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ahdok

@[email protected]

I make comics sometimes: linktr.ee/ahdok

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ahdok,
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Now that the crew is all caught up, we can get back to making jokes about ridiculous use of spells. Mechanics jokes coming soon :)

Here’s the last October Konsi.

https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/940f196c-8a41-45a3-8325-aff747ef4614.jpeg

ahdok, (edited )
@ahdok@ttrpg.network avatar

I do intend to follow up in a later comic.

It’s probably my art not doing this justice, but Razira is 6’4" and 200 pounds of muscle, Konsi is 4’ tall and weighs 40 pounds when wet. Toron himself is physically very weak (he rolled a 6 for strength, and avoids all physical activity whenever he can).

In Toron’s mind, it’s a miracle that she survived the experience.

ahdok,
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Okay. I have another one :)

ahdok,
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Here’s one of the Konsis from October that I didn’t post here.

https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/373ad5ee-9104-4113-a1ff-35754aa089a2.jpeg

ahdok,
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I fully encourage this :)

ahdok,
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https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/e14cdb1e-756f-453a-80fb-67441e5306d6.jpeg

ahdok,
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I have a giant box of dice and I loan them out to my players, especially new players. At the end of the campaign, I let players keep the set they used as a memento :)

If I only owned four sets, I’d have run out a long time ago.

ahdok,
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I miss the chessex sets that came with 2 D6 in the box.

ahdok,
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5e’s balance point puts a massive premium on AC - it’s very expensive to improve AC.

ahdok, (edited )
@ahdok@ttrpg.network avatar

This varies hugely from DM to DM.

When you’re at the table, the most important thing is to keep the game running. Keeping the game moving and everyone playing is more important than “getting the rule right” - so there’s a number of ways to do this - and different tables have different feelings, but here are some options.

  1. If your table cares heavily about “getting the rules correct” you can look it up. Some players place a lot of value on “getting the rules right”, they want to know for certain what the rules of the game they’re playing are, and it’s important to them to have a consistent ruleset to play within. For tables with this mindset it can be worth taking a moment to look up the rule, so long as people are happy with the flow of play being interrupted. This is an exception to the general “Keep the game running” priority.

1a) 5th edition doesn’t have hard and fast defined rules for *everything" (in this case you could use “improvised weapon” rules and treat the halfling as an improvised club)

1b) A lot of DMs are much more happy to “let something slide” if the player isn’t gaining any significant mechanical advantage from doing it… So interesting note: in 5e, ghosts are only resistant to damage from non-magical weapons, not immune, so “swinging an improvised halfling” is less good as an attack than just using your weapons. Lower expected damage, lower chance to hit, might damage the halfling. Since the player isn’t even getting an advantage from doing this, many DMs would be happy to just let it happen.

Assuming you want to keep the game going, here are some other options.

  1. If the game doesn’t have a rule, you can use a rule you know from another game. 5e often doesn’t have strictly defined rules for niche situations, but 4e and 3e often did have rules for those things. I often use an older rule I remember if 5e doesn’t have a rule for it.
  2. Go with your gut. Just decide what you think should happen given your understanding of the game world and metaphysics, then go with that.
  3. If your table likes it, use the “rule of cool” and just allow anything that is funny or interesting or cool.
  4. If you’re convinced a rule exists, but you can’t remember it, a really good practice that I recommend is as follows:
    a) In the moment, let the player do the thing in the fashion that’s most favourable to them.
    b) Let the table know, this is a one-time ruling for the current session, not a house rule that’s permanently in play
    c) Make a note of the situation in your DM notes
    d) After the session, do the research to look up the rule, and take the time to figure out how you think it should work. (If you have mechanically minded players, they might be interested in helping with this kind of thing.)
    e) Let the players know what the rule will be going forward. \

Fundamentally, what’s most important here is NOT what method you use, but that your players know how you run the game and are happy with it. Any approach can work if the table likes that approach, and different approaches work better for different groups. There’s no “right” or “wrong” answer other than “what works best for your group.”

ahdok,
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oh just… this is why full plate is so expensive in 5e - it’s for game balance rather than for the realistic fidelity of the setting.

Another example of the economics here are the rules governing how much income an artisan (such as a blacksmith) makes per day, compared against how long it takes to make a suit of full plate, and how much it costs. Even with the updated guidelines that an artisan “makes” 1gp per day, that means a suit of full plate is about five years worth of income, and many stores in big cities have sets just on the shelf.

