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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Short answer: read Jack Vance’s ‘tales of a dying earth’. It’s the reason dnd magic is called ‘vancian’.

    Longer answer: in that series, magic works by just remembering words, and then saying them. But these magic words are powerful things, weighty in the mind, hard to carry. And, when said, they tear themselves out of your mind, causing you to forget them.

    So, not ‘spell slots’ per se, but the idea is you’re prepping spells almost as a ‘potion’, something you carry in your mind, and consume to cast out a spell.




  • It really depends.

    I’m thinking about 3.5 in particular, where an optimized wizard will be able to do the job of the rest of the party (assuming they’re built to be fine, but not power-gaming), better than them.

    There’s no real in-world way to balance that. Either the DM Fiats the power-gamer weaker, the DM tells the power gamer “no”, or the rest of the party power games to. Its just too unbalanced.

    If we’re talking 5e, that’s all out the window then. If 3.5’s power runs from 0-10, the strongest 5e build is like a 6, and the weakest is like a 3. Its still extra work for the DM to balance, but can be done all in-world without needing to rely on metagame fiat.

    And, of course, there’s lots of other systems out there, where the above can be more true or less true depending on what kind of game it is, though 3.5’s power ceiling is probably higher than 95% of the systems out there.







  • I’d say the key difference between a ‘spotlight hog/main character syndrome’ and ‘a player who RPs a lot in a group full of quiet people’, is does the player also start talking/engaging whenever the spotlight is on the quiet player.

    Because I think that’s the real rub; that difference between a player ‘dragging’ the less engaged players behind them (good and fine), and a player who can’t allow themselves to step back and let someone else be the main character for a single scene.



  • BedbugCutlefish@lemmy.worldtoRPGMemes @ttrpg.networkHow I Feel in a Lot of Groups
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    1 year ago

    Eh, I’ve seen it cut both ways (as someone who GMs 90% of the time).

    Had a player I was friends with, and roommates for a while, who was a huge ‘spotlight hog’. Since some players are quieter and less assertive, I try to make sure each player gets at least one ‘spotlight moment’ each arc. And this player was real bad for always kinda muscling into other player’s ‘moments’.

    After having multiple talks, eventually just had to kick him (cause he didn’t stop), which has pretty awkward considering ‘roommate’.

    So I’d take players that need to be coaxed into RP over players that have main character syndrome any day (though, of course, ideally all the players just RP readily but politely).