I assume that of course we are posting the iconic Lower Decks character who is Peanuthamper's father.

How exactly do the Klingons justify using cloaking ships, a strategy which necessarily involves sneaking up on an enemy and catching them unaware? Wouldn't sneak attacks conflict with their notion of honour?

The party finds a secret door. Not knowing what's on the other side, they send the fighter in first. The fighter pushes open the secret door. As it swings forward it pushes aside a corpse on the other side that apparently died trying to pry open the secret door and escape from the next room.

The fighter steps over the corpse, walks into the room, looks around, sees there are no enemies immediately attacking him, and says to the rest of the party "come on in guys, looks like it's safe in here!"

I'll preface this by saying I'm a very new GM, so I'm fairly sure I made the wrong ruling here, but as the saying goes, the best ruling is the one that keeps the game going. I was running the first session of Abomination Vaults last weekend and something came up that I'm not sure how to handle RAW.

Basically, a PC wanted to use the Lie activity in order to talk their way out of a fight. They were fighting a group of Mitflits, and had already used Recall Knowledge to know that Mitflits are easy to manipulate. The PC speaks Undercommon, and they are a Bard, but they want their character to be friendly and therefore didn't like the idea of using Demoralize or Coerce. They instead tried to use the Lie activity. They told one of the Mitflits that the party was sent by their boss, and therefore they should let them go. They rolled a critical success on the Lie. Now I needed to decide what to do with that.

This was a weird situation, because the rules don't really say what lying can accomplish. All it says is that the target believes the lie. Given that the combat had already started, and the PCs had already attacked some of the Mitflits with lethal attacks, it seemed impossible to me that this Mitflit would actually stop fighting (ie. go from hostile to unfriendly), even if he believed the lie. The lie was convincing in terms of how it was worded, but the situation in which it was spoken made it kinda unbelievable. But then again, Mitflits are supernaturally easy to manipulate and bully. Ultimately I ruled that the targeted Mitflit would become Frightened 1, as though the Bard had succeeded on a Demoralize. My reasoning being that the Mitflit believes the lie, but also believes he should continue fighting the PCs. This cognitive dissonance in his mind shocked him and distracted him from the fight at hand.

I'm curious if any GMs out there have any tips on what the best way to handle this would have been.

I've noticed that many archetypes with a level 2 dedication feat simply don't have any level 4 feats. How does this work with the free archetype variant rule? Do you just discard the bonus feat slot at level 4? Also, does playing with this variant rule essentially make it impossible to take a level 4 dedication feat at level 4?

As a GM I'd like to feel like I fully understand how to utilize my monsters tactically, but over the past couple months as I've been running the beginner box and now leading into Abomination Vaults, I feel as though I'm very often just making three strikes with an enemy or moving and striking twice unless the enemy has a very specific action in its statblock which is obviously better. Like a dragon is obviously supposed to use its breath weapon, but then I ran goblin warriors last night and I couldn't even figure out how to use their scurry reaction beneficially.

I just played Codenames for the first time and was in the situation of needing to clue "Ninja" and "Czech" for the win. Ended up going with "Defenestrate". My teammates didn't end up getting it but I'm still proud of coming up with anything that could link those two words.

What are some you've played that were memorable?

I've always thought of the StackExchange network as kind of a strange beast. In one sense, it is basically a Reddit clone. It has a "front page", it has "karma", it has "subreddits", etc. And yet, it is something else entirely. Through strict moderation and constraining site rules, it has always maintained a separate niche from Reddit, despite being so conceptually similar.

I think there is a real possibility that StackExchange network is basically already compliant with the "threadiverse" protocol (ie the Lemmy/Kbin dialect of activitypub), or rather that the data model of their API could be made to be compliant with almost no effort at all. I think it would be really cool to see some of the questions and discussion threads that get created over there appearing over here. Even if it was a one-way connection, the idea of knitting these networks together is fascinating to me. I have no idea if it would make business sense for them, but then again I don't actually know how StackExchange makes most of their money.

Like many 5e players, I investigated other systems during the drama in January. I have converted my table over to Pathfinder 2e, so that's what I'll mostly be running going forward.

However, I'm not one of those people who thinks 2e is better than 5e in all respects, and I'll probably run 5e again at some point in the future. And when I do, there's a mechanic from Pathfinder that I will 100% be porting over to 5e: Hero Points.

Below I will provide a version of this mechanic, written in the mechanical language of 5e (to the best of my ability)

Hero Points

(replaces inspiration)

Hero points represent a player character's unique ability to act heroically against adversity.

At the beginning of each play session, each player loses any hero points they have accumulated, then recieves 1 hero point. Depending on the average duration of your group's gaming sessions, the DM may increase or decrease the frequency of this by periodically resetting hero points mid-session, or only once every couple sessions. The expectation is that this reset will occur roughly once every 3-5 hours of play.

The DM may award additional hero points for any reason. They are encouraged to give out hero points to reward good roleplaying, good tactics, or any behaviour which improves the play experience for everyone at the table. A DM should award an average of approximately one hero point for every hour of play. You can have multiple hero points, but you can never have more than 3 hero points.

Whenever you roll an attack roll, saving throw, or ability check, you may spend a hero point after seeing the result and after the DM tells you whether or not the roll was a success or failure. If you do, you reroll the check and must use the new result, even if it is worse. This roll is unaffected by whether you have advantage or disadvantage on the check.

Whenever you would fall unconscious due to being reduced to 0 HP, or whenever you would accumulate a death saving throw failure, you may spend all of your hero points in order to remove any death saving throw failures and become stabilized at 0 HP.

The DM may provide other options for how to spend hero points, such as altering the story or introducing new information which benefits the party.

That's it, that's the whole mechanic. In general I just think 2e does a much better job of the "inspiration" system than 5e.

In my years as both a player and a DM, I can count on one hand the number of times I ever saw Inspiration being awarded to 5e players. It simply isn't a good system. The DM fiat needed to receive it makes it unpredictable, and it's way too hard to get players to actually spend it once they have it.

The Hero Points system is much better because it resets every session, meaning that players will have a predictable way to get hero points, and that they will have a good reason to spend them; even if the DM forgets to award it. And since they will be spending that resource more often, the DM will have more reminders that the mechanic exists.

I encourage DMs out there to experiment with this system in their own games. And let me know how it goes.

Hi all! Relatively new (or new to PF2e) GM here. Last night one of my players who is playing a Summoner raised the question of whether he can attempt Treat Wounds twice every hour instead of once since his Eidolon is a separate target (ie. Someone treats the Summoner's wounds and then immediately treats the Eidolon's wounds). I ruled in the moment that I didn't think that sounded right, my reasoning being that they share a health pool and the PC shouldn't be able to double its benefits solely because of which class it is. Can anyone tell me what the RAW is here, ideally with an AON reference I can point him to?

Edit: I found this thread which seems to suggest that I made the wrong call. I'd love to have a more official answer, but I think the idea that healing is supposed to be trivialized by certain combos makes sense.

Discovered this band a couple years ago. Before long I owned their entire discography on vinyl. I don't usually listen to much ska, but something about their punk/ska fusion really appeals to me.