Have fun!

Cool You’ve got a lot of gear

this was in my recommendations btw! instant subscribe, and hope ur channel grows!! :))

That is why I design me own system to not even have stats that can be min-maxed.

My wife would like to inquire if there will be more sleep ASMR? She's been listening to this one every night since it came out.

The worst part of that "having the sheet passed back" experience is, to me, knowing that the entire game is going to be dominated by that concern from that point onward. Not even that the game will be crunchy, or mostly involve combat, but that it will be BALANCED (in that balance will be attempted before other things even though, especially in 5e, balancing encounters or party member powers isn't really something that can actually be done)... an upcoming event of unremarkable, formulaic, standardized, and unengaging repetition without real consequences and limited choices

To min-max is to not even use a trope. But I'd say that it's an objectively bad thing to do, that you're right, and that MMing is pretty much always bad. Not only does it make everything in the game only about Gamism, and power fantasy, but it makes the actual Gamism of the experience worse. It's not really a game if there aren't consequences, and when a game's choices are funneled through a narrow range of abilities or strengths you don't really have a choice (I press controller button A or B... but without the audio visual option of where to do that). The game becomes too easy, or becomes all about reacting to the created unbalance. Furthermore, the power fantasy of min-maxing becomes increasingly mandatory and competitive, growing off of itself. Whoever has the most ability to only press controller button A or B becomes the quarterback of the experience, and the leader of the group; the other players to an extent become only extensions of what the quarterback is doing. It isn't even only that icepick to the head feeling, but the reaction to it... it all orbits around the imbalance. .... now, imbalances aren't bad. Just the dominance of the imbalance. There's more to be rambled about here about how the game is made to revolve around the power fantasy and use of mechanics to create a standardized grey goo autodrive experience where nothing is special and all difficulty is preorganized ahead of time, and how it habituates players into expecting and operating entirely on basis of that instead of GNS theory or what the concept or roleplaying even is... but... already exceeded attention spans with what I've blathered

Great ideas ty!

My no.1 rule is no overweight or low IQ people in my group. Served me well over the years, even though it’s hard to find fit players, it’s worth it.

This is great, appreciate the insights!

Literally dont understand how in a party of more than 2 can have a bugbearian dominate combat to the point where nobody else gets any kills. Are you playing a support class? If you care about roleplay, then ending combat earlier by playing the role of support and adding damage or bonuses to the minmaxer should be in character

Minmaxing for combat efficacy is dumb but minmaxing for how much you can massage official content into the quirks and personality of your character is AMAZING. Find the weirdest combos of fluff to put a little flair on your character. I was told I have to take Feylost as a background for reasons and... now I have a guy haunted by dreams of a fey sentient potato named Roscoe, who gives him a normal potato every day via a magical rucksack to pointlessly attempt to help him in his journey. Story Minmaxing is fun!

I think that a minmaxer has a place at the table as the role-playing as well as the rules lawyer, every character has that niche they want to explorer. There is a time and place for it all. To the larp aspect I minmaxed initially to get the mantle I wanted, then back filled skills and abilities, it has some story elements that I am exploring.

I was told there was a goblin in this video at the beginning. Where gobbo? You're looking great, btw. I want people that have characters they're happy with. I'm not a fan of minmaxing, but I don't want to stick anyone with a character that doesn't do anything they want the character to do, either. I've played some of those low end, really bad dice luck, really bad at everything characters. I get it. As a GM the minmax characters tend to find themselves in situations alone with the MIN part of their character exposed. It doesn't always teach the player a lesson, but their next character in my games are usually more balanced. Really there's never a need to out-game the system as far I'm concerned. GREAT VIDEO! 😍👽 Have fun in MN!

Even outside of characters, we all have blind spots. The sooner you accept that you ARE wrong, loudly and often, the sooner you'll actually become an adult with an honest self image.

This is gold. Thank you!

Never apologize for your natural face. never apologize for tropes

I chuckled in my vast understanding of Existential Dread (tm). <3

Great Video.

