Pipes, Pints, and Polyhedrons

Saw this and it rang true for me, without a doubt; got a good chuckle.

Haha - nice! Reminds me of a player and friend back in the early 90s who came to the table with a 5+ page backstory that, had I been buffaloed by it, would've resulted in his PC, a multi-class wizard and some other class, immediately reviving as a LICH in the event of his death.

I had no problem with him writing up a family history of sorts for his PC but it didn't mean any of it had to be true. :wink:

I love the experienced and shared history of some of my characters. And to this day tell stories about what happened to them. But I never understood the "role playing" of the expansive background story. The reason why I'm a level 1 numbnut from Hicksville (a true town on Long Island btw) is because I haven't done anything yet - aka, NO experience (points). If you are a (according to your novella of a backstory) prince of Crapville and fought in so many battles, why are you only level 1??

That being said, short backstories are okay for sure. One of my friends wanted to try playing a paladin, and created a backstory to stop certain other players from being merciless to him about being a goody-goody. So he wore black armor and stayed hooded most of the time. He had a backstory about why he was devout to a particular god and had a terribly scarred visage thus being hooded. In reality he just wanted to disguise the 17 CHA
That backstory was not even a paragraph long.

If you give me a short paragraph about your character, 2-3 sentences or something and it's not some inflated illogical story, I'm usually ok with that. Anything more or anything beyond my own belief will get a big NOPE.

=)

Allan.

So, I ran across this earlier today and once again, there is most definitely a difference between current players and older. I offer up Exhibit A as evidence (and yes, this was really posted to a D&D group with serious intent)

This is precisely why I can't play modern D&D, it's just not the same player base.

Something else that popped up on the interwebs, I ran across this via a Youtube vid but had to do some Googling to find the actual source. In a recent D&D Beyond article (something of a blog for WotC), the author, James Haeck, a D&D Beyond Staffer, made the following statement:

I don’t like the way that races in D&D get numerical bonuses to their ability scores. I think it’s unnecessarily limiting. There are over 1,000 unique race/class combinations in fifth edition D&D, but only a small handful of them are worth playing from a character optimization standpoint. Not everyone feels the need to play optimal characters, and would instead rather play characters for their roleplay potential than their mechanical viability, but I don’t see why we can’t have both.

Ok. While I don't agree in the least bit, because I like racial adjustments and class requirements, at least I can understand the reasoning. However, then he goes on to say:

...class combinations like a half-orc wizard have always been a harder sell. In previous additions, a half-orc’s penalty to Intelligence made being a wizard incredibly hard—and even in fifth edition D&D, the fact that the half-orc race doesn’t get a bonus to Intelligence makes it hard to excel as a wizard because you’ll always have a subpar spell attack bonus and saving throw DC.

This is to say nothing of the fact that linking ability score penalties (which are thankfully absent from the fifth edition Player’s Handbook, at least) to your choice of race has distasteful similarities to real-life racist ideology.

I'm sorry, I beg your pardon, um, what? Did he really just suggest that racial penalties, for imaginary characters, in a table-top roleplaying game, are related to real life racist ideology? I can't even...

He then goes on to offer various options on how to remove racial bonuses and assign bonuses for things like class and background, etc. Personally I have a hard time understanding how the game that I started playing in 1985 (I know, much earlier for some of you) can be sanitized so much. I wonder how long before it's barely even recognizable as actual, D&D.

Source link for anyone interested: HERE

BTW: The original Youtube vid I was watching is here:

There is a fine example of why I call it 5nowflake.

I know I'm on the younger side for the board, but these kind of stories just make we wonder how some of these people learned to read and write. The inability of people to use reason, logic, and compartmentalization is astounding to me. How do they survive? Do they not have to do anything on their own?