It says to roll a D6 and then gives eight possible results…

The reason many still associate D&D and anything else remotely related to it with fat, basement dwelling, socially inept virgin incels is because those people actually made up a significant percentage of the original following of the hobby. Because it’s founders were only a half step away from most of those descriptions in many cases. And anybody that insists otherwise is either willfully ignorant or, more likely, angry at being called out by association because they’re the same.

So either get over it or go join the people that still insist that the confederate flag is anything but the war banner of a rebellion raised as an attempt at preserving slavery as a legal institution. You have the same mindset and validity as they do on this matter.

“DM, are we on drugs?”

Someone needs to push THAC0’s head under the water then depth charge the pool.

Every system has to decide where to draw the line on the prioritization of realism versus simplicity and speed of play. On one extreme you have the “one page RPG” system where you have exactly two stats and everything uses one or the other, rolled on a single D6. About two thirds of the way to the other extreme you get “Pathfinder has a rule for that,” with some systems going into truly absurd levels of detailed minutia in ways that vary from being mote or less mechanically consistent to the old school D&D method of the designers pulling a random table out of their ass for every new thing they don’t have a rule for yet and filling it out with whatever nonsense comes to mind in that moment.

Yandere needs the clarification of burning your character sheet from the other game, then shackling you to the table for theirs.

Also thugdere’s stance is grounds to have them committed to an asylum for the criminally insane for life. Or just euthanized as a ranid animal, depending on the jurisdiction.

I’m either a cleric from the Abbey of St Whatever passing through Heroshire in my way to hunt monsters in Vampsylvania, or a spellcasting hermit of dubious sanity living in the Witchy Wood.

Probably, although Martin was definitely not the first fantasy author to put a villainous faction/entity in the inhospitable frozen north, nor was he the first to have a villain with a zombie army.

Although I think the Mountains of Muscles are more likely just a border feature slapped in between the Necrolord and the ambiguous barbarians of the northern steppes, which are again a common trope but probably directly drawn from the barbarian tribes of Icewind Dale (Wulfgar’s people in Forgotten Realms).

The Desert Island is where all the shipwrecked sailors get washed up. This is the result of all ocean currents in the Tepid and Warm seas eventually converging there. If you miss the exit you go right past into the Giant Whirlpool of Hydrodynamic Implausibly.

Awesome as usual, and bonus points for the bad guy’s sucker punch attack actually hitting a main weak point in plate mail.

I also like that Angela throws a hand axe. I’ve seen a lot of people with melee focused martial characters hauling around multiple javelins as a backup ranged weapon because they do slightly more damage. When they announce in the middle of a fight that they’re throwing one or even several in a single turn I always think, “Just where were you carrying those multiple long hafted spears while fighting with both hands this whole time?” Mechanically a high strength character can handle the weight but those things aren’t exactly throwing knives you can conveniently slip a half dozen of into your belt or strap to your thighs or arms. A nice tomahawk or two, on the other hand, you can have tucked until your belt.

Kind of. As a concept but not the definition people that use it attribute to it. The act of people getting that definition wrong is itself a memetic behavior.

That would be the actual definition, yes. But many if not most people who use the word “meme” to mean “funny picture and caption” don’t actually know what the word meme refers to. So they go by some definition originating from Reddit, Facebook, 4chan, etc.

“They’re weird looking dragons, I tell you. They fly really fast but somehow do it without flapping their wings, they have short, fat tails, and when they go really fast they blow jets of fire out their arses!”

Yeah, and my personal opinion of the Drow is that you can still have matriarchal spider themed villains and not be “problematic” if you just st officially decannonize all of the weird-ass kinky fetish stuff that Ed Greenwood wrote into their original description. And the same can be said of most “problematic” things in Forgotten Realms, which is the source of a lot of the stuff that many consider to be “generic D&D.”

Seriously, go through the deep lore of FR and you will find a bunch of stuff that reads like it was written by a horny thirteen year old that wants to be edgy and kinky but clearly doesn’t know how fetishes or anything occult actually work beyond involving leather, whips, and bloody sacrifice rituals at orgy parties like a midwestern church granny will tell you happen every time anybody plays Dungeons and Dragons. I wonder where they got that impression from…

Short answer, no. There is a lot of nitpicky fine print and “nuance” involved but while you cannot copyright rolling a twenty sided die you can copyright a bunch of distinct and organized thoughts and specific groups thereof, such as the collection of rules that make up a class or subclass. If that class, subclass, spell, made up monster with a specific name and abilities, etc is published in some work that is sold for profit then legal action can occur.

Anything under creative commons effectively becomes public domain. If it appears in a WotC book, digital content, etc and is not specifically under CC, like say spells and subclasses from any supplement not included in that (such as Xanathar or Tasha), it is copyrighted and WotC can and will sue you if you republish it.

Maybe if those games had more appealing rule systems, other publishers would make products using them.

If it’s under a CC license you can literally publish it yourself with a few things tacked on. That’s what creative commons does. It’s basically public domain at that point.

Among other things, yes. Some things I have seen do strike me as logical tweaks and fixes much like 3.5 was to 3e, but some are clearly attempts at “fixing” PR problems by people who don’t understand why they’re having those problems in the first place. And at least in some cases I expect are personally responsible for said PR problems. It’s kind and like a Three Stooges skit about corporate mismanagement, but they honestly think they’re doing a good job.

My only thought upon seeing this is what an overstimulated eight year old would rattle off the top of their head if you told them to make some wicked awesome homebrew that doesn’t worry about any of that “balance” nonsense. Or actual rules at all really. It’s just a bunch of words that someone overheard D&D players say mixed with attempts of sounding like a fast talking comedian.

What really disturbs me about this is that somewhere out there is a living, breathing human who thought of it. I will probably never actually meet that person but the nonzero possibility of doing so shall henceforth haunt my thoughts and dreams forever.