What kind of psychopath says things like "too much chili powder" and "no more tacos"?

Tropes happen. Attitudes towards tropes seems crunchier to dig into. Sure, you can get corny and trite ad-nauseum cliches... but what happens if one's instead putting energy into being concerned with that possibility? Not only does one then embrace a default of judgmental negativity, but the focus is on preformatting and prewriting a narrative and that narrative will be of one's own... the character backstory taking over the immersive and interactive roleplay more than even the rules of a character sheet might if allowed to. Most of the time, when everyone's only telling their own stories especially, people tune out... those solipsisms get little engagement and end up being rooms full of monologues. Relevance and interconnectivity become commodities. All prewritten story arcs are at the expense of shared storytelling. My favorite tropes are ones which then develop deeper dimensionality through character development and shared interaction. Best times doing that when there's respect and immersion in the setting.

Lack of makeup where? You look great as always :)

I want to be your friend! 😍👽 I love your strategy for talking to an audience. It's inspiring. Thank you! Keep up the good work.

A trope is a tool. Use it for the wrong job, or the wrong way, and you'll make the problem worse. That's all.

Never apologize for your natural face 😍 happy to watch and listen

You look so beautiful. Miss your painting on twitch.

Fantasy tropes of Arthurian - ruler raised in secret

I like using tropes. Yes a little goes a long way. Yes the hidden weapon trope I’ve used that one too. I hate the horny bard trope though

🥳🫂👍🏿 Love hearing everyone’s game philosophies - I’m on a quest to collect every house rule on KZfaq - do you have any that you like to use you’d be willing to share? Would love to add yours to my House Rule Quest playlist of 2,226 videos and counting - many thanks 🙏🏿

Your tea making at the beginning here reminds me: your recent Tea Tuesday I was thinking, "What is she drinking? How does she make it? What's in the cuuuuuup?" #Request for Behind the Scenes, Tea Time? (A couple of weeks ago I was wondering if you were still doing the iced hibiscus 🌺!)

Good points here. Yes the characters need moral dilemmas

Oh, I want to learn more about the try-fail cycle! <3 <3

That should be a new psychological evaluation: "How do you feel about 'found family' stories? And why? Innnnnnnnterestingggggg."

I think if the DM is setting out to try and achieve a semi-reasonable TPK ASAP, then yeah that's uhhh pretty weird and not great. But I think if the players just do really dangerous things despite warnings, then that's on them, ya know? Like if I was running a game and my players encounter a group of enemies that are wayy too strong, I'll sign-post it as best I can. I'll warn them. If they really want to go ahead with the fight, I'll give them a few rounds of getting trounced and offer an out. If they really don't take it... that's on them, ya know? They're clearly making bad choices. I've had games where A player does this, not a whole party. They were upset but then the rest of the players were like "He warned you. We warned you. You kinda brought it on yourself." And then they said "Yeah you're right, I guess I should roll a new character huh?" I dunno. You just seem mad at bad DMs and are saying TPKs are the problem. When maybe it is bad DMs, but the TPK is a symptom, not the actual problem. TPKs should be rare, or in most games non-existent tbh, that much I definitely agree.

I love playing characters which start with a fundamental idea that they have but haven't actually fully understood, or fully understood the consequences of, or which is almost certainly destined to take its course into becoming an extension of that idea... after that, the rest emerges from the group story and the setting and situations. Then it's out of my hands other than to prevent the sorts of things which create antisocial dynamics or present the other players with anything that they can't handle (Orcs killed my mother, and I need to stop that from ever happening again... by killing all the Orcs? By eliminating all obstacles being put in the way of moving all people everywhere toward killing ALL the Orcs??? By killing anyone who takes the sides of the Orcs??? etc etc). The result is a character with depths much deeper than just a complete self-insert or a story which I've already told in my head to myself, and with perhaps maximum interaction with the other players, the NPCs, the setting, and often even more to do with that core original story element than a character which simply has that view.

