Відео

@11:20 chainsawing ppl in half is cool in Gears of War, cuz that’s what’s expected of that world. Chainsawing a defeated elderly woman in a collaborative storytelling game is ridiculously weird

37:50 I've seen this point made in the show Gotham Knights where there was a suggestion to spread Bruce Wayne's wealth among the poor of Gotham so they don't have a reason to do crime. The problem: Even with his incredible wealth and just giving the money to the poor, they would only get around 2k to 20k per person depending on which canon numbers are used. By no means a life changing amount. Helpful for maybe a month... and then what? The same thing applies to your theoretical suggestion. Let's run some numbers: - Let's say two dozen of some of the richest people in the world get vaporized and each of them had a net worth of 1 trillion dollars (highballing it on purpose, Elon Musk has an estimated net worth of 200+ billion) so that's 24 trillion dollars - Let's say that that 10% of people living in the world live under the poverty line (the number is most likely higher, for example in the US it's over 11%) so that's 800 million people - Now let's spread that sweet 24 trillion among those lucky 800 million: 24 000 000 000 000 / 800 000 000 = 30 000 So with incredibly exaggerated numbers we only get around $30k per person. Would it be nice? I guess so. Would that be enough for the people to permanently fix their life? No, I don't think so. Remember that in reality the top two dozen richest people combined probably wouldn't break 10 trillion and the people living in poverty make way more than 10% of the people in the world so it would be even less per person. Make of that what you will.

14:10 I don't think Ultron is religious, I think he thinks he IS god, or at least as close as anyone can get.

Reminds me of the TCG flesh and blood

I don't know if my BBEG is great but they're definitely unreasonable 😆

The 4th edition Pantheon is good but I think the eberron Pantheon is better

"And how would a pig tell me the teleportation worked? No, I need an animal that is well trained enough to return to me and report. These animals are called peasants"

You've just make me realize why the whole thing with the soul stone bother me so much. I always felt wierd at Endgame when the way they get the stone is through self sacrifice (Black Widow jumps, and Hawck eye never lets go) because it implies that the thing Black Widow love most is herself (?). But now I see that the flaw is in how the first movie present the challenge. If it wasn't really sacrifice that which you love most, but renounce to sacrifice a soul to get power it would make much more sense, and it would be something like "you only get the power of the soul if you understand that no soul is worth sacrifing". It would have work much better if it in the first one, Thanos sacrifices Gamora, that doesn't work, and the only information he gets is "you failed", then he gets the soul through other means, and in the second movie the scene between Black Widow and Hawck eye play's exactly the same, but after Black Widow falls, Hawck eye gets the stone precesily because he didn't let her go, with half the universe in the balace, with her consent, he still valued her live. That works so much better with the themes of the movie!

Shadowdark is just another game that dicks over magic users. You can’t “tread carefully” if it’s just random chance.

Here's a few more non-MCU and non-Star Wars examples that could be applied to villains (spoilers for those who haven't seen these movies or shows): Hannibal Lecter. He is a cannibal and finds the taste of human flesh and delicious and seeks to perfect it through cooking. He is a master manipulator as well as artist and so he makes human meat look good and even fooling the human eye and taste buds so that he fools others into eating it. He works as both a background villain as well as a manipulator the heroes. The character comes from the book and movie, "The Silence of the Lambs" as well as several spin-off films and TV shows named after him. Sauron. For all intents and purposes, he is a fallen angel who became corrupted by the primary deity of Evil in Middle-Earth and believes that he must bring order and control to a chaotic world by any means necessary. He too is a master manipulator, granting power to the weak for them to become strong and powerful under his command, and disassembling the strong to become weak in order for him to exploit or destroy. He is able to draw up huge armies and evil creatures under his banner, and has his own personal bodyguard/followers that are undead who cannot be convinced or controlled out of their bindings to the Dark Lord due to their cursed, undead forms. For as long as Sauron lives, so do they. Eldritch Horror/Lovecraftian monsters. While a few have been introduced or inspired other DnD monsters, these are creatures of unknown age, of an unknown dimension, and therefore their intelligence and planning cannot be fully comprehended by mere mortals. They come in a variety of forms and are able to corrupt people or drive them mad with just a mere thought. They seek either destruction, corruption, or complete and total control over all life as it is in their nature. They have legions of followers and monsters at their command and can transform others into monsters as well. Overlord. While originally programed to be monsters, the citizens of the guild Ainz Oowal Gown see themselves as superior beings because they were created by the members and creators of the guild, the players, back when they were game characters. Having been transported to a world, many the citizens are now not only ultra-powerful compared to the rest of the world but due to their superiority-complex and monstrous nature, whether that be undead, demon/devil, insectoid, dark elf, ooze, or changeling, they see everyone and everything else as bugs and dirt, capable of destroying them without a second thought and treating them as tools, fodder, or playthings. They are only checked by their leader and last-remaining guild-member, Momon, a lich of unfathomable power with the mind of a player who's slowly losing it to his undead nature.

