There's a novel called Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre, generally considered one of the best spy stories ever written.

For what it’s worth, likely the only person who’s actually going to see the massive dick you draw is a random person who has agreed to work through the night to get the votes counted. They don’t get any more input than you into the quality of the candidates, and there’s no separate pile for people who drew a dick so drawing one makes no additional difference versus just regularly spoiling your ballot other than making some tired stranger view your handiwork at 1am while they’re trying to work.

Obviously it’s not like you’re going to traumatise anyone by drawing a crude penis and it’s not some huge deal, but consider if you’d draw a dick on literally any other form you had to hand over to a person just doing their job, because you didn’t like what was on it.

Kind of? In Japanese if you’re running through the syllabary (the equivalent of going through the alphabet in a PIE language like English), each consonant has a set like this, so you have ma mi mu me mo, na ni nu ne no, etc

But since the L consonant doesn’t exist in Japanese, there is no la li lu le lo. They don’t exist, they can’t exist, and they’re hidden in a sort of blind spot of the language. It’s deliberately hard to pronounce, but less as a funny thing and more to evoke the idea that everyone’s been secretly conditioned to avoid thinking and talking about the patriots.

It’s possible Kojima might have been inspired by a similar idea from western counterculture of the fnord. In the book series Illuminatus, the Illuminati insert the word fnord into news articles, which people are conditioned not to see but feel anxiety and unease over, which helps them manipulate the public en masse.

That's not how it works, if they have a live insurance policy but no MOT the insurance company may be able to void the policy (if they can show the vehicle was unroadworthy, it's not quite as simple as "no MOT = no insurance"), but even in case of voidance they will still have to deal with the third party's claim under section 148 of the Road Traffic Act 1988, which essentially lists a bunch of reasons an insurer might void a policy and says that the policy still needs to cover liabilities, but is then entitled to recover those costs from their insured.

I'd call this evil from a modern perspective, but I don't think it's evil from a D&D perspective, which I tend to view as having more medieval views on good and evil. I'd probably put it as neutral overall--arguably, killing the assassin was good and reviving the assassin was the morally questionable act. Rather than getting hung up on whether the act was itself "good", "neutral" or "evil", I'd instead think about how the cleric's God would feel about it. Are they chill with the cleric executing a prisoner? Are they okay with the deliberate infliction of fear and terror to get what you want? Are they happy for their magic to be used to bring back a murderer so they can receive a lesser punishment than they "deserve"?

That said I don't think I'd have necessarily allowed this to work, mainly for the reason that I tend to go with the notion that the soul lingers in/near the body for a few minutes after death, so revivify doesn't actually bring someone back from the afterlife. I don't think that's specified in the modern rules as written but I've maintained it from older editions. And it somewhat justifies why you can revivify an unwilling target, unlike the other re-aliving spells.

As I understand it that's a common way of explaining it justified from a mix of Forgotten Realms lore and rulings from 3.5 and earlier but so far as I'm aware there's nothing in 5th edition rules that provide those as reasons for the difference between Revivify, Raise Dead and Resurrection. Also, the Fugue plane is FR-only, the dead in other published settings do not make a pit-stop in the Fugue on their way to the afterlife (though they may have other trials or tribulations to go through on the way).

As someone who both plays and DMs, on the player side I do find it hard to keep track of which monsters have been hit. I don't want to spend five minutes on my turn working out what I want to do, so in between the end of my turn and the next I'm normally reading my own character features and spells to prepare for the turn that comes next, and I have to split my attention between what's happening on the battlefield, what's on my character sheet, and listening out for enemy attacks on me. If we're fighting eight bearded devils who all have an identical token on the VTT, it's easy to be unable to remember if it was Devils 1, 4, and 6 who failed the saving throw against the Lightning Bolt or devils 2, 5, and 8.

I could absolutely keep meticulous track of all that myself, but it would then likely lead to me going "uhhhh, umm, 2 mins while I check the wording of a spell..." on my turns.

Also from that article:

"Many of them hugged, cheered and held our hands as we were forced to disembark."

Now I don't know about holding their hands, but learning that the passengers were cheering as they were forced to disembark...I do not think this means what they think it means.

The logic they gave in the reveal stream was that they had a lot of discussion on how to handle it, technically by the wording alone it would be up to the storyteller whether to register the recluse as evil, but in that situation the Ogre can’t even know if supporting their pick is a good idea for their team since neither of the two can know if their alignments match, and so it was just an un-fun interaction that broke the idea of the character where it’s supposed to create a pair where one player completely trusts the other.

They then considered a jinx which was that the Ogre always turns evil picking the recluse, but since the Recluse is good that actually helps the good team since the recluse is good and now knows one member of the evil team, and two outsider abilities interacting with each other shouldn’t help the good team. Similarly an always good Ogre also felt unsatisfactory since the two abilities now create a soft-confirmed good player and outsiders are supposed to hurt town.