Daaaaang. You're good! Another A+ video. 😍💚👽 Yes, more!

Hey girl hey!

This is a role playing game. Game is a third of it. As a game, you must have a win or lose scenario. In order words, you gotta have stakes. And while stakes don't need to be death, if you are indeed fighting to kill something and that thing is fighting to kill you, if my enemy has the chance to kill me and they don't, that's immersion breaking and not a good story to me. It all becomes meaningless if you're never in real danger, IMO. TPKs can happen and they don't necessarily mean the end of the game. If it does, thought, that's ok. You can play again with a new batch of heroes against the evil that won, or you can start from scratch. So many great classic stories have the deaths of protagonists as major pivotal story points. Boromir and Gandalf (although Gandalf is resurrected) comes to mind. Cedric Diggory from HP. Don't even mention ASOIAF. Biblical, folklore, so much! Heroic sacrifice is epic and sacrifice is half of it.

I dont want to diagnose, but you sound like someone who's had a terrible DM and are looking to overcorrect. The DM isnt a storyteller, they're a referee. The way that I avoid unsatisfying TPKs is that every fight is telegraphed. eg. My players are fighting a xorn, an earth elemental that eats gems and is looking for a meal after being woken up. It smelled an elemental gem that the artificer had and attacked him. The gem cracked and released a water elemental, seeking vengance for being released from his slumber. I tell the party that the earth elemental won't attack anyone without gems but the water elemental will attack the lowest hp pc. The artificer drowns inside rhe elemental because he spent his turns shooting it and standing still. The fight was fair because everything I said in this part was told TO THE PLAYERS! Communicating enemy intent to players allows them to strategize and plan. If a protagonist in a story is too stupid to realize that carrying a ribeye steak into an owlbear den then maybe the story was a comedic tragedy all along. (btw dont worry the artificer is fine there were just enough gems in the elemental to revive him)

The volume is a little too low. I have to play it at almost full volume on my phone.

Ahhhhhhhh, yiiiiiiiiis. This is going down tonight. When you have time I think my request is putting your Fabric Pressing ASMR on a 10-hour loop because my whole body instantly relaxes from the first PSSCCCHHHT of the spray botttttttttle <3 <3 <3

One of my rules like this is the Nope-Cut. When in movies there is the one character who's like 'nope nope you'll never get me in there' jump-cut and they are now in the situation. I just do that when one player is holding out on some course of action.

One of my rules is called the doodley-doodley rule: When the characters are doing something that is an absolute waste of time or utterly doomed to fail; like when a player flips a table and sets the bar on fire I waved my fingers in the air and say in a highpitched voice "doodley-doodley...the city guard showed up captured you threw you in jail confiscated all of your items and the next morning have released you and youve to the local church to pray and that's where our story picks up." Or something like that.

We are on the same page - I’ve said various times: “Ok, your character goes and does that. Now I need you to make a character that wants to be here.”

The only group I knew who enjoyed having the constant looming threat of TPKs was a group that didn't run long campaigns with continual narratives; they just did different one-shots every week, a few of which extended into 3-shot games. So there was never a long standing risk of unfulfilled narrative for them

