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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Most of what you read online is incorrect, then, or at least misleading. Willpower isn’t actually a stat in D&D. When your character asserts their will, they succeed at doing so, full stop. The save is for whether or not the character has an opportunity to do so.

    What you have instead are Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma.

    Intelligence saves are how much your character knows. An example here is illusion magic. Illusions are imperfect, and better understanding of nuance lets a character see an illusion as false, and then exert their will to disregard it.

    Wisdom saves are about how much you can perceive and intuit. When someone attempts to control you, it’s subtle, and the saving throw is about noticing that something is wrong. Once you notice it, your character exerts their will and shrugs it off.

    Charisma saves are about your force of personality and sense of identity. When someone attempts to possess your body, they are attempting to change who you are, and is directly opposed by how strongly you believe in yourself, and how strongly you believe in who you are. Once you resist the attempt, you then exert your will and drive the spirit out.


  • You would simply say “The spellcasting ability modifier for this spell is Wisdom.”

    Wisdom is the stat that represents your willpower, your experience, and your ability to perceive the world around you. If something attacks your mind, it is most often resisted with Wisdom for this reason.

    Realistically, it probably shouldn’t be a spell, and it definitely shouldn’t be this complicated. Spells used to have this level of granularity in earlier editions, and 5e specifically moved away from that for clarity and speed of play.

    My recommendation is to decide if the person this item was created for (not necessarily the PC using it) is supposed to die or not when using it. If they are, then the item just kills them. If not, they fall unconscious at 0 HP, then suffer one failed death save as normal when the item detonates. Don’t mess about with charging it with death saves or exhaustion levels, just have it do some damage.


  • One thing to mention: The saving throw type should match the means used to resist the effects.

    Charisma represents your force of personality, your sense of identity, and your ability to interact with the world around you. This effect targets none of those things, nor can it be reasonably assumed to be counteracted by any of those things. Thus, this should not be a Charisma save.

    Examples of effects with Charisma saves are possession (resisted by your own ability to be in control of yourself), Zone of Truth (resisted by your ability to interact with others), and forced planar travel (This makes sense with a longer explanation, but can’t really be summarized.)

    This should be resisted with Constitution. It withers the bodies of those trapped within it, so naturally should be resisted by how healthy that creature is to begin with. Dexterity is an option, too, but that’s typically represented by effects that can be dodged with a split-second reaction without leaving your space.



  • For SSD’s, it’s 100% a logical table, because data is stored all over the place for load balancing purposes, so it already uses a logical table to keep track of what each block is for at any given point in time.

    For HDD’s, historically they were physically separated, and they mostly are still, but there’s still a logical table, and there’s no reason the logical table can’t say “Blocks 0 through 1234 and 2000 are part of partition 1” if you have something somewhere else that you want on that partition.





  • I, personally, think this is a totally valid tactic, and wouldn’t be upset if a player used it in my game. One of the first things we go over in Session Zero, though, is that your characters, while unusual, are not unique. Any BBEG worth his stuff is capable of scrying on your tactics and hiring a hit squad that can copy or counter your tactics.

    If a player started doing this repeatedly and trivialized many encounters, maybe the next group has his own sorcerer that can do that, or knows disintegrate, or can teleport the big stompy guy into the obvious spellcaster’s face. Cheese isn’t an arms race the players can win.



  • This is a terrible position to take. Anyone can be educated.

    The thing is, nobody likes being flat-out told they’re wrong, and with the way arguments on the internet go, that’s all that will ever happen.

    Most of my friends are heavily conservative, but I’ve learned how to have productive conversations with them about issues, and it’s almost always “This is how it benefits you if it were different.”

    It’s difficult sometimes, but it’s worth doing, and it’s important to understand that the guy you’re talking to isn’t the enemy. He’s just another dude.


  • Says who?

    Says the diagram in the OP, the EM spectrum of a 5800K star, which clearly shows a peak within the visible spectrum in the blue band, and a significant (25% or so) drop off by the time it gets to the red band. Those aren’t relatively equal.

    As near as I can tell, your entire argument is based on what a human being perceives to be “white”, and I’m not talking about perception at all, because it lies. Examples:

    • The sky looks blue. It’s not blue, and you can tell by looking anywhere that isn’t the sky in the daytime, because the air is the same everywhere.

    • Related: the sun looks yellow. The sun looks yellow for the same reason the sky looks blue.

    • When I close my eyes, I can’t see anything. That doesn’t mean everything is black or the same color as my eyelids.

    • Your own dress example, where different people would see different colors in the same dress.

    You and I are arguing about two completely different things. You are talking about what color something looks to be, in terms of colloquial terms used to describe things people can see. I am talking about what color it is, in terms of temperature and wavelength, which are things people can measure.


  • Colors are a perception, true, which is why we don’t really talk about colors, we talk about wavelengths and temperature. 5800K is not white (relatively equal amounts of all visible light wavelengths), it’s light blue (decent amounts of most visible light wavelengths, but a significant peak in the 450-500nm wavelength band, which looks blue to us). Lightbulbs use color temperature because filament and halogen lights generate light the same way the sun does: by getting hot, and how hot it is determines the light wavelengths emitted. That’s why I included the chart, it’s a good analogue.

    If you look at the graph provided in the OP, you can see for yourself that there’s significantly more blue than anything else being emitted.


  • It’s really a pale blue. If it were white, the visible spectrum would be pretty even, but you can see the graph is higher on the blue edge and lower on the red edge. There’s enough green and red to brighten it a lot, but it’s definitely blue.

    In fact, the sun’s surface temperature is around 5800K, and you can look up what color that actually is wherever you go light bulb shopping.

    This shows the colors based on temperature, and the sun is firmly in the “Day White.” It’s called white, but you can see it’s pretty clearly blue, especially next to the “Direct Sun” color.



  • Step 1: Find the area of each chunk. The biggest chunk is your main chunk.

    Step 2: Find the distance between the closest edge of main chunk and the center of each other chunk individually.

    Step 3: Discontinuity of each chunk is area of chunk * distance from main chunk / total area.

    Step 4: Total discontinuity is sum of each chunk’s discontinuity.

    Bolded parts are important. If you use the center of the main chunk, larger main chunk radii make other chunks seem more discontinuous than they should be. If you use the closest edge of other chunk’s, you don’t account for the entire area of the other chunk.

    This will give you a number that is bigger when there are more and/or bigger pieces that are further away, and smaller when the opposite is true, normalized for the total area of the country so bigger countries aren’t penalized just because they’re bigger.


  • Honestly, he’s right. Game prices are the same 60-70 dollars they’ve been for 30 years, but nothing else has stayed the same price that long. With inflation, a game should be around 200 dollars.

    Super Mario Bros 3 came out in the last half of 1988 and costed $50 dollars, or around 127 dollars. It also costed about $800,000 to develop, which is about $2 million today.

    Nowadays, it costs around $80 million (about 40x) on average to make a AAA title that costs $60 (about half). This is why all these games have cash shops and battle passes and paid dlc and whatnot: they need to make up that extra cost somewhere.