So, they settled on just making an exception for this jinx, if you pick the recluse, you turn evil and you know it. Your ability hurts town, the recluse’s ability just hurt town (by helping you, a member of the evil team), so you’re both suitably outsidery.

If you're finding it difficult to gauge how you should treat social checks, I recommend reading the rules for social encounters in the DMG. Hardly anybody uses those rules as written but they're actually a pretty good framework for considering the limits of things like persuasion and intimidation.

You start by determining an NPCs disposition, which is hostile, indifferent, or friendly. Hostile here doesn't mean "attacks right away"--that's a combat encounter--someone who doesn't like you is hostile, someone who has a job that involves stopping you like a guard is hostile if you're trying to do a thing they're obliged to stop.

Through roleplay you can raise or lower someone's disposition by one step. That's not making a check, but by drawing on something the NPC cares about (one of their flaws, bonds or ideals), which you can allow players to learn via an insight check. If in their roleplay they successfully touch on that, bump the disposition in the direction they're pushing, one step.

Then, the player can make a social check like persuasion or deception to determine what the NPC is willing to do. you consult the table to see what DC they beat.

Imagine trying to talk your way past a guard. They start out as hostile because they have to use force to stop you normally. You engage them in conversation, touch on something they care about, which bumps them to indifferent, then make a persuasion check. if you roll 0-9 they won't help you. If you roll 10-19 they will help you if there is zero risk involved to them personally. If you roll a 20+ they will take a minor risk to help you.

What does that mean? It means that a guard who might get chewed out for letting you in or is unlikely to be implicated if you're caught needs a DC20 check and good roleplay to let you pass. It also means that if the Guard thinks he's risking getting fired, or worse, executed by his boss will never be persuaded to let you by, because the risk is too great. That's one of the limits of persuasion.

For what it's worth, Ed Greenwood (the original author of the setting) has been dialling back the magic level at least in his vision of how the setting works. WotC might not pay that much attention but depending on who you'd rely on for what you consider "canon" (if indeed one should even care about that), at least one possible source is now supporting de-powering the realms to be lower magic outside of player characters and major NPCs.

Ed's numbers are so low that they make no sense if you take them literally, but if you take them more on vibes instead I think they'd imply that the Spires of the Morning has like, maybe five or so first level clerics and maybe one guy who can cast third level spells.

I dunno what the laws are like in Australia but when they opened that knife set on a public street my immediate thought was "that...seems like a very risky idea, legally speaking".

English also has the word "Laconic" (I think the German might be "lakonish" but I don't know how common it is) meaning someone who says as little as possible to express what they mean, derived from the Spartan reputation for also being very sparing with their words, via the other name for the place Lacedaemon.

What do you think of a downside like “If you choose a minion, they learn they were chosen”? It would theoretically allow the huntsman to keep picking after they chose a minion and possibly hit the damsel, but it also sets up minions to make “I was the damsel” bluffs and throws suspicion on a lucky damsel pick.

It seems a bit weird to inflict exhaustion for activities like that, it seems to me that it would essentially disincentivise doing anything consequential in the solo sessions you’re having.

Generally I’d only inflict exhaustion for things truly exhausting, like a chase, a long distance run, or staying up all night. A normal hard day’s work is tiring but not exhausting.

Speak to your DM, if you all like these 1-on-1s it would be a shame to lose them because they’re being mechanically discouraged, but maybe your DM is finding them a lot of work and trying to “subtly” scale them back, and just too timid to tell you they need a bit of a break.

It's worth pointing out that this source is Ahmadiyya. Most Sunni and Shia branches, along with the governments of most majority muslim countries do not recognise Ahmadiyya as being a branch of Islam at all. So when the linked article argues "Maulana Muhammad Ali was the first Islamic scholar directly to challenge the notion that Aishah was aged six and nine, respectively, at the time of her nikah and consummation of marriage", we should bear in mind that a Sunni or Shia muslim could say this is equivalent to a sentence like "Joseph Smith was the first Christian scholar to raise the possibility that Jesus was reincarnated in the Americas after his crucifixion".

The evidence presented in the linked article isn't new, and it's rejected by most "mainstream" Islamic scholars as cherry picked or misinterpreted. Secular scholars (and muslims like the Ahmadiyya who have alternative perspectives on hadith authenticity) have less of a problem with the idea that Aisha could have been older, but the problem for most mainstream Islamic schools is that the hadith that specifies Aisha's age as six for marriage and nine for consummation is smack dab in the middle of one of the collections of hadiths considered to be the most reliable and authentic. If any hadith in that collection is not true, huge sections of Islamic law and practice completely unrelated to Aisha's age also come into question because suddenly the reliability of the author is in question. So Aisha being in the single digits when she married is a position not seriously challenged in the most common branches of Islam.

