Ronald does tend to mix in his “flamebait” bit with actual pointed content, which isn’t always welcome, but there’s something to be said for actually spotlighting the kinds of things people say to content creators.

Sunlight and disinfectant and all that.

Oh fun. Who is Elon going to just haphazardly drop the ISS on top of?

I kind of suspect this was an attempt on the IA’s end to get parts of copyright struck down by court ruling. Laws can be clear and still found to not be in the public’s interest, or in violation of some other legal doctrine, and sometimes you’ll see groups come at them sideways.

Ownership laws are really tough ones to chip away at, and IP law in particular has been getting worse and more unassailable over time.

This way they can spend more time rearranging the store so nobody knows where anything is, in turn making us walk past a bunch of stuff we don’t need in an effort to try and indice an impulse purchase!

Efficiency!

carve out Wizards as a community

I don’t know where the idea that WotC is worth saving keeps coming from. These are the MTG people. It’s a shock that monsters, NPCs, items, and feats aren’t purchased via booster pack.

D&D isn’t a game, nor is it a community. It’s just a brand. We can let it go.

Excited to have backed. Congratulations on a successful Kickstarter!

Nothing pseudo about it. This is the natural progression of capitalism.

I’ll be honest: I have very little patience for “you can homebrew this game that does’t do what you want, so you should never play something else” is probably the thing I hate most about 5e stans. This is the equivalant of telling someone not to give up on a show they don’t like because “you can always write fan fiction!”

Why should I recreate the game when I just spent $150 on it? Isn’t that what I just paid for? For people who actually know game design to supply me with a game that meets my needs? Instead of someome who doesn’t know game design and also paid for the experience?

There are so many games out there that could do what people want, but everyone’s way too invested in WotC maintaining a monopoly on people’s tables.

The point of 5e is to sell as many books as possible with nothing in them while convincing the customer that they’re game designers.

I mean, they are religious defenders. Knights Templar and all that. That’s the core concept and fantasy they’re aiming for.

Guardian Sorcerer or Guardian Oracle or something probably fits other concepts better.

“Roll acrobatics, I guess.”

“Natural 20!”

"Ok… You contort your body in ways that no humanoid creature should be able to, and successfully fit inside the jar.

"Can I get everyone else to make a Wisdom saving throw, please?

"Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh.

“Ok, everybody else now thinks you’re a djinni.”

Ad soon as they go public, their product is their share price. And even before then, since most growing private companies seek out private investment long before going public.

Yeah, there’s plenty about how Mastodon frames itself and its features that are frustrating. That “easy mobility” requiring an 80 step process that involves downloading and re-uploading a bunch of files kind of anchors you for seeing how disconnected some developers are from the user expectations they set.

But does there?

This comes back to what federation and “the fediverse” is, and why trying to hide its nature is harming it.

No one expects their Facebook post history to follow them to Reddit, or to a forum, or to Lemmy, because they’re different websites. Just as no one expected their Twitter history to come with them to Mastodon.

But because it’s framed as “Mastodon” and not “social.website.com” the expectations are different.

Federation isn’t a mess, it’s just… messier. And too many federated services do their damnedest to hide that they function differently, meaning people treat them like they’re perfect drop-in replacements.

It results in a lot of questions about “Why can’t I ____?” and answers of the “Because this doesn’t work that way” variety.

Like, look at Mastodon. It bends over backwards to hide the fact that it’s 10,000 different websites. The result is that people could not understand what the big deal was, nor why it wasn’t as easy to see everything from some other website as easily as they could from a single website that everyone was using.

This further led to centralization of the Mastodon ecosystem, which… I mean, at that point, you’re just abandoning the central concept.

The point of federation is to publicly share what you want to publicly share, not to have unfettered access to whatever you want to consume.

There are good tools for limiting your view to only what spells are relevant, too. I like the spellbook over at pf2easy.com for this.

If your party needs a heal bot, they need better tactics (which isn’t a slight – tactics are hard), and a non-magical healer to use battle medicine.

But no, Cleric’s whole gimmick is extra dedicated heal slots so they can use their regular spell slots to do other fun things. They can be very flexible, and we’re hoping for a significant expansion of the Divine spell list in the fall with War of the Immortals coming out.

Look into a battle cleric in particular. They’re very versatile.

The most beginner friendly support classes are the Bard and the Cleric. The Cleric is a very powerful healer, with their Healing Font feature granting them a number of free extra heal spells per day, and it comes in 2 flavours: The Cloistered Cleric, that wears robes and casts spells, and stays at the back of the party, and the Battle Cleric, that wears armor, uses a shield, and works as a front line class.

Both can do a fair bit of buffing and debuffing with their non-font spell slots.

The Bard is the gold standard support caster in the game, with less focus on healing, and a wider variety of support options.

Clerics have access to the Divine spell list, and are Prepared Casters, while Bards use the Occult spell list, and are Spontaneous Casters. Take a look at those lists, and what those casting types mean, at the Archives of Nethys

“None that you can see” is a fun response. Especially on a high roll, if you’re rolling knowledge and perception checks in the open. Gets 'em good and weirded out.