or join waller once theory rejoins the family

“this one’s on me” might be my favorite truth line & delivery of all time

omg i scrolled back to read the username and IT DID NOT DISAPPOINT

thank you for a genuine answer to my question! it’s not a big change, but i knew there had to be something “different enough” (at least in the eye$ of the publisher) to warrant a new edition. luckily that isn’t enough of something that i feel the need to get both versions

that episode of community where jeff is bullied by one of these

perhaps there isn’t! which is also an answer to my question

i suppose i assumed because in my own book experience (outside of gaming, more lit trade publishers) a new title & repub means changes.

i just wish the belt showed up on the main shows. they don’t have to wrestle for it! just let people walk around with the belt like it’s an actual belt

we just moved into this area code and we’re talking about how much quieter it was than our previous house (in 78753) so it’s good to know it was probably a fluke than a specific neighborhood difference.

that extra hour really complicates things

yeah she’s been injured since december; she missed wrestlemania and everything

I would check out Ishiguro’s Buried Giant, as it’s all about the changes that the land and people went through post-Arthur. Perilous Times is set in modern-day but gives a great scope of the personality of different knights that might help your brainstorm of the different challenges.

There’s some interesting things you could pull from Dame Ragnel(le) stories to feed into your portrayal of Morgan, especially if you want her to only be sympathetic up to point. Morgan v. Merlin is a pretty common Arthurian refrain, especially in post-medieval work, and it would be super interesting to explore the question of natural/home magics vs. latinate magic in a D&D game.

I would suggest making each knight a different kind of challenge—some combat, some non-combat—to really pull that medieval romance thread even further. There are a handful of readings that assign common faults/sins to each knight, and that might be a productive place to start.

Sounds like a cool idea! Feel free to ask me more questions (medieval romance & Arthur was my dissertation topic) and I’d love to hear how the campaign goes!!

this is what i’ve done for my magician—now relegated to NPC, as he was my last PC before becoming a forever DM.

i assumed ‘in a tactful manner’ modified ‘correct,’ e.g., how would you tactfully correct a trainee?

i have started to call it confetti cheese too!

I did give my players a chance at one point (level 15? the obstacle course) to turn their items and coins into ‘points’ and/or useable potions from a Halaster simulacrum shopkeeper! The exchange rate was bad, but that’s what happens when you’re a tourist!

I don’t allow travel back up! I am also running the companion. If the party reeeeally wanted to, I’d probably figure out some way (probably through Skullport) but my party never has shown any inclination!

if you’re talking about lore—do you mean forgotten realms? greyhawk? dragonlance? D&D isn’t a world; it’s a ruleset.

i suppose my question is: what is the expected outcome of creating this pantheon? how will it affect your players? what are they playing now? are any of the classes religious?

i’m a big proponent of the advice ‘never homebrew more than you need’ especially with new DMs. DMing can be difficult and when you have little experience, trying to do the heavy lifting of creating an entire world while learning the ropes behind the screen often leads to burnout.

try creating a village & environs first. play in that space & straight up tell your players that they’ll learn about the world and the pantheon as they encounter it. that gives you space and time to develop these things in relation to your players’ interests. it’s can be pretty demoralizing to spend hours building something that players don’t care about!

that being said, my feedback: fey isn’t a race exactly, but it does include changlings. if you’re grouping tieflings and fiends, i’d also be grouping elves and fey. i don’t see giants or any type of dwarves here. i don’t see gnomes. i don’t see anything from the underdark or any of the several varieties of lizard & fish & snake-folk. use the DMG and the PHB to cover the basics! perhaps one god/dess is specifically for half-races? half-elves, half-orcs, etc.

straight from the PHB:

A character can’t benefit from more than one long rest in a 24-hour period.

my players can sit around for 8 hours as many times as they want, but they don’t get the benefits of a long rest unless it’s been a full day.

edit: sorry, i was a bit snarky because i thought you were a player, not a DM. i didn’t want to give away all DM secrets (despite the fact this sub is for DMs only, clearly that’s not true in practice). a dispel magic goes a long way! & it doesn’t have to be a caster. it can be an item or an ambient effect. my halaster casts dispel magic on everything in the dungeon that’s not his/authorized by him every few days, because he’s a neurotic, obsessed ‘just a little guy’.

yeah but i run a lot of three people tables, and this new ranger would work really well at most of those tables because when two players’ specialties are really specific, having a generalist who is also a dps is usually really helpful.

honestly, i don’t hate it.

regarding attunement (copy pasted from the PHB, no page since i used the app)

A creature's attunement to an item ends if the creature no longer satisfies the prerequisites for attunement, if the item has been more than 100 feet away for at least 24 hours, if the creature dies, or if another creature attunes to the item. A creature can also voluntarily end attunement by spending another short rest focused on the item, unless the item is cursed.

taking an attuned item off (or as we weird DMs call it, doffing it) wouldn’t break an attunement. you could have an attuned sword hanging in your house and as long as you returned once a day (and no one steals it or attunes to it), it would remain attuned to you.