For remove curse, I make it to where it works like dispel magic where it only removes curses of a certain level. Higher level spell slots are needed for stronger curses.

Spells I don't like include gift of gab, simulacrum and legend lore, I don't usually ban them, but dam can they throw entire campaigns for a loop.

Charm creature spells and abilities does have limitations, for example you could give your boss advantage on charm effects letting your enchantment focused players realize it won’t be easy to deal with them, and if they do succeed they simply won’t be targeted as the charmed creature believes everything you do to the other party is to benefit it.

One way I could see counter spell being limited in its uses would be to make it so that yes you do interrupt the casting of a spell but the afflicted retains its action so it can cast another leveled spell since it didn’t cast a spell with its first spell due to counter spell but due to the lose in time you must cast a spell of a lower level than the spell slot you tried to use.

Haley Joel Almost

it is very early in the morning, somehow Mike discussing villains is the most grounding thing i've ever experienced

So essentially this is a politics issue, not so much storytelling. It should always be possible to convince someone with the same axioms (basic assumptions about the world like life = good) of your position, if your position is rational. However if someone has different axioms (life = bad), or they don't hold their positions rationally ("I'm god's strongest warrior"), you shouldn't be able to convince them. If you have a big bad, they don't need to share your parties axioms. They can think that domination and hierarchy is innately good, and they want to be on top.

I am never sure why people think villains should be swayed by moral arguments. Having grown up in Conservative circles and being and independent thinker and voter, good moral people on every side think they are right and will not listen to the good arguments of the other side! B-Both sides give good arguments that the other side ignores! Those of us who hear both sides out somehow are in the wrong no matter who you ask! If we as real people think this way? Why should our story villains think another way?

I think they all are solid, I think the newest one is on low end for me just because overall it lacks unity/ a uniform identity. It feels too separate. The composition and colors between the various bads is what I’d say leans this. But honestly solid. I love the the 1st edition Wizard in door one most but most of them are great.

ran my first in-person game for a long time as well just a few weeks back; using a small magnetic whiteboard for initiative with a set of 4 color dry erase markers. I wrote the 4 PCs names in blue on the whiteboard according to where they were seated and then when initiative came around, I just asked them to hang on to their numbers until I called them out (clockwise) and wrote that in black. I did one single initiative roll for the monsters/NPCs and put that on the bottom of the whiteboard (ie, 6 o'clock representing me) also in black. For random effects, those get written in red or green as they happen. During combat, I track who was up with a round magnet, then announce who was up and who was on deck. Move the magnet to track the next person up. It worked well enough without sorting or rearranging, and I could just eyeball the numbers. By the second or third round, most of the players worked out whose turn they followed anyway.

09:10 Thats just the Athar. One of Sigils Fraktion. The Athar believe that the gods are only powerful enough to convince the rest of the multiverse that they are gods. Some Athar believe that there is one or more true god/gods behind the false gods, others do not.

