I’ve rarely seen anyone talk to their patron for any length of time to get the tips n’ tricks necessary to increase their level through “apprenticeship.” Even coyly saying “I seclude myself for a few hours“ seems to be too much for most players. You have a mechanically built in RP opportunity, folks, use it!
Wizardry makes perfect sense if the character came from a wizard school, in the same way that schooling just kinda kicks in with med interns. The martials become more accustomed to their own bodies and read others’ tells through the ol’ ultraviolence. Clerics are noticed by their god and paladins rapidly develop their god complex. Most, honestly, make sense without any legwork. Even communicating with their patron during their watch would be enough to begin understanding the intricacies of the pact magic. I dunno, maybe I just put too much effort into grounding it.
With the martials I can agree, with the wizard in particular imo they'd need a lot more time than they really get in most campaigns for studying, their level up spells IIRC is supposed to be the stuff they get from experimenting during downtime but the game doesn't really show downtime training at all. I'd rather most classes have to show putting more effort into training either way tbh, for martials it'd be training new techniques before they can do it in combat, for casters it's new spells Even a sorcerer should imo have to spend some time learning how to use their powers in ways they want them to.
WotC seems not to understand how people play, so I mostly ignore their suggestions on the “how” of the apparent “chosen one” PCs. I’ve found sorcerer players somehow get it just right enough that I can’t complain. I do agree that people skip the buildup altogether too often. However… rapidly becoming a druid sage is the one that I have nearly unmitigable reservations about. Unless the druid is an elf who spent most of their 200s as an ascetic, I have to give them a major side-eye.
See, this shit wouldn't throw me. As a DM I love improve in my plot lines. Hell, I often don't plan things out past laying out the world and enemy motivations.
Sure my big bad has goals, but they have to work for them just as much as anyone else does. One of the most fun (for me) campaigns I ever ran was where the big bad conducted a ritual off screen, and botched the roll. He ended up killing himself.
The party knew that he had been planning a ritual of some sort and had gone into seclusion. They had decided to dismantle his organization before tracking him down.
So weeks of fighting and taking out little hidden cells of the cult, they finally find info about where the big bad was doing his ritual. Only to find a mangled rotting corpse and a closed hell portal.
So what....happened after? I mean, that had to be a huge letdown, you can't just end the campaign with the villain dying offscreen by himself and then we all go home.
The survivors of the cult splintered and became a bit of a running gag, but yes, the players were a bit pissed that the big bad of that part of the campaign was dead off screen.
I don't really do a singular big bad... Just groups and factions and madmen wanting power.
The players run into some of it. And hear tails of other adventurers solving some of it off screen. Which is what they thought happened at first until the wizard made a great roll and spotted an error in the ritual circle.
If it takes a half hour for a single round of combat then I will assert that you actually are doing D&D wrong. Players should know the rules for anything their character can do and be paying attention so they’re ready when their turn comes up. Combat and magic rules take up maybe a dozen pages in the PHB, spend an hour and read over them a few times to make those weekly games you invest two to six hours into go much smoother.
The DM should know all the rules. Like most homebrew I see, this is an overly complex “solution” that functions nothing like anything else in the game and wouldn’t be necessary if everyone involved actually learned the real rules. 5e already has an exhaustion mechanic and it works nothing like what is described. Making up new and convoluted rules to be used by people that take six minutes to move and make an attack or cast a spell is not going to accomplish anything but making your combat turns forty minutes long instead of thirty. I play in a game that includes seven PCs including two “lightly experienced” players and one complete noob. Combat rounds take maybe ten minutes, tops, because people pay attention and the DM actually learned all the real rules.
The clan that Konsi originally comes from uses a variant of “rib bones tied into hair” as a status symbol - if you kill a big monster, you weave a bone from them into your hair to mark the victory… as members of the clan gain renown and status they add more and more bones to their hair to show off their conquests.
Konsi might have been thrown out of the clan, but she keeps to her own version of this to stay true to her roots - when she defeats a dangerous monster, she’ll take a bone for her collection (if it has bones) - and often she’ll use one of those bones to fasten her hair each morning. (This is why she also doesn’t cut her hair short.)
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