Kids these days who think that being a bard is just about swinging swords and playing lutes disgust me. Where’s the pizzazz? The showmanship? The seduction??
you ain’t a real bard until you seduce your way out of at least 19 situations that would normally end in combat
You’re not a real bard until you make your DM cry because you seduced the Big Bad that they’ve built up to for 10 sessions
Once a bard friend rolled a 1 for a seduction and ended up killing a girl and tried to hide the body. He was caught, rolled low on deception and they all thought he was fucking her corpse. He then tried seducing the guards and rolled low again so all the guards had boners while arresting him and the DM had to sideline the entire game and make up a dungeon for the rest of us to get our stupid bard out of. But we didn’t. So for like 3 nights the DM essentially ran 2 different games, one of us questing without ol’ corpsefucker and then the adventures of corpsefucker: escape from boner castle.
there’s a lot of evidence that the iliad and the odyssey were actually composed by a variety of poets through an oral tradition rather than just by one poet, so what if the homeric texts are actually just a very long game of D&D
homer, the dm: okay achilles, agamemnon has just taken away your war prize, what do you want to do achilles’ player: i roll to have a diplomatic conversation with agamemnon achilles’ player: *rolls a 1* homer: you throw the staff of speaking at agamemnon’s face and storm off to sulk with your boyfriend
Homer, the DM: Your beautiful Patroclus is dead. What do you do? Achilles’ player: I fight everyone. Homer, the DM: You can’t fight everyone. How would you even– Achilles’ player: *rolls a 20* I fight everyone. Homer, the DM: *sighs* Fine. You cut a path through the Trojan army, enemy dead strewn in your wake. Achilles’ player: How many? Homer, the DM: …lots. Enough to clog the friggin’ river with bodies. Achilles’ player: I fight the river. Homer, the DM: You. can. not. fight. the. river. Achilles’ player: *reaches for dice*
Homer, the DM: Okay guys, so the war’s over, you had a bunch of losses but you won in the end. Time to go home, let’s roll to see who gets there firs—
Odysseus’s player: I got a critical failure.
Homer: The cyclops asks you who you are. What do you do?
Odysseus’s player: I say, “Who me? I’m nobody.”
Homer: Roll for deception.
Odysseus’s player: I got a natural 20.
Homer: The cyclops now completely believes that your name is Nobody. He shouts for help from the other cyclops but they ignore him because he’s telling them that “Nobody hurt him.”
Essential components of any fantasy rolepaying group:
The player who brings exactly the same swishy elf character to every table; 50% chance of wizard, 50% chance of bard, 100% chance of banging a dragon before the campaign is done.
The player who favours dwarves because they’re uncomfortable with speaking in character and dwarves aren’t expected to have personalities.
The player who thinks they’re cleverly subverting expectations by playing their halfling as a bloodthirsty, sexually promiscuous drug fiend, unaware that – thanks to players like them – literally 80% of all halfling player characters are like that.
The player who designs their character purely for novelty value – like, this time they’re a giant telepathic praying mantis, or whatever – yet inexplicably manages to have the deepest character arc out of anyone.
The player whose character’s stats honestly don’t matter because their real contribution to the party is being the only adult in the room.
More:
The perennial orc player who you’re pretty sure is using the game as a group therapy session to work through some sort of identity issue.
The player whose rogue’s complicated backstory and sinister secret
agenda never actually end up being relevant in play because they also
kept it a secret from the GM.
The player with a penchant for Lawful Goodish warrior types who thinks they’re the adult in the room, but really they just have a talent for making irresponsibly dangerous plans sound reasonable – even to themselves.
The player who insists on taking the most complicated race/class combo
the GM will allow, then later discovers that the reason they can’t hit
for shit is because they’re been rolling their attacks on a d12 all
night.
The player who rolls druids because they are a straight up furry.
• The player that plays as a dragonborn purely because they’re a scallie
• the player that plays as a dragonborn purely because they’re a scallie
^Haiku^bot^0.4. Sometimes I do stupid things (but I have improved with syllables!). Beep-boop!
My favorite thing about Dungeons & Dragons is how fucking quickly people become ride-or-die bitches with each other
no lie i had a campaign where I tried playing a really chaotic neutral “leave me alone” rouge and ended up attached at the hip to our monk who couldn’t roll higher than a natural 10 to literally save his life bc in our first encounter he called my character “a nice lass” and that was all it took
Robes are stupid. My sorcerer dresses like Petyr Baelish.
To expand: if you are a mage, dress like a noble. Do not dress like a wizard. Pointy conical hat and sky-blue robes is medieval semaphore for “kill first and with extreme prejudice.” Tailored black silk over cloth-of-gold and studded with rubies says “Harmless, but valuable; ransom if possible or kill last.”
If you dress like a noble, they’re not going to pay attention as you take a turn or two to back away from the melee and prepare yourself. The ruse is only broken when you reveal yourself, at which point 8d6 fire damage is screaming toward them at Mach Fuck anyway, so no big.
counterpoint: if you don’t get to dress like someone ran a magical thrift shop through a rototiller and frankensteined the pieces back together what’s the god-damned point of being a wizard
Historically, there are major four groups that have commonly been described as “adventurers”:
a. Pirates and bandits who realised that the real money lay in getting people to pay them to go pillage someone else;
b. Members of the idle rich who wandered about robbing tombs and subjugating the locals for fun rather than for profit, often distinguishable from the first group only by the presence of a “Sir” before their names;
c. People who just wanted to look at birds, but it sort of got out of hand; and
d. Lesbians.
Now, I’m not saying that this taxonomy would make a reasonable basis for a class system in a tabletop roleplaying game, but I’m not not saying it either.
D&D but your only class choices are Pirate, The Idle Rich, Birdwatcher, and Lesbian.
sparksoffandommagic 