These rules are a little complex, because the “take home pay” of labourers and artisans in the rules is after living expenses, and a blacksmith has to maintain rent on their forge, as well as purchase raw materials, but even factoring all that stuff in, the cost of full plate just doesn’t make economic sense in the context of the world, the high price is there because it increases one of your stats permanently - and to boot, it’s a stat that comes up constantly in play. A single point of AC is more powerful than a single point of almost any other stat in the game, with the exception of your class’ primary stat or your proficiency bonus.

ahdok,
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That’s what I said. It’s a game balance consideration.

ahdok,
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There’s always been a bit of a tug-of-war between making a good mechanical game, and making a good storytelling environment.

If your aim is to tell stories, having consistent, intuitive worldbuilding helps a lot - it’s easier to immerse yourself in a world and tell better stories in a world if the internal rules of that world make consistent sense. The further you stray from this, the more barriers you erect to storytelling.

When you get heavily into storytelling/roleplaying within a fictional world, there’s always an element that involves exploring the aspects of that world and expanding its boundaries, asking questions like “what if?” - a poorly constructed world that doesn’t have consistent worldbuilding will collapse if you push too hard at the edges, whereas a world with consistent rules and systems will yield new ground to explore new narratives.

If your aim is to provide a balanced mechanical gaming experience, then it’s important to focus on game mechanics and balance a lot, in order to make everything fair, and to build a game that’s interesting to explore from a mechanical perspective. You want your rules to exist in a state where every element has a purpose, and they work together. You want anything that costs resources or investment to yield rewards that are in proportion to the cost you put into them, so mechanical choices are interesting and result in many different approaches.

For a game like DnD, it’s often the case that these two design goals are in conflict. Making an economy that’s balanced around the mechanical power of different magic items results in an economy where adventurers are earning tens of thousands of gold pieces for an adventure, and regular artisans are earning one gold piece per day. If the blacksmith has an income of one gold piece per day, how can it afford to buy an unneeded item from the party for hundreds, or even thousands of gold? where did that money come from?

So the question in your design is… where is that balance point? at what point does narrative consistency have to yield to mechanical balance, and at what point does mechanical balance yield to narrative consistency? - for most designers and for most tables, this is going to be personal preference, and the answers are different. You might find if one of these two principles “feels wrong” for you, it’s worth tweaking the world, or the systems or the economy to make a game that works better for your group.

I think 5e is unfortunate in that the specific systems of DnD bring these two halves of roleplaying into conflict shockingly often. A huge amount of DnD exists as vestiges and inhereted setting from older editions - to the extent where large portions of the game mechanics exist as they do because as a result of historical technical debt - there are aspects of 5e’s mechanical design and worldbuilding that fail to satisfy either design principle, doing both badly because they felt they had to… (e.g. why is “Fireball” just so much mechanically stronger than all comparably levelled damage spells? That’s not serving any mechanical or narrative design principle, it’s just inherited from older versions.)

For something like… “the cost of plate armour” I really think WotC dropped the ball though - the reason the “mechanical design goal” and the “narrative design goal” are at odds is purely a result of the values they assigned to some items in the PHB, and those numbers propagating through the rest of the design, because mechanical purchases and treasure values have to make comparative sense.

Original core doesn’t define gold values for magic items, and it doesn’t provide recommended treasure packages or income curves (older editions provided these things to help DMs figure out how much treasure to give.) - the only real things that have defined gold costs are “starting gold”, “living expenses” and “mundane adventuring gear”

So you could, for example, simply divide the value of every item in the “adventuring gear” table by 10, and keep the costs of living, and the incomes of NPCs the same. This wouldn’t make any significant difference to gameplay - you’d just give out 10% of the money… but it’d bring the economy of adventuring more in line with the economy of the rest of the world, and allow players to operate with numbers that’d “make sense” when contextualized against the rest of the setting. In essence, it’d be a net zero mechanical change, but a significant narrative improvement.

ahdok,
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When I ran Rime of the Frostmaiden I managed to One-Shot a character three times over the campaign (once at low level, once at level ~5, and once at high level)

All three times it was the party Paladin.

ahdok,
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I spent quite a lot of time at university doing improv, and what I learned has come in useful in all walks of life, but also for roleplaying games. It doesn’t matter whether your improvisation and storytelling skills are good or bad, everyone improves with practice and experience.

ahdok,
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Here’s today’s Konsi

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F9pJ7uKWwAAb01b?format=jpg&name=900x900

ahdok,
@ahdok@ttrpg.network avatar

https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/b6bb8af3-72f7-4978-8d39-51316192eef2.jpeg

This dress

ahdok,
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I’ve been a tad busy with drawtober, it’s meant to have been up this Monday, but I’ll backfill it once I get a little sleep :D

ahdok, (edited )
@ahdok@ttrpg.network avatar

Multiple users in this community post ongoing comic stories from their campaigns. With mine, there’s always a joke in each comic, and they’re always from roleplaying games. A lot of the humour won’t make sense to you unless you’ve been following the whole series though - as it’s character-based humour, which relies on you knowing the characters to work.

