#the party love my traps

[britcision]

So this is pretty much what it looks like when I’m world building with the partner

————

Partner: so I want Evil Tony Stark to have this magic painting of a door that opens into a dark little room to keep my boy in when he’s naughty or inconvenient

Me: oh yes very good. And it’s not like the frame is the door, you open the painting of the door into another dimension

Partner: yeah he’s gotta be able to take it away with him so he can have it on command 😈

Me: okay so how I think this works is he paints the room inside it first to make the interdimensional space, and then paints the door closed over it, so he can paint whatever he wants in the room 🤔

Partner: oh yeah that’s cool, so he can put furniture or a happy little tree in 😋

Me, suddenly vibrating: okay but no he actually paints a Happy Little Tree and it’s just a tree in the corner of this completely dark room that just giggles softly all the time 🫠

Partner: …. And we tell the party as a joke the first time about this old cell the boy was in with a happy lil tree 😏

Me: and then we don’t say anything for like 2 years and then one of them gets put in the dark room and they just hear giggling 🤩

————

Or

————

Partner: okay so Evil Tony Stark mostly uses constructs and stuff for servants so we’ll put the Robotery in the basement for those 🤖

Me: okay, and when y’all go back to the abandoned mansion do you want there to be one left behind? 🙂

Partner: fuck yeah and the boy knows all of them he loves little creatures (and the house mimics) 🥰

Me: and since the boy was intentionally left behind, this is probably a construct that was doing something related to him so it’s probably reasonably aesthetic, yea? Like feeding him or dressing him up? 😇

(The boy was being kept as a pet by Evil Tony Stark because he glows for Fey Reasons and was pretty literally a living sculpture for 11 years and they did not exactly worry about the “living” part much)

Partner: yeah, if Evil Tony Stark is gonna see it around it’s gotta be aesthetic ✨

Me: so you find this cute sweet little construct friend and then you go a little further into the room and just see hundreds of partially or fully deconstructed bodies of this exact little guy and most of them are just minorly different aesthetics because Evil Tony Stark just trashes them when he wants a new look

Also one is still just barely alive and that’s because it’s one of the ones with a person’s soul bound to it and they’ve just been cuddling in the dark for months since they were abandoned 🥰

————

This just happens in the winter okay I become Extremely Fucking Ominous for literally no reason and then it’s Horror Time

Most of our world building is him making cool and interesting places and characters and then me sneaking in sideways like “hey what if they’re also super fucked up 👀”

And to be fair he loves it and he always says yes please and helps me fuck them up more

Anyway we laid the groundwork for Lord Meldacio’s mansion today that the party are gonna get to in a couple weeks and I had so much fun this guy is the fucking bomb

[egophiliac]

we were fucking ROBBED

[royaltea000]

Pose practice! ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ

[lobotomy-lady]

I don't care how many times the rich & famous talk about how being rich & famous is the worst fate humanly possible I will never ever ever believe them for one milisecond lol

[psi-hate]

when a maidencel does something so homoerotic u gotta hit em with that hakurei stare

[everdoeswriting]

do you ever have a dnd session that was so insane that the next day you're still struggling to process whatever the fuck just happened

[gimyung]

when they're a chaotic neutral equipped w a god complex and a mouth running 1000kmph to spout the cockiest and most eccentric shit known to man >>

entp: the real menaces

[itspileofgoodthings]

Taylor returning over and over to the falling through the ice accident in the Bolter—everything to me

[astralshadow]

M2S PF Experience

[crows-of-buckets]

Thinking too hard about Aviae and Zevrans friendship and it's making me Ill

[elftwink]

been learning to play ironsworn (gritty fantasy ttrpg which you can play with a gm but is mostly suited for solo or small group co-op gmless play) after having the rulebook pdf for several years (stars finally aligned to remove invisible thing blocking me from reading it idk) because i'm on another solo ttrpg kick & i don't know what took me so long to get around to this game because it genuinely is exactly what i was looking for. years ago when i was playing through solo 5e modules i should have just been playing ironsworn (believe it or not, 5e isn't very suited to solo play and is extremely clunky when you try lol).