happy to help! i actually added a little more at the end to answer the ‘was it worth it?’ question.

truly i loved my time in books, even though it was hard work! but it takes stamina and hustle in a way that trips to cozy bookshops keeps hidden. we want our customers to feel cozy and welcomed and warm even when we are frantic about missing books for the author event tomorrow!

not owner but long-time seller. my love for reading & books changed dramatically over the ten years i was a book industry pro. obviously others may have had different experiences.

my care about books as material objects is basically non-existent now. i pretty much only ever want to own books if they’re specifically rare (i own an 1920s academic lesbian travel memoir series; a 1905 london travel guide) or personal (w/ notes from authors i’ve worked with) or practical (it’s easier for me to look up monsters in the monster manual than via apps). i consider any special edition of anything to be an absolutely frivolous waste of money but also how i could afford rent for a decade. when you get customers that treat the material object of a book as precious, chances are you’re gonna make some good sales. i don’t think of books that way anymore because truly you have to destroy/recycle so many books (and you see so many destroyed books come in from publishers, since shipping damages are an element of the business).

my love of reading never went away but it has changed drastically over the past ten years. at first, working in books was a dream come true! free early copies of anything you could want! but there are just so many dang books published in a year, that it becomes impossible ‘just read’ everything that looks interesting. booksellers (and owners, who often do the ordering) have to read very widely; unfortunately this means we don’t usually get a chance to read deeply. my first boss read anywhere from 600-700 books a year (about 2 a day, one in the morning before work and one a night after work); we were not expected to read that volume but we were expected to read at least a few books a month.

most of the time (and this is across my jobs at multiple stores) we were allowed to read whatever we wanted, but sometimes there was a new book by a local author or one that has been getting good early press or one the publisher is pushing, and while you are not obligated to read it, it’s just good business sense to maintain those industry relationships. i often found that the daily practice of reading was a burden—even when i was ‘theoretically’ enjoying the book. when you read as a bookseller, you’re always reading for two audiences: yourself and your customers. you’re reading for your reaction, but it’s like there’s a secondary process filtering all your thoughts through what sells well at your store and region. and that factors into your reading! a lot of times i’ll read a book that personally i think is so-so even from the blurb but i know will sell heaps and so i read it. some of my favorite types of books are weird and arcane and i might be lucky to get one customer where i can confidently handsell them that book—but i know 50 customers are gonna ask me about the new rick riordan. guess which one i’m gonna pick up? and at 99% of book industry jobs, all this reading is unpaid. if you’re the owner, i guess it’s included in your salary.

and of course, i think i had time to read backlist (that’s everything that’s already published) maybe once or twice a year? i was reading constantly, and my tbr list only grew. so many publishers constantly want feedback and you want to maintain relationships and discounts, so you help them out in return by reading one of their books for next season! but of course they need feedback by certain dates, which means it’s a never ending scroll of not-yet-published books. i had to become very private with my reading because i never had anyone i could talk to about books, since all my reading was 6mo-year from being published. and you think ‘oh but i’ll review them!’ but that is…let’s just say a complicated topic in the book world. no one will tell you that you can’t post reviews, especially mixed ones, before the publication date, but we aren’t provided copies to be honest critics; publishers provide us early copies as a courtesy so we can sell books better. i mostly opted out of any online book presence, only tracking my reading sans public reviews and ratings. and feedback went directly to the publisher, and then maybe online after publication.

when i left books, i took an entire year and read nothing but romance novels as an attempt to reset my reading style to focus on enjoyment first instead of maintaining that dual-focus. it mostly worked, but even years later, i still always have a little bookseller!knyghtez in my head talking to me about customers’ preferences. but the counterpoint to that is that i still get all my books for free as a bookseller alum of my store—as long as i continue to provide reviews (more like shelf-talkers than true reviews) they can send to publishers & use in marketing, they provide me access to arcs.

i hope that answered your questions (from one person’s point-of-view anyway)!

edit: as for ‘was it worth it’: books pay nothing. unless you are truly the top of the top (big four c-suite), jobs in books pay nothing. i made no money; i ended the decade with fewer savings than when i started. i also met my partner and most of my closest friends in the book mines. i was able to maintain my mental health while completing my phd because i actually talked to real people about books instead of just academics. it was absolutely the best job for me for my 20s, and only under a few circumstances would i go back.

as far as owning a store: maybe if i could clearly identify a niche that my store would fill and i found a reasonable property and i had enough investment to not go 1000% broke in the first year, i’d think about it. if i had the capital and someone offered their store to me because they were ready to retire, i’d think about it. but i have seen so many smart and experienced book people open bookstores that absolutely flop despite them doing everything correct, and in my perspective, it’s because the goal was to ‘open a bookstore’ and not ‘provide a service to my community through access to local/nerdy/feminist/queer/gaming/comics/horror/romance/et al books.’ if i see the opportunity and the need, i’d be all for it, and i know my partner (who was in books for even longer, and now is in cybersecurity) feels exactly the same way.

fr, & friends is an understatement!