In the case of this series, I specifically polled the community here and asked if people wanted to see this content on this sub before I started posting the series. When the comics moved from “isolated jokes” to an ongoing story, I polled the community again. The general consensus has been that the community wants to see this content here.

If you, personally, don’t want my one-comic-every-2-weeks diluting your feed, then a simple solution that works for everyone and keeps everyone happy is to simply block me. It’s entirely within your power to generate the solution you want for yourself.

ahdok,
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Aw. I’m sorry.

I’ve been busy drawing the daily Konsi though.

https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/83586589-6ffc-4caa-b120-122a5f71afe2.jpeg

Here you go.

ahdok,
@ahdok@ttrpg.network avatar

https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/feb9e4f1-dac7-4358-81f6-2a12164a1745.png

ahdok,
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Here’s your last daily Konsi. No she can’t get up she’s stuck there.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8cAGHsW8AA1Kr3?format=jpg

ahdok,
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It is not. JoCat is king.

ahdok,
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What a difference 24 hours of preparation, a plan, and four friends backing you up makes. :)

ahdok,
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This was fairly early, Razira didn’t even know she was bisexual- she was just proposing sharing a bath platonically.

Konsi was too embarrassed, so finished washing extra quick and vacated the bathroom for Razira to use.

ahdok,
@ahdok@ttrpg.network avatar

Here’s your daily Konsi, and a reminder that if you want to see all of them, you should check the socials links. :)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8W3dDUWcAAfYJl?format=jpg

ahdok,
@ahdok@ttrpg.network avatar

I’m sure you’re all wanting a daily Konsi.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8R4gSOWcAAphv7?format=jpg&name=small

ahdok,
@ahdok@ttrpg.network avatar

I haven’t “ended” it - I just ran out of new comics. I’ll still make more, it’ll just be a slow update schedule. (Lemmy is actually ahead of my webcomic right now, the most recent one I posted is going to hit my site on Monday.)

ahdok,
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Here’s your daily Konsi

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8MdbnUXoAAfImf?format=jpg

ahdok,
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…cambridge.org/…/make-a-rod-for-own-back

ahdok,
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Here’s today’s daily Konsi.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8HRxN_WEAEJFrC?format=jpg

ahdok,
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I’ve definitely had my players fail easier puzzles :D

ahdok,
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I’m making them, it’s just one every 2 weeks or so.

This Halloween short is 4 comics - I drew it last year in a single day in October.

ahdok,
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Oh my bad, I forgot to go back and add it.

Fixed!

ahdok,
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Razira isn’t the smartest lady in the world, but she’s also not trying to be - she’s happy with straightforward simple problems, and if something’s complicated she’s very capable of going “oh this other person has a plan, I’ll support that”. It works out well for her.

On the road as a paladin she has solved a lot of her problems in the past with “smite first, questions later” - but Konsi’s influence towards “work it out peacefully” is very strong in that regard.

This is sort of why they work well together. Razira gives Konsi confidence (that she sorely needs) and Konsi’s inclined to think things through (which Razira needs)

ahdok,
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Razira has absolutely no concerns about this at all, she’s perfectly fine with stripping off in public spaces and we have to keep stopping her.

ahdok,
@ahdok@ttrpg.network avatar

I guess she’s just really comfortable with her body image and not easily embarrassed by nudity.

ahdok,
@ahdok@ttrpg.network avatar

https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/764551b0-83b8-47ac-baea-3e5b941a3be4.png

This is Priestess Guidance, she’s wanted in Neverwinter for blowing up Lord Neverember’s manor.

https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/228df049-eb06-4247-b01d-8848d2d23625.png

This is priestess Miko, she’s wanted in Baldur’s Gate for the killing an entire squad of Flaming Fist.

Both of them are Konsi disguises (and Konsi didn’t do either of those things.)

ahdok,
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Ah! It wasn’t broken for me, because the browser version takes the post number and manages to navigate to it.

Fixed now :)

ahdok,
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In this case, not deliberately - although I do love Buffy a lot.

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