I make comics sometimes: https://linktr.ee/ahdok

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • (Please be aware I’m talking about 5.0 here. Everything I say here is wrong for 4.0 and 3.5, and I don’t know anything about the new edition.)

    It’s a little complex.

    5e wasn’t really designed for multiclassing, the original intention was to disallow multiclassing altogether, and the feature was only added last minute after playtesters complained. They didn’t really try to balance it other than trying to make it weak enough that most players would be dissuaded from taking multiclass levels.

    The main cost of multiclassing is that it delays your class features for a level, for some classes, such as primary casters, this is a big deal - a wizard doesn’t want to wait until level 6 for fireball. For other classes such as rogues and monks, they might not really care as much about higher level features. Once a rogue (played by a player who is minmaxing for power) has reliable talent, they often multiclass into something that’ll give them new features (Paladin is quite popular as it increases your damage, gives you a better hit die, and adds new spells and abilities.)

    One of the biggest reasons to multiclass, or refrain from multiclass is roleplay - as this is entirely based on a character’s narrative and the story being told, the consideration of whether or not to multiclass for story reasons is essentially a personal choice.

    For players looking to maximize their power, it’s important to consider whether the features you’d be taking in your new class are useful in your campaign. I mentioned Mask of Many Faces, but that’s a useless ability in a pure dungeon-crawler style “fight a new monster each week” style campaign.

    It’s also important to think about the scope of your campaign. Many people look at the level 20 capstone abilities, which can be extremely powerful, and will argue that multiclassing is never good because it locks you out of those abilities - but consider how long you’re going to be playing your character and at what levels. Most campaigns that even get to level 20 wrap up after a couple of encounters, so is that exceptional power, for two sessions, better than taking a new feature that will last you for tens of sessions?

    Most character classes, especially martials are very front-loaded. The first 5-10 levels contain most of the core features of your class, and before you’ve unlocked those, it’s often tough to justify multiclassing - but once a monk gets access to stunning strike, do they care about other Ki powers? If a campaign is planned to end on an even level, does a full caster care about that last level when they’re not getting any new spells?


    As a very very rough rule of thumb, full-casters often want to avoid multiclassing altogether, or if they do multiclass, they want to take a single splash level of another class once they have the spells they care about. For most of those classes, that’s either level 6 or level 14. Martials are often more flexible, as higher level features often amount to more choice in abilities rather than mechanical power. Swapping to a different class offers different choices, and certain builds can by synergistic.

    Rangers always want to multiclass, because ranger sucks. /j







  • Addis explained in an earlier strip - the people making the accusations are not interested in whether or not the accusations are true, they’re interested in manufacturing a scandal.

    When people with an agenda are pushing conspiracy theories, there is no test or proof you can administer that will satisfy them. They will just move the goalposts. “She found a magic way to cheat the zone of truth, that’s how awful she is.” “She’s so corrupt she doesn’t consider what she did to be cheating.” “The church cheated for her and she didn’t notice”. “The person casting Zone of Truth is part of the conspiracy.”




  • Fortune’s favour would be pretty useless in this kind of situation, as it takes a minute to cast, you can’t subtly re-up it during the game. You could pre-cast it and get one favourable outcome, but that’s not enough to win a tournament with, and the 100gp cost would mean you’re probably just wasting money. On the plus side, it’s not concentration, so you could put the buff up on top of enhance ability or borrowed knowledge.


    As for the house rule, what’s happening here is tomfoolery and japes.


    As for Konsi’s access to this spell in specific, most of the spellcasting NPCs in our setting were created and had their spell lists defined early in the campaign. EGtW came out after they were already long established - the party actually knows Addis’ spell list (it’s a static list, consisting of a subset of the full cleric list). Konsi’s sudden acquisition of a new luck-based spell, as an outcome/reward of her completing a major goal of her goddess, does make some kind of sense as a “special” situation.

    As to whether or not Konsi is a “chosen” it’s a little ambiguous. Tymora already has a defined chosen in canon (Curran Corvalin.) Gods normally only have one chosen at a time.

    Tymora hasn’t explicitly made it clear to Konsi that she’s chosen, just that she has a mission to fulfill, favour and support. Likely, Konsi’s on the path to becoming Tymora’s chosen, but she’s not there yet, she’s just an important priestess that’s going places.




  • One time I built an arena out of kinetic sand, with shaped obstacles and dunes and stuff, then scraped a grid into it for battle. I built some working pit-traps into the sand itself that only collapsed with enough weight was placed on them, and I glued small weights to the bottom of the player minis to trigger the traps, while using light plastic kobold minis for the monsters, which did not trigger them.

    The next week my girlfriend responded by running her game with a functioning sewer system with variable water levels.





  • Yeah. I also sometimes break the panel borders this way too, to avoid tangenting. Addis’ fingers in the first panel actually break out of it very slightly here.

    In Making Comics Scott McCloud talks about these techniques as “fourth wall breaks” - if your characters significantly overlap the framework scaffolding of the comic itself (speech bubbles, panel borders, gutters, other panels etc) it can serve to build up dramatic intensity, especially when combined with other techniques like oversized letters, or dramatic panel shapes, or intense forshortening.

    Here, the purpose is much less grandiose… I have a limited size for the panel on the page, and speech bubbles take up a LOT of real estate (especially with this much dialogue.) This forces me to squish my art into the remaining space, but I can get a little more of it out if I disrespect the panel apparatus.


  • Yes. One of the benefits of this is that it makes my visual style rather unique - I often get asked what digital brushes I’m using to get these pencil textures, and the answer is “pencils.” One of the downsides is it means it’s quite slow to make new pictures.

    I used to hand-letter, but lettering is a surprisingly slow and taxing job, and I found myself spending a lot of time touching it up digitally, so now I use a font I made from my own handwriting.

    Here’s an image showing many of the physical media brands and tools I use. Notes:

    • The primary pigment liner width I use is 0.2, I use the 0.05 for very fine lines sometimes.
    • I have replaced the pentel p203 pencil with a Spoke-4-Titanium, although the Spoke pencil still uses a P203 mechanism

    Here’s a step-by-step showing how it looks as I go

    And, here’s a photo of the pencilwork for this specific comic :D



  • Yep.

    As best I can find, rooting through old Forgotten Realms lore, the colours of the Tymoran church are normally blue and silver.

    For my comics, I made the Tower of Luck use green as it’s main colour for stuff, to mimic the green baize of gambling tables. Gold accents to symbolize wealth - since the Tower of Luck is much more focused on luck and gambling than the good fortune and karma focus that the rest of the faith normally has. It’s my general intention to slip gambling references and symbology into the church whenever the characters are there.




  • Here’s a short little “meanwhile” comic as a bonus, since it’s been a while.

    Oh, apologies about my personal website. My hosting is done by a friend with a small server, and… well basically every wordpress site in existence is now under constant effective-DDoS by AI bots trying to scrape all the data. They’re not subtle about it, and just try to download all the pictures simultaneously. My server is too small to handle that load, so just reboots when that happens (it’s usually down for about a minute).

    The fact that it’s near constantly down is just a product of how often I’m getting these requests.