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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I’ve played a quite a bit of bg3 (and DM’d some DnD) and can offer some thought. Please excuse the wall of text. I wouldn’t go pure rogue, and get eldritch knight, for Weapon Bond. You will lose Reliable Talent, but pushing people isn’t as useful in the third act, where you’d get the feature anyway. Going 3 fighter 9 rogue gets you the weapon bond, weapon and armour proficiencies, and the 5d6 sneak attack bonus on finesse weapons. Your weapon progression won’t be limited to Returning Pike > Nyrulnea & Dwarven thrower plus the stuff you pick up from the ground and instead you’ll get a progression that looks more like Ritual Dagger > Phalar Aluve > Dancing Breeze. All finesse weapons you will be able to bond with. Take thief and you’ll pop out of the shadows with a throw, dash to reposition, and hide again. Great single target damage, and you’ll have plenty of skills to boot.

    On the other hand, you could go EK 7 / Thief 3 / Abjuration 3. EK gets spells from the abjuration school natively, weapon bond, and an attack as a bonus action (I think the Throw action counts, but could be wrong), thief gets the extra bonus action, and abjuration wizard lets you learn new spells (up to level 2 spells) and a shield that increases each time you cast an abjuration spell. You’ll get the option to either throw the same weapons mentioned above, protect/heal someone or yourself, or do magic damage. Probably will be harder to manage, and each long rest you’ll want to keep an eye on trader inventories to see if there are any Abjuration spells on sale, but could be more interesting/less monotonous. Stat spread will also be a bit MAD, being Strength, followed by Intelligence and then Constitution. You can get the headband of intellect, however, which will give you a +3 to any Spell Save DC or modifiers.

    As for assassin, it works great on characters that can nova. For example, an Oath of Vengeance Paladin with Assassin 3 can blow up single enemies really, really easily (plus, fits thematically, like an inquisitor or something). Give them a finesse weapon (for example, the Shadow Blade), stack some extra damage (with the ring that gives extra psychic damage while concentrating, which the Shadow Blade does), two level 2 Divine Smites, and one off-hand crossbow with the Ne’er Misser, guarantees you will be able to one-turn beefy enemies (especially with the Shadow Blade combo, psychic resistance isn’t common). On a throw build, I can see the appeal, but you’d need to have your rogue start fights, which means they’d be up-front, without much in the way of AC or HP. Thief allows you to stand back a bit. Assassin also falls short later in the game, as some enemies have the Alert feat, which means they cannot be surprised. That, coupled with the low dexterity, means they’d probably go ahead of your character in initiative. Plus, returning weapons (as in, weapons that have the Returning trait) are somewhat bugged. If you start a fight by surprising someone, weapons don’t always return. You could end up wasting the second turn by picking up that weapon and equipping it. I haven’t gotten my EK far enough to test whether Weapon Bond weapons also behave like this, however.


  • On my solo honour run, which is just starting Act 3, my Tav is a dex Vengeance Pally / Assassin rogue. 23 AC with psychic damage sneak attack smites makes for a great frontline character. Gale is a Wiz 1 / Stormsorc X (his damage potential would be higher as a tempest sorc but Gale has to be a wizard), Karlach is a Thief 3 / Zerker X, and Wyll is a Fiend Lore Bardlock. The only fight that gave me trouble was Grym, because I had terrible luck with his pathing. Every other boss, including W’wargaz, has been a breeze. Locking down enemies with my pally and Wyll, letting Karlach get picks and Gale blow up and debuff enemies has been extremely useful, to the point that it kinda feels like cheating. I’m kinda dreading getting my due against Raphael though, that dude scares me.

    I have some MP characters, including a Mephistopheles Ice Draconic Lorebard. Will come online at level 7, so, kinda late. But is already fun. Another one is a Tempest cleric with the Light of Creation glaive and Sentinel. Stay back, blast people with Call Lightning recasts, heal with bonus action, and anyone who gets too close gets pushed back by Light of Creation and the level 6 Tempest feature. Will probably fall off later though, since Light isn’t even the best glaive, nevermind weapon for the class.




  • How tech savvy are we talking? I can troubleshoot the usual stuff on my pc, by googling. But I’m not a sysadmin and have 0 knowledge about how to set up or maintain a server.