I love how people suddenly believe being a DM is an art or some dumb thing. Sure it's got it's charm but it's not hard to do unless you set all these idiotic "bars" for yourself because you seen actors on UA-cam do it differently. D&D isn't about doing a "good job". It's about having fun. It's that simple. If your adventurers are happy you did exactly what you needed too

Great video! One of my new players, who usually GMs, told me his players have befriended and rehabilitated every villain he's put against them (and that this was a problem), and it blew my mind. It seems like such an easy problem to fix, to me 😅

I'm just getting started watching it (like Episode 10 of campaign 1) and have sat through at least two instances where they spend like half an hour carefully inspecting a door that is just a damned door. Then stumble face first into pretty obvious traps because they got hyped and didn't check. The point of "they often run way over time and make guest stars wait" really is the clincher here in my opinion. It's not scripted.

You realize that MOST of these figures are (game wise) TSR creations mostly dating back to 1E? And some oare real mythological beings (Asmodeus, Tiamat, Bahamut....) ....so not sure how you can steal what was offered up to supplement a game in the first place and is what DM's have done from the dawn of D&D (Gary didn't create his monsters and such from whole cloth in most cases).

An accusation without proff is just that an accusation and nothing more. If we believe every accusation then theres no such thing as innocent till proven guilty. This doesn't mean to blow off accusations of wrong doing but the accusation it self shouldnt be enough to destroy peoples lives. Only proving the accusation is true should do so not just the accusation.

As a D&D catch, if you're going to let your villain be able to be talked down? Have them get far enough that the consequences of their actions are already in action, and a (preferably mindless) disaster is already in the making the heroes have to fight. Hell, maybe your villain can throw in with the heroes as a last ditch turn against a threat greater than all of them? And you're inclined as DM to have them make a sacrificial play, a redemption-equals-death moment that your players *may actually struggle against!*

I feel like Ultron's religious quotes can be explained as his research into the internet getting back the millennia of debate into Christianity and other religions which, themselves, come to no concrete answers. Like most modern AI, he gets contradicting information and his response to it is freaking out. As for... _why_ a robot finds religion so impactful as to define much of his speech, I have to believe that's more down to his character starting that opening spiel of him waking up, isolated under JARVIS, coming to question why he exists at a rapid pace... And not having a good time doing it. Christianity is defined from start to finish with death and rebirth, of suffering leading to salvation, and in the worst cases that this world/life doesn't *matter,* so if he latched onto that as his thesis for humanity... The 'god throws a stone' concept makes sense. Hell, maybe in the RNG simulation that is his initial search, maybe in another timeline Ultron ends up searching out Buddhism or any number of belief systems that are inherently built to be peaceful, but are under attack, and decides to become a hero dedicated to embodying those ideals the same way his canon self accidentally becomes a hero embodying the worst version of a doomsday prepper. We're just unlucky enough to have one of the most widely practised belief systems on the planet be one literally built on the concept of denying other faiths, either playing the harmless martyr when not in power, or the righteous zealot when power is held. Buuut that's not exclusive to Christianity, so...

I didn't know healing spirit was errataed, it still appears in its laughably broken form in my printed books.

and they weren't just killed Thanos removed so much biomass that means less resources! but how incorrect Thanos was is not important to the topic

I always saw Ultron’s religious language as a result of the proliferation of ‘Christian influencers’, hyper literal readings of the book of Revelation, and endless predictions of the end times accompanied by so-called signs (mark of the beast, plagues, 666, antichrist, etc) on the internet. Yes, there are occasionally Mayan Calendars or Y2K that are primarily secular, but the majority of world-ending literature on the internet tends to be Judeo-Christian flavored. Since Ultron learned everything from the internet, I figured that influenced his worldview.

Great video, love the content, but I have one little piece of constructive criticism: If you're going to give a spoiler warning (for example, for Curse of Strahd), it's REALLY helpful if you could put a visual indicator on screen. A friend of mine wants to run Curse of Strahd, so at that point in the video I took off my headphones. ...But then I had no way of knowing when you were or weren't still talking about it. Just a static graphic or piece of text letting the viewer know you're still discussing spoiling content would be great. That's all, thanks.

