How to Be: Link
With Frame Fatales running, I wanted to talk about a character who has a strong presence in speedrunning, and a character that owns a special place in the heart of the community, and a character who helps people feel connected to something. I figured what better to do, than look at a Link.
Group Flirts
The skill challenge represents one of the many pieces of 4th Edition D&D technology that was underappreciated in its time and misunderstood in hindsight.
Distributing Abilities
Ability scores in Dungeons & Dragons are one of the game’s many mechanical systems that float atop a liquid surface of questionable justifications. They’re a perfectly serviceable set of dials to use to define a character, they do a job and they create a lot of thematic hooks you can use, but also, under the hood, they are not sensible at all.
How to Be: Cyclops
A long time ago, when I first started playing RPGs, a friend (hi BigAngry) said to me, the thing with RPGs is that once you play in them you’ll notice the way that literally every single piece of fan media presents you a list of toys, things you can always look at, then point to and say ‘I want that.’ And I thought about another friend who doesn’t care about RPGs, and I thought: Yeah. Let’s do Cyclops.
How to Be: The Very Best, Like No-one Ever Was (Dun Dun D-Dun)
You know, it might just be because I’ve been thinking about pets and subordinate characters, what if the inspiration for your character in a 4e campaign is being someone who has for some reason, a monster that works at their side? What kind of character can produce monsters out of nowhere – like they can just pull them out of their pocket?
How to Be: A Meguca
In this, a Dreadful Month, maybe you need a radiant light. Maybe you need something that makes you feel warm and fuzzy and happy in this time of long nights. In which case, let’s look to the most successful Monsters Inc fanfiction anime there is, and look at the magical girls from Puella Magi Madoka Magica as we ask […]
The Warlock is Alone
It’s a well-worn meme that Warlocks and Paladins are different only in that one has an employer, and one has a sugar daddy. Notably, recognise that the Warlock’s the one with a contract, but the Paladin’s the one with a code of conduct.
Wall Crawler
[Gruuwar] You gain a climb speed equal to your land speed. You cannot use this climb speed while you are carrying more than a light load.
How to Be: Lalo Salamanca
I suspect for this one, I’ve given myself something of a tall task to try and justify this one. Because Lalo doesn’t necessarily strike many people as a character who’s a good fit for ‘a D&D game’ or even ‘a player character.’ After all, he’s a villain, and not just a villain, he’s probably going to be one of the iconic villains people are trying to replicate for decades.
4e: Deploying Monster Types
People say that 4e D&D was ‘only good for tactical combat,’ which I don’t agree with, but I can understand the feeling when you consider it was the first time that it made the combat system kinda work. Part of how it worked was that rather than treat monsters as if they were all generic spots on a continuum, monsters were balanced based on general formulas of things they could do and ways they could be represented, and part of that was recognising that some types of monster were best suited to particular types of role.