This is non-canon, but I thought maybe I'd share how Neverwinter works at my table to possibly give you some ideas. The way I have it, loads of adventurers make Neverwinter their base of operations on the sword coast (this started out as a bit of a jokey reference to the Neverwinter MMO being free-to-play before it became established as just truth in our version of the realms). The city has a high degree of respect for the profession, and adventurers are registered and receive privileges as a result (the main one being the right to carry any arms they wish in public). Consequently, the city doesn't need a watch--there are gate guards who handle customs and register new adventurers and so on, and the wealthy have private guards, but all peacekeeping and law enforcement within the city is handled by adventurers.

This is handled through a mix of social pressure, private prosecutions and posses. Adventurers keep each other in check with the first--there's a "don't shit where you eat" attitude that will see adventurers who are, say, believed to have stolen from a city merchant just universally shunned, suddenly unable to find work, unable to find comrades, unable to find accommodation etc.. That cuts down on murderhobo activities.

Should a citizen of Neverwinter themselves be a victim of crime, they're expected to bring the perpetrator to justice themselves via private prosecution (this is how most criminal justice worked IRL prior to the establishment of modern policing in the 19th century), and if they need assistance in doing that (e.g. investigating a murder or apprehending a thief), the solution in Neverwinter is "hire an adventurer".

And lastly for peacekeeping actions like quelling a riot, the city has a reeve, a magistrate charged with maintaining order (we get the word sheriff from shire reeves). If there's a disturbance which requires a group of people to put it down, the reeve has the authority to round up a posse and conscript them to help, and they'll generally use adventurers for this task. Similarly should the city come under attack, adventurers in the city are legally obligated to assist in defence, so they'll be the ones to man the walls.

Again, none of this is "canon", but I like that it gives the city a very different feel to most other cities. PCs who arrive in the city tend to fall in love because the city fawns over them, gives them special status (which encourages them to stay in the city and spend their large gold hauls here, boosting the economy).

(All of which, at my table, is a small part of a massive scheme by Neverember to leverage an army of adventurers in a bid to take over the Sword Coast)

For all that Milei has wild policies in other areas, his position on the Falklands has always been incredibly mild compared to pretty much any other Argentinian leader before him—that Argentina lost the war and needs to accept that the only way to ever get the Falkland Islands is diplomatically and throwing periodic tantrums over the matter just damages relations with the UK and makes a diplomatic agreement less likely.

There's an argument to be made that since edition changes in FR are not retcons but actually explained by in-world events, time travelling should change which edition of D&D you're playing. That's been the long-running joke at my table for years but we've never actually time travelled. Our next adventure is the one that Darkstar_Aurora mentioned in their post, though, so for the first time we'll have the slim chance of it happening.

I'm considering having the time travel artifact leak second edition rules into the general area, as armour classes flip negative, spells change wording slightly (or significantly), skill checks become percentile dice etc. It would be a massive pain in the ass to do on a VTT but nobody will be able to say that I wasn't committed to the bit. :P

We were out of combat at that point, so taking a minute to cast the spell wasn't an issue. The undead force was likely to arrive in about 5 minutes, enough time to let the players prepare a hasty defence or an extremely panicked evacuation of this keep but not (I thought) enough time to get across town and back.

The full story behind that one, sorry if it's too long:

The party is in Hell, and sailing an Elemental Galleon up the River Styx, when they end up in an altercation with a pirate necromancer. I had not expected it to be a combat encounter necessarily, but things go south and it comes to blows. The party puts their ship up to full speed (much faster than any rowed boat on the Styx can muster) and so the Necromancer teleports onto the bow of Galleon and the battle continues as the ship hurtles downstream.

Now, a diversion into a ruling I made a long time ago. When you cast a spell that creates a stationary effect on a moving vehicle, what happens? So far as I know there's no RAW ruling. I won't go into the details but the convention we use at my table is, essentially, that outdoor casting is stationary relative to the earth, indoor is stationary relative to the room. There's edge cases but they're not important for the story.

All of which is to say, the necromancer, standing at the bow of the ship travelling at somewhere between 20 and 40 miles an hour, casts Wall of Force. In an instant, the party is no longer playing D&D, they're playing that japanese gameshow where a wall comes flying at you except there's no hole. The wall scrapes across the top of the ship peeling off the aftcastle like it's the 11 foot 8 bridge.

Two of the party members are close to the stairs below and I give them dexterity saving throws to dive into the stairwells. Another party member who is downed is luckily positioned that the wall sweeps him into another stairwell. The player in the aftcastle is not so lucky and is plunged into the styx along with the ship captain, becoming feebleminded. Oof.