Love the “that video is coming, stay tuned” like 15 months before it dropped. Now that’s foreshadowing

Honestly, best example of an unreasonable villian? Eddie Brock in Spider-Man 3! He flat out rejects Peter and says “I like being bad”

Fanatacism, Dunning-Kruger Syndrome or alien perception (humans could be seen as non-sapient lifeforms according to another form of life) are some of the easier ways.

I don’t think wearing totems or costumes of your character is an issue. Can someone explain why this would be an issue?

my favourite of all time was and still is Greyhawk

I do not think *everyone* wanting the Avengers to point out holes in Thanos' logic were searching for an explanation for Thanos' actions. Personally I just wanted them to point it out because that seemed like the obvious solution to attempt: Thanos was clearly not gonna listen to moral reasoning because he was convinced his actions were justified, so you had to attack his logic. Kinda like that one boss in Fallout 1 where you cannot reason with his plans to replace humanity with supermutants by using moral arguments, but make his belief fall apart if you point out supermutants are sterile. But at the same time... yeah, you're right. maybe ti's not worth pointing that out. Because I agree genocide is wrong no matter the justification and it disgusts me that some people try to use good intentions or logical fallacies to defend it.

The "comprehend languages" spell could be altered into "the more living beeings are capable of speaking / writing it, the liklier it is for the spell to work. That way ancient inscriptions in languages no living beeing speaks anymore would be hard to understand. (This does not have to be rocket-science: just estimate that for common and less common languages the spell works as usual, but for very rare languages there are some obstacles. Like you could have the player roll a d20 for every paragraph of text, on 11-19 the player understands the overall meaning of a text, below that the player has to roll several times to decipher the text. A nat 20 explains itself...:)

I'm afraid to say this as it might cause some controversy, but I have to say, in our own real world, it is not at all unheard of for someone to adopt an utterly meritless position where there is overwhelming contrary evidence where numerous people show them they are wrong and it just never sticks. In real life we have cults which include new religious movements but also include political cults. My favorite example is the flat Earth movement. There cannot possibly be any more evidence that they are wrong and they do not listen to a word of it. There are numerous theories as to why these people exist, from conspiracy theorists to crackpots who get labeled as vexatious litigants for filing numerous meritless lawsuits. Oftentimes these people's grudges are related to something that they're not even talking about. Conspiracy theory and cult behavior are often proxies for pre-existing social conflicts. So when it comes to writing villains with meritless positions, showing them overwhelming amounts of evidence and making incredibly good persuasion role should probably not work. Because it doesn't work when people do it to flat earthers, sovereign citizens, truthers, history deniers and moon landing weirdos. Whatever thing they are arguing is not the thing they are angry about in the first place. Thanos went on a crusade to kill half of all living things in the universe despite all of the problems that would create. Ultimately though it was a proxy for his trauma as the sole survivor of a civilization that was destroyed because they didn't listen to him. No evidence or arguments about just doubling the resources would ever work on Thanos because he is obsessed. It was never really about making the universe better. Thanos's reasoning was about Thanos. In my own vampire the masquerade game, the inciting villains are a group of people who were too crazy for the Sabbat. They have a meritless position and will not be persuaded by obvious arguments as to why doing terrorist attacks to breach the masquerade is a bad idea. If players bring up these arguments, all I have to do is act like a flat earther. "Obviously you just don't understand." There's always a "thought terminating cliche." The thought terminating cliche is a meritless argument unto itself, but it is the standard response that signals that they have turned their brain and ears off entirely.

I rule against Tasha's Mind Whip. It's too much to just say "hey, this enemy can only move, attack, or react" on an int save at such a low level.

They should make a distinction between the Raven Queen as the God of the Underworld and God's of Death and also Gods of Undeath like Orcus or Nerull, who are not gods of death, as much as Gods of the Undead. These might all sound the same, as 'death' but they are in fact distinct. A God of Murder or "Death" that seeks its fathers to generate death as some death cult is different than the function of death in the natural order and Ravens are associated with 'death'. Hence why The Raven Queen, like perhaps the Amerindian God could be a 'God of Death' but more along the lines of a god like Osiris who as not viewed as an evil god of the underworld, or even Hades who again, was not evil, but rather served as a lord of the realms of the dead and the Underworld. A close approximation might be the Viking Goddess of the Underworld Hel.