also though i have dabbled in some other solo ttrpgs, a considerable amount of them are journaling games which is fun but imo considerably more work (usually by the time i'm a quarter of the way through the journal entry, i know how to entire scene played out and i want to move on to the next gameplay thing, so i get frustrated and bored quickly. it feels like when you solve a level in a video game but don't have the coordination to pull off the necessary move so you have to spend 20 extra minutes doing something you already figured out), so i really appreciate like not needing to write something for the game to progress (ive been taking notes for my own record since im playing solo and thus am not really out loud roleplaying the way you do in a group, but i definitely could do that instead and not take notes and the game would still function perfectly)

& ive been playing by myself but also in the past ive played a lot of ttrpgs in very small groups which has been other games but is mostly dnd and like. we also should have been playing ironsworn so that having a gm was not necessary. have definitely played games where we had to adapt the rules soooo much to do something that is just base game included in ironsworn. plus it's rules-light enough to do pretty complex moves that pose difficulties in bulkier games (ever introduced someone to dnd and they tell you they want to do a sick backflip and catch something and then attack and you have to tell them that will require several different consecutive rolls and some creative liberties with how the rules are 'supposed' to let you move? you can just Do That in ironsworn. use the strike move and describe it. done!)

the one thing is that although it's rules-light enough to theoretically play any setting or genre (some with more difficulty than others), ive found so far that like... the grittiness and sense of threat is very built into the mechanics so that would be sort of difficult to work around or change (but i think it's great from a game design perspective). what i mean is like, okay: you start with 5 max hp. there isn't really a way to raise this max hp, you just slowly gain abilities (assets) that make you less likely to have to lose the hp in the first place, or that make it easier to recover. when you encounter foes, you rank them on a scale of 1 -5, and enemies on the lowest side of this scale do one harm to you, while enemies on the highest side do five harm to you. so even though encountering an epic enemy won't always be deadly due to the assets you have, they are ALWAYS capable of taking you down to 0 hp with one good hit. so the feeling of threat is much more present compared to games where your character starts to be able to just tank and push through a failure or huge threat.

admittedly also i'm playing solo, im still learning how to balance combat, and also i built a character who has NO combat talents and iron (the close quarters fighting stat) is one of my lowest stats so i personally am under much more threat than if you built a character who knew how to fight or who could do deadly harm. but also the other thing about combat is it's extremely difficult to maintain control of the fight; you have to score a strong hit to do it on basically all moves, and there's a really limited pool of moves available when you don't have the initiative, and obviously none of them really favour you. i don't know that this makes combat genuinely more difficult, but it does make you feel like the fight is always about to spiral out of your control. every second you let it drag without decisive action feels like it brings you closer to dying. like i said, this is a feature of the game design and not a problem in any way. just thinking about it because when i was initially learning i was going to try to supplant it into a homebrew fantasy world of my own but the tone just wouldn't be right. and that it is somewhat difficult to replicate the kind of worlds that i typically play or run for dnd, which tend to lean somewhat sillier and definitely much higher fantasy

but i like to try new things and tbh especially in dnd i find that i very rarely feel that sense of threat and when i do feel it, it has nothing at all to do with the actual mechanics and reality of the combat and everything to do with how well the dm sells it to me and makes it sound and feel scary and dangerous. which is a testament to what a good gm can do for you but i do appreciate the threat feeling more built-in and also being actually real.

[jackass-jones]

Yeah the mouthwash game is pretty good

[blujayonthewing]

might fuck around and start following the wheel of the year again

[ranger-danger]

I miss my dnd ranger :( Joyce I miss you. Much more now that the 2024 rules turned out to be really good for rangers.

Anyways have some of the only decent drawings I’m made of him (in his entire lifespan, idk why but he is the worst character to draw. I have never struggled with a character as much as I have him and Likaria).

Also a baby one I did for some reason??

[natjennie]

had a dream I was playing a ttrpg and my character was sort of a gay werewolf tom wambsgans who married into this powerful supernatural, mostly vampire, family. I've never wanted anything to be true so badly.

[andromedasummer]

you know what i would love to be an option in bg3? making your own party member. like Icewind Dale style. choose their class, voice, appearance and travel with them. obvs i understand why they didnt, but it wouldve been so fun to have the option to make your own member, esp if they could be incorporated into your backstory. a sibling, parent, spouse, adventuring buddy, best friend.