Do they work, though?

I’m Italian. School explains all there is to know about sex and stuff, so I never needed the “talk” with my parents. I also had a bigger brother that would tell me everything way before the time lol

About drugs, I think I already got everything from TV? I certainly didn’t need my parents explaining to me that drugs are bad.

EDIT: For those curious about how/when SexEd is taught in school in Italy: I had SexEd in my 5th year of elementary school (10yo), 3rd year of middle school (13 yo) and again in high school (I think it was the second year, so 15 yo, and then in my fourth year as well, when I was 17 yo). My parents were required to consent to the school teaching us SexEd only in elementary school; no consent form was required from middle school onwards, it was mandatory.

And I think that drugs were discussed in school as well. I think in middle and high school, around the same time as SexEd.

I don’t have a reference to how it was before, but I tried Beyond once and it was terrible. I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone to spend money on such a horrible piece of crap.

I have way more fun filling the character sheet by myself. I use Emmet Bryne’s custom character sheets and the Spells 5e app when I need to reference spells.

The CEO constantly starves the D&D team. They don’t have the budget they need to make a good product.

Respectfully, I disagree. I’ve seen much better 3rd party content from smaller creators who charge less than WotC and offer much better value. As much as I’m sorry for those who were laid off, the problem with the DnD team is not their meagre numbers, but their lack of care for the brand.

The DnD team (which consisted of both writers and playtesters) had ten years of consistent player feedback on 5e, and one and a half year of OneDnD playtest, and only did the bare minimum. You don’t need hundreds of people to write a rules update. Heck, it took me (only me, a single person with no collaborators or playtesters) a week to write a replacement for the 5e fighter, and I recon I did a fairly decent job. There were Monk revisions floating around that were miles better than the abomination that they attempted to push in UA6. Heck, I also wrote my Monk revision during that time, and it took me about two/three days at most. During the playtest, Crawford claimed that the Warlock’s Pact of the Chain was never meant to be as “spicy” as Pact of the Blade or Pact of the Tome, which is bullshit (it was clearly presented as an equal option to the other two); instead of rebalancing Chain and Talisman, they just folded the Pact Boons into the Invocation system and called it a day (again, lazy game design). I did that for my homebrew Warlock in about… half a week of brainstorming?

I could go on, but the point is, I would expect those who are paid to create content for the game and do it for a living to do better than what I can do for free in my spare time.

And according to RPGBot, after 10 years they still have no clue on how to make mounted combat work, despite Summon Greater Steed now being part of the Paladin class by default.

Yeah, I knew that all those people praising the new and innovative accessibility design of the books before they were even out were full of shit.

It’s WotC. We have criticized their books for over a decade now and they still don’t give a damn. I remember flipping through one of their adventure modules and being flabbergasted by their incompetence.

It’s not just cross-referencing, either. They actively made OneDnD more complicated to run for a number of classes, yet refused to add more depth to the system. Depth remained the same, it’s just more complicated for first time players. It’s disappointing how little they cared, they just rushed the product in time for the anniversary.

I really liked GI. No drama, no ignorance, great articles: quality journalism, which is rare today, and even rarer when talking about gaming publications.

I’m not much of a gamer myself now as I was in my youth, but GI was still one of my main connections to the gaming world that allowed me to keep in touch with the hobby.

It’s sad that the talent of all those people is being unceremoniously dumped like this by executives who only care about money. I wish them all the best.

It’s actually a great way to roll out a product. The reason they are paying content creators is to drive engagement on their product so that people get excited and pre-order/buy said product. They don’t care about fairness or rules or whatever. They just want to make more money.

If you don’t like it, try to remember it next time they release a new product.

What’s the rush? Just play good ol’ 5e (with or without homebrew content) for a few more weeks. World’s not going to end.

I agree it sucks to see people enjoying the product they got for free before paying customers, but like, it’s WotC we’re talking about, here. It’s the least shitty thing they have done in the past two years. If you don’t want to get kicked in the shins, don’t pre-order from them. Be glad you don’t have the Pinkertons knocking at your door right now.

I’ll just wait for the Pirate subclass to make an appearance. I’ve been playing it for the past few years and enjoyed it very much.

I’ll be honest, the playtest was handled so badly and most of the changes were so lazy, that I lost all the interest in getting the new rulebooks. Not that I had any to begin with, after the OGL shitstorm.

I created revised options for the base 5e classes to play with my friends, and I’m having a lot of fun that way. I’ll pirate legally obtain these new books down the line if it becomes necessary, but me and my friends are accustomed to homebrew everything, so I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

TTRPGs are group games and everyone involved should have fun (both the players and the DM).