Down two members and with the survivors on near single-digit health points, the two remaining party members flee into the bowels of the ship, being pursued by the necromancer like she's the terminator. She's on hurt too but that's relative, she's much higher level. One of the players slows her down enough to give the last player time to get away, being downed himself in the process, and she flees into the cargo hold and hides inside the party's war machine, a Mad Max-esque mega-vehicle they use for exploring Hell. She readies an action to hit the necromancer with the wrecking ball the second they come down the stairs.

The necromancer descends, looking to finish off the last survivor of the fight...and the player rolls a nat 20 on the attack, does 16d8+4 bludgeoning damage and--I decide, since the wrecking ball was not designed to be swung inside a ship--rips a huge hole in the side of the vessel and yeets the necromancer into the Styx. Her anti-Styx contingency spell to cast fly having been used up earlier in the fight, she drops in with a sploosh, is feebleminded, and drowns.

I think, technically, technically, the necromancer had like 4 HP after the hit so if I'd run things like a truly joyless pedant and said "oh, but nothing in the rules say getting hit with a wrecking ball moves you" she could have finished the player off with a cantrip and TPKed the entire party, but I will die on the hill that it is absolutely right and proper for me to rule on what happens when you swing a wrecking ball inside a wooden structure and declare physics in play when a human is hit by a huge sphere of infernal iron. That's the stuff the DM is there for.

I'm guessing the problem is that often these stories are not very interesting, like the wizard just cast a spell the DM didn't expect

Yeah more or less. That can be entertaining for the group but less so for strangers. But anyways, here's one:

The party had just completed a raid on a fortress which was a strongpoint for some evil knights who had kidnapped local townspeople and forced them into the dungeon beneath, chaining them to the floor and forcing them to worship their dark lord. In the course of the assault on the fortress, the gates in the defensive walls had been breached, and then the gate of the main keep blown to pieces. At this point, the party learned two things: First, another nearby fortress in the same town held by potential allies was under assault by the forces of evil, and also, a horde of undead were about to descend upon the keep they'd just liberated. I had intended this to be a sort of Sophie's choice, if the party went to the aid of the other fortress, the people in this fortress would surely perish because they were in no real condition to fight back, and the door to the main keep was completely destroyed--even if the entrance was barricaded, it would just be a matter of minutes before a horde of undead battered down any physical defence; if the party stayed to defend these people (by holding the entrance themselves), the other keep would likely fall. You can't save everyone!

Instead, the warlock player begins narrating the process of casting a spell, concluding with "...and I cast Magic Circle across the keep's entrance". I had no idea the Warlock had that spell, and with the keep only having one entrance (and the horde having no way to dispel the circle), he'd just erected a completely impenetrable forcefield against undead occupying the one entrance. And with that, the PCs bought themselves an hour to sprint across town, break the assault on the other fort and then sprint back to see off the undead.

So yeah, the warlock just cast a spell I the DM didn't expect. It was awesome in the moment, but maybe you had to be there?

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I do have another one that the party remembers fondly but it might not count in the eyes of a RAW-purist since it concluded with a player hitting a wizard with a wrecking ball and me ruling that a human wizard would move when hit by a wrecking ball when technically, technically, the rules for the wrecking ball did not actually say that waifish humanoids critically hit by a giant steel ball would get ragdolled by the hit.

The exact text is: "While you are wielding a glaive, halberd, pike, quarterstaff, or spear, other creatures provoke an opportunity attack from you when they enter the reach you have with that weapon."

Quarterstaff and Spear both have a 5ft reach. I'd still require a PAM opportunity attack to be made with the qualifying weapon, but reach isn't the issue.

Strategically this seems like a dumb move though. If the SNP had allowed the Greens their vote and then been faced with the Greens terminating the agreement, there’s no doubt that would have been politically damaging, but in a subsequent confidence vote they would likely still have been able to count on some level of support for the greens, having parted on better terms. Even simple abstention on confidence and supply votes would have been enough. Losing a confidence vote will be way more damaging than the greens choosing to leave the coalition, heck, winning a confidence vote on the technicality of a tie is still arguably more politically damaging. It will dog him for the rest of the parliament, and it likely won’t be the only confidence vote Yousaf faces before this parliament is up.

Yeah it would have sucked to just take it on the chin and let the Greens leave, but I can’t honestly believe they looked at this and though “yeah this seems like a better idea”.

In that case it couldn't be your explanation, because if it was, then there would be a mistake in the diagram.

Which, to be clear, there is. Obviously whoever set the exercise didn't intend for the diagram to state that Hubert and Agnes' children married each other. But it does, because they made a mistake.