    My group has been looking at TTRPGs for a while now. We used Owlbear Rodeo for one campaign, and started our current one on Roll20 without premium, but… It’s so unintuitive. An honest to goodness UI/UX nightmare. I can see the logic behind some of the choices but it’s so uncomfortable to use. We want something with a bit more functionality (character sheets and dice rolling at least, dynamic fog of war being a personal bonus as a DM).


  • How tech savvy are we talking? I can troubleshoot the usual stuff on my pc, by googling. But I’m not a sysadmin and have 0 knowledge about how to set up or maintain a server.

    My group has been looking at TTRPGs for a while now. We used Owlbear Rodeo for one campaign, and started our current one on Roll20 without premium, but… It’s so unintuitive. An honest to goodness UI/UX nightmare. I can see the logic behind some of the choices but it’s so uncomfortable to use. We want something with a bit more functionality (character sheets and dice rolling at least, dynamic fog of war being a personal bonus as a DM).



  • Not anymore, due to my GAD and insomnia. Long story short, I was compensating how tired I was with how tense I would get from coffee. My psych told me to stop taking so much caffeine and it’s helped a lot to curb my anxiety.

    I miss it though. Used to brew a fresh cup in the morning, noon, and afternoon. Freshly ground every time. It legitimately ruined every espresso shop in town for me. Burnt, bitter, or underbrewed. Only good coffee shop in town is a turkish one.


  • Replaying Dragon’s Dogma in prep for the new game. I had forgotten how much grind the game requires, honestly. I’ve been Mage 1-11, MArcher 6, Ranger 6, Sorc 30-40 or so, and my magic score is still low as hell. I’m purposefully delaying meeting the duke because I really want to give MArcher a try in the post-game, and it feels like I’ve already played for a long time but sheesh, levelling up is slow. I had never focused on building for stats, honestly. I know now though that most of your damage comes from your gear, so I might quit levelling Sorc when I reach 450 magic instead of the 600.

    Hope it’s a little faster in the second entry.

    Apart from that, trying the Nordic Souls modpack for Skyrim, and Helldivers 2.






  • 5e might be easier to grasp than previous editions, and even easier to play than other TTRPGs, but even then. I started playing DnD after my second playthrough of BG3, and even having some experience with CRPGs, reading through the DM book, PHB, and all the sourcebooks I totally legally acquired, felt like trying to map a room with my eyes closed. Bg3 streamlines the math, but the complexity is still there.

    Half of all the time I’ve spent as a DM has been spent devising homebrews to streamline the game further.




  • Skyrim, after lots of years of not playing it. Tried a couple modpacks and collections and they either have horny mods, bad performance, or are unbalanced in regards to difficulty. Like, I can accept dying a lot, I have hundreds of hours on soulslike games. What I can’t accept is dying because of jank, and as good as a mod might be made, it still interacts with a janky engine. Even scriptless mods end up janky sometimes. I’m building my own modpack instead, choosing simple mods for modularity. Not gonna bash nothing so it will probably end up a little basic, but eh. Playing this to tide me over for whenever an Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate expansion drops.

    Apart from that, Baldur’s gate and Zomboid with friends. And the good ol classic, Rimworld.

    Also, I’m a new DM and decided to fuck myself thrice over. I’m designing a whole new homebrew to play in an ASOIAF setting. It requires whole redesigns of classes, weapon systems, mechanics, etc. My players are excited for it though, I’ve been dropping sneak peeks and they’ve responded well.


  • Depth is what Starfield is lacking, imo. It fixes a lot of what both skyrim and f4 did wrong (there’re backgrounds, they affect your skills, and they come up from time to time, to mention one), but they regressed so hard on other things. They tried new stuff but the delivery was so limp dicked that everything landed awkwardly, or not at all. Think the game suffered because of scope creep, honestly, if they had limited the game to just a handful of planets, they could’ve tailored the experience and they wouldn’t feel so empty.

    And as always, their obsession to let you do everything in one playthrough hurt the game hard. There’s very little reason to go for a second playthrough.

    Like, they did a good job with most of the game’s mechanics, but everything else is mid as hell. Very forgettable.