Instead of doing a sales pitch, talk sincerely with your players about what you want to do, and try to be receptive of what they expect from next campaign. If you want to run a dungeon crawl that badly, tell them so!

“Since this is a short campaign during the summer hiatus, it’s a great time to try something new instead of the usual open world sandbox. I’ve been itching for a long time to play an old school dungeon crawl and have prepped a short campaign about etc etc…”.

If they really don’t care about that kind of play, then don’t push it. If they are willing to try, then go for it.

I don’t like trash food and I don’t drink energy drinks (only water), but I enjoy taking a food break during sessions, mostly because it allows me to stand up, stretch a bit and go take whatever I may want to eat that day, which improves my attention span in the second half of the session.

Sometimes it’s some fruits, others it’s a pack of potato chips or just a cup of coffee. During winter I’ll most certainly toast some bread with cheese and salumi, to keep myself warm!

I’m Italian, so it’s not difficult for me to buy brands that use high quality ingredients and are still fairly cheap to buy. And if the session stretches through dinner, it’s pizza time for everyone! Although it’s been a while since I last played a session in person, because my party is scattered all over the country, forcing us to meet online.

It doesn’t matter though whether Homer is a single person or many, real or fictional. What matters is that we’ve not lost the context of the story.

We literally did. We don’t know how much - if anything - written in the Homeric poems is true. If it did happen, we don’t know when, only rough estimates.

For hundreds of years those poems were thought to be an accurate retelling of history, to the point that political diatribes between ancient Greek cities could be settled by consulting the Iliad.

If our civilization falls, there’s no guarantee that our common knowledge survives. It could very well be that people see a lightsaber and think that we had the technology to build one.

It’s not just about losing history, but also mixing it with incorrect/wrong retellings of the story and fake news.

For example, you mentioned Homer, the writer of the Iliad and Odyssey who lived 3000 years ago. Homer’s existence is hotly debated, and even if he did exist, “he” probably didn’t write both poems. It’s far more likely that the Iliad and Odyssey were created as part of an extensive oral tradition by multiple travelling bards, who independently added, changed or removed verses; the story we know today as the Iliad is just one of many who happened to survive for a variety of reasons.

We also know very little of the broader trojan cycle (Cypria, Little Iliad, Sack of Troy, etc…) of which only fragments have survived. It would be as if, 1000 years from now, only the original SW trilogy survived, and only pieces or fragments of the other movies/TV series in the expanded universe remained - And to be fair, even this example is wrong, because it compares the Iliad/Odyssey to the “original” trilogy, but there’s no consensus about the relationship of the two Homeric epics with the broader epic cycle: as far as we know, they could have been created independently, and later edited to flow from one to the other seamlessly.

I’m a very early Gen Z and I feel like a boomer lol

I do nerd things alone at home or maybe with a friend or two. DnD live shows, people traveling to play/watch e-sports… It’s all so foreign to me. I don’t feel resentment, but shock and disconnection are always present when I read headlines such as these. Like, I wouldn’t dream in a million years to pay money to watch someone else play DnD, but then again, video game streamers exist. I can’t wrap my head around this!

And just to be clear, I’m not bashing the people enjoying this form of content. I’m just expressing my disbelief at the fact that it exists at all. If I didn’t know better, and saw something like this in a movie, I would call it fake and detached from reality. When in fact, I’m the one detached from my generation. Then again, I don’t have any social media and I’m writing my thoughts on Lemmy, so I’m clearly not an example of what my generation looks like.

Azura is just Tasha from another realm, change my mind.

Judging from all your other replies in this thread, your stance is that:

• Good deities don’t cause pain and suffering.
• God did, but he was justified because they were all evil.
• Maybe he killed a bunch of innocent people too, but he sent them to heaven, so it’s fine.

That’s some olympic-level mental gymnastics. I hope that, one day, you’ll think back to this discussion and realize your hypocrisy and free yourself from the religion of a god that has committed genocide multiple times, gatekeeps eternal life behind the worship of an evil entity and threatens all the others with eternal damnation for the only “sin” of not thinking like him.

Killing people is wrong, even if they are evil. It becomes even worse when it’s not a single homicide, but a large scale genocide of people whose majority (but not all) are evil.

“Good deities don’t intentionally cause pain and suffering. Unless it’s God, in which case mass genocide and killing children is perfectly justified.”

I agree, that’s why I said that God, the one who sent locusts and killed innocent children, submerged the world for 40 days killing everyone indiscriminately, and razed Sodom and Gomorrah to the ground, is the evil deity.

Satan has realized that God is the evil deity, so he must be the good one.