I am kind of confused as to what exactly you think the DM's role really is. If the DM truly wants to let the players have agency, that also means they have to let them go off and die. Like, is the DM supposed to just narrate things that the players do? If it's impossible to TPK, then am I really free? Like, are they just trying to tell you a story? Because sometimes the story of the characters is, they all decide to do something really dumb and they all die. Or we just roll all 1s and the DM rolls all 20s. Sometimes shit happens. To me, the DM's role is to create a world for the players that lets the players tell their story, and to then have the world react to the players stories in a believable and interesting way. Sometimes, the only satisfying conclusion for that is the characters fighting for their lives against a very real threat. Sometimes they lose. I have never TPKed the party, but I've never tried to avoid it either. I've also never been in a TPK. When I don't show up to session, I've literally come back to TPKs however, and the party has told me how it happened (and then the DM tells me I need to either res the party or go get a new party or something). It's usually not that the DM was really trying to cause one, it's usually that players were doing something really dumb and preventable. Almost every player death I've ever witnessed has been due to them not paying attention to things the DM is saying and then walking head first into a very preventable death. The other times it's they roll a nat 1 on a save or die and those I will agree, completely suck balls. And from my view as a player, being at a table where dying is a consequence of things happening is kind of necessary for me to enjoy things. If I walk out as the only one alive because I listened to the the DM, I used every ability at my disposal, if I wracked my brain thinking of the every solution, it feels way more rewarding than the DM saying "well, I didn't think any of you should die, so I'll just whisk you away to safety." The latter would actually piss me off. And I love consequences. Many of the things I do change the world and it almost always makes sense for there to be dire consequences for my actions. Some of those consequences are dangerous, and that makes the story make more sense, makes it so my actions matter and so that I feel like my character has reason to do what they do. Not every combat or situation or even social encounter needs to feel that intense, but having those moments can really let your players shine if they're up for it. Having the game be consequence free really makes it feel like nothing you do matters or has any impact, and a TPK is a type of consequence that has to be there for it to really make sense.

Nobody would read a book where everyone dies? You clearly aren’t a fan of Westerns.

This campaign I'm playing a paladin, and every single combat has begun with my character entering the room, saying "Hello!" politely and being attacked immediately. Talk to monsters recognize talk to monsters. DM definitely plays a lot of morally ambiguous "monsters," but also is like "no, if these guys are fascists, and you're in their little demonized outgroup, they're not down to talk" or even "this is a literal mindless demon." I appreciate having both, in terms of story-building.

The thing of it is, there are plenty of other games where TPKs aren't likely. Purely story-driven. And those are fun. Just like games where TPKs are a foregone conclusion. A game like D&D, or Pathfinder, or something in that vein, represent as close to a happy middle-ground as you can reasonably expect. Telling a rich story is the goal. But for a great story, there must be stakes. And not every great story has a happy ending. TPKs can be a satisfying ending. Look at the Star Wars film Rogue One. I've been GMing since 89, when I was 11 years old. What spurred me into doing it, was my first DM, a friend's older sister, who was objectively awful. We TPK'd four times before we even got to the dungeon. That was not fun. We played on because she was older, and insisted that's how the game goes. I was not convinced of this and went out and got my own DMG. No surprise when I discovered that she wasn't running things properly. She was tormenting us for her amusement. Next session, I quit and announced to the table that I was going to start running a game, and we left. The first TPK that happened wasn't until I was 22. It was a new edition, and we were getting back into D&D after a long run playing World of Darkness games (Vampire, Werewolf etc.). It came about because the players simply didn't really know what their characters could do and they also didn't co-ordinate very well. It was a learning experience. The 2nd TPK was a boss encounter where the first few rounds, the dice rolls broke really bad for the players. To their credit, they committed and kept going. Despite several "outs" I presented for their characters when it became clear they were going to lose. Diminishing returns reached critical mass, and PCs started dropping. The others fought on, not out of desperation, but out of acceptance. "We're not going to survive, but we're going to defy this evil to our last breath." The evil won. And our next campaign was set in the same world where that evil had won. A new batch of heroes rose to fight it. When the final fight against this boss happened, I'd even had some of its minions be undead thralls of their old characters. Basically a good example of how a TPK doesn't have to be the end of the story. Just the end of a chapter in it. The TPK you seem to be talking about here is the result of adversarial GMing. Which, I agree, is not fun. But not all TPKs are like this. I believe they should always be a possibility in a middle-ground game like D&D, but not the goal. And as long as the person behind the screen isn't gleefully murdering PCs (That's what beloved NPCs are for) as the TPK unfolds, it's not a bad thing. It's just an outcome. And when they happen, they don't feel good. But not every tale has to. I honestly don't believe every tale should.

We disagree on PC death. And that's okay! We both enjoy our games.