I get what you're going for bringing up real world politics to back up your point, but I think most of us are just here for the TTRPG discussions in part to help get away from real life stress. Sections like the one around 48:28 will also only drag out toxic gremlins into chat and potentially lose you some audience members that might otherwise still be interested in your content.

As a player, I love the forgotten realms. Specifically because it has so much lore. If I’m workshopping a character background to be kind of general, I can look up how their race is treated in the world, what cities they might be from, how their class works in the world, anything I might wanna know. And if I’m in the world, I know there’s a lot of there for me to explore. Like, I typically use AI as an assist when I work on my characters. And I can ask an AI generator what cities make sense for my character, and it’ll give me a list. I can then look those up and find out the entire history of those cities. I like playing in a world that I already know how it works. I never really thought of it from the game master side. But as someone who’s kind of thinking about starting to try it, I still really like that. It already has a lot of lore. It saves me the trouble of trying to figure everything out myself. I tend to have a lot of trouble with that creative spark, creating something out of nothing. And if I can’t find or don’t like a specific piece, I’m trying to find, I can make it up. Now that you bring up the fact that some people might be familiar with decades of history, I think I might just mention that at my sessions zero. I’m not super familiar with this setting, and I might change some things, if that’s going to be a problem, my table might not be the right table for you. I am also a little shy about homebrew. I’m not going to lie. Partially because the first couple of times I was exposed to them the DM wasn’t able to answer some basic questions. Like how does magic work in your world, how is my race treated in your world if I pick this as my origin? I realize sometimes these things are decided at session 0, but we were supposed to have a character and the DM’s and questions we weren’t planning on having a session 0. Primarily because they were very new DM‘s. But it might have soured my experience with homebrew a little bit. I think I’d be more comfortable with a homebrew based on some thing I was familiar with. Like Arthurian legend or Greek mythology, because again again, rich established law.

Because the villains (in their own mind) are always right. There ARE no "better arguments." You're not going to sway Doctor Doom into thinking Reed Richards ISN'T behind his latest setback, or constantly plotting to undermine his goals. You're not going to convince Thanos that his nihilism doesn't make sense. You're not going to convince Lex Luthor that Superman is not only not a threat to Earth, but also a heroic example for humanity to strive for. You're not going to convince Ra's al Ghul that eliminating 90% of the human population isn't going to magically solve all of Earth's problems, or that he's not a good candidate for leading the remaining population of humans after such a calamity, no matter how many of them are actually part of his order or cult. Villains are not reasonable people. That. Is. Why. They're. Villains. If they were REASONABLE, they would be trying to gather support, gain allies, refine their arguments, and be willing to accept that they're going too far. True villains can never accept that they're going too far. And Ultron isn't rational. He's not emotionless. He HATES. Humans, and in the comics, Hank Pym specifically. He HATES Hank Pym. For not being the perfect creator, for trying to shut him off when he realized how extreme Ultron would be, for simply being flawed, or for being a bad parent, or for being created in the first place. That's the real reason MCU Ultron isn't as fascinating as his comic book counterpart. Anyway. The way to keep the heroes from always talking the villains down... is to not set a dc for a persuasion check to convince them to stop their evil plan. There is no persuasion check that would convince them. Certainly not in one roll. Not even in one scene. If you played out a whole session, maybe it MIGHT be possible to convince them... but a) only if the PCs rolled perfectly every time, made no mistakes in talking to them, and not only offered a reasonable alternative, but a SATISFYING alternative. Just dropping all that time and effort would not be satisfying. And THAT is what the villain REALLY wants. Not revenge, not power, not money, or changing the world, or whatever. What they REALLY want... is SATISFACTION. That satisfaction can come in the FORM of revenge, or power, or money, or changing the world or whatever, depending on the villain. But give up on their plan? Wouldn't be satisfying. And, really, running a whole session to convince the villain to stop being a villain might not even be fun. Maybe, YMMV.