A fun thing people often forget about Mage Armor is that you can cast it on other people, which is occasionally even helpful!

While Mystery doesn’t have counterspell, Faelys does, and we own a hat of disguise.

You’d probably be able to do that and win the match, but, well, there’s a few problems…

First of all, Addis is a Tymoran priestess with level 5 spells, so she’d be pretty difficult to take down quickly unless you were serious adventurers. Chances of pulling it off without a hitch are non-zero. We don’t know for sure what is and is not on Addis’ spell list, but if we imagine it’s similar to Konsi’s list well… Konsi always has Dimension Door prepared, grabbing her would be very difficult.

Secondly, this is Konsi’s boss, you might win the match by default, but the repercussions within the temple would be much worse.

Third, Konsi would never approve of kidnapping anyone who wasn’t evil… She’s too much of a good bean.

Probably the biggest problem is that the entire point of this match is to have Konsi play a high-stakes poker match under scrutiny, to prove that she legitimately has skill at the game, and doesn’t cheat. They’re staging this whole thing to head off accusations of foul play… Kidnapping your opponent and winning by default doesn’t exactly solve the problem!

OotS has SO much text per strip, I could really do a lot with that kind of real estate.

It is an artifact, the “Forgeringer”.

Some artifacts might be powerful enough to have function inside anti-magic fields… although the Forgeringer has never displayed that kind of power. More problematic though, it’d be kind of difficult to use a hammer in the middle of a poker match undetected.

Exposition’s really difficult in comic format. People don’t really want to read a full page of text when they’re reading comics, so you got to find some ways to at least give it some visual flair…

Faelys has negative tact.

Bonus Konsi, as usual

Since some people’s clients can’t properly display tall images, here’s the comic split in two for readability.

If that is ALSO not helpful to you, I recommend looking at it on my site

I am assured it was 2e

My fiancee played a whole campaign of Apocalypse World! She enjoyed it!

The second picture of Konsi I ever drew :)

Part of the fun of having Konsi as the main character of this story is that I can just make up a new pretty dress every time the day changes.

Here’s a Bonus Konsi I drew during Pride Month.

I live in a set of apartments (60 in all). Once a year we have an “AGM” where everyone’s supposed to show up, and we go over stuff like the resident’s association finances, and plans for future works and changes to policies. (e.g. we had to remove a tree because it died, or the council want to put parking restrictions in our neighborhood, or the bike sheds need repainting, etc.)

It’s not really as oppressive as a HOA, because your interaction with it is once-a-year, and if you have an issue you just email the people running the committee, you don’t really have to contend with constant complaints and jockeying about whether your driveway is tidy enough or any of that nightmare stuff… but the once-a-year-meeting can sometimes drag on for hours and it’s very tiring.

There’s sometimes a discussion around an issue before we vote on it. Sometimes particularly beligerant residents get into circular arguments where they’re not listening to each other, and neither of them are going to change their mind, they’re just taking up air in the room going back and forth and making no progress, sometimes the argument is in spite of a lack of needed information and everyone is just speculating on what might happen etc etc.

From my extensive time DMming, more than anything else, it’s become very easy to spot when such discussions have no chance of resulting in a productive outcome, and I’ve started to notice that a quick interjection that summarizes the situation and suggest we move on and deal with it via email, is invaluable. “Look, we don’t know yet if the change to the renter’s rights bill is going to pass at all, or what exactly it’ll contain. We should wait for that before trying to figure out how to handle it.” or “The motion we’re discussing is for the committee to research how much this installation will cost, not whether or not we’re going to do it.” or “That information sounds useful, you should email it to the committee after the meeting so they can make sure it’s considered.”

I think, just having anyone in the room who’s focused on staying on task can save you a huge amount of time, in basically any group-discussion forum. Our AGMs are almost an hour shorter now, and there’s an increasing number of attendees who are on board with my philosophy of “are we going to be able to solve this now? no? email the committee and move on.”

This was the most “androgynous” looking goblin I had…

Konsi’s first two years of life were as a goblin in a goblin clan, so would have eaten the same as the rest of them, after that, the next four or so years of her life were as a street urchin in Waterdeep. She ate a lot of scavenged food from trash cans and rats.

She’s definitely eaten beetles.

This is all fine. I’m not arguing that this is a problem for ONLY DnD… It’s just that was the subject at hand, and it’s a problem with DnD.

I’d say the bigger issue tends to be around certain players feeling creative or desperate and trying to lean into the plot/setting with less respect for the rules.

This is an interesting point, but I would not say that the problem is with “certain players.”

DnD is heavily marketed and promoted as THE ttrpg. The default. The one for everyone. WotC talk about the game as being designed for an extremely broad pool of players, of many different styles. Players who want a more narrative experience, with less of a focus on rules are also a the target market for the system. If WotC say the game is for them, and the game doesn’t handle what they want from it, then the problem is either with the game design, or with the game’s promotion, marketing and reputation.

It’s interesting that my post was largely about how DnD 5e fails to cater towards people who want a strict set of rules for simulations, and your argument is about how DnD fails to cater towards people who want a loose set of rules that can be bent. I’m a firm believer that when you try to please everyone, you please nobody, and this is DnD’s biggest weakness as a system: If you have a strongly cohesive group of players who want a specific style, DnD will do an okay job at it, but there will always be a better system out there. It’s the ready meal you put in the microwave because it’s easy, not the specific gourmet restaurant that does that one dish you love perfectly.

DnD’s not really trying to cater towards any specific niche though - the design wants to appeal to the widest audience possible. By trying to cater to every style, it means you can pull together a group of players with a range of preferences, and put them in the same game. That’s a big part of why it’s got so much ubiquity after all. The logistics of setting up a group to play are rough for a lot of people, and just being able to put a game together is easier when your system promises fun to a wider range of players.

I’m not seeing any mention of it, but I think a lot of people might be interested in Break! - it’s specifically aiming to make a game that has the vibes of an “adventure of the week” system, where you learn of an ancient ruin, gear up, venture through the wilderness, explore a crumbling tomb for loot, then get back in time for dinner and an ale. - Basically I’m saying that the game is specifically designed to try and tell the kind of stories that DnD is designed for.

Where break differs from DnD is in it’s approach to mechanics. Downtime, journeying, exploring an adventure site, and fighting are all their own small, light subsystems of rules, so there’s clear guidelines for how to run each of them, and they’re largely aimed at highlighting the cruical and interesting moments for each of those activities, while quickly glossing past the faff and monotony of what lies between.

I’ve lost track of the number of DnD campaigns I’ve played where the DM didn’t really have a clear framework for what to do on a long journey, and resorted to just tossing a couple of random encounter fights in because it “felt necessary”, but they never felt like they advanced the story or contributed anything interesting to the game.

It’s also a game you can recruit random NPCs and the like to join you and follow you around, and when they run out of HP you check to see if you remembered to give them a name. The world knows that characters who have their own names are important to the story, and characters who are just “that random bandit mook who surrendered and we brought them along” are not. If the character doesn’t have a name when they hit 0hp, they die on the spot.

Oh, and fights take 10 minutes, rather than 2 hours - so you can have one in the middle of a session without it becoming the whole session. Yum.