Me as a DM critting a player:

Not gonna lie, “magic stealer” is a really bad name. What’s wrong with the classic spellthief?

there’s actually great resources for getting started online. There’s a site called start playing games dedicated to matching new people to a DM. Note that services like that cost money. There’s also the virtual tabletop roll20 which has a group finder for you to find a game. It will have a mix of free and paid games. Alternatively, you can crowdsource that such as on r/lfg on reddit (unfortunately the LFGs here on lemmy don’t seem to be active enough to find games), or through various discord servers, including the official D&D discord. Another that has reasonably active LFG type sections to try is the Fantasy grounds (another VTT) discord.

For in person play, you can also look in to local gaming stores that might run adventurer’s league, which is the sort of ‘official’ play wizards of the coast sanctions at local stores and at conventions.

I haven’t heard terribly many people talk about draw steel, honestly. I’d be interested to hear what you think about it after trying it out.

They also recently did a reprint of the first ~5 or so books in paperback. One of the neat things they did with the reprints is they’ve included dice rolls at the bottom of every page, so instead of needing to use dice, you can flip to a random page instead and use that as your roll.

Yeah, no idea. And the statement is pretty just a bunch of marketing speaking and no real plans. So we’ll see, I guess

https://hardcodex.ru/2024/

Hardcodex has printable spell cards, and they updated for 2024 spells it looks like.

well, to be fair, almost no one used counterspells back then because of the many failure points, clunkiness, and the high chance of it being a complete waste of your turn. Better to just cast your own fireball first.

Thats pretty similar to what 3e (and iirc older) counterspell did. You had to cast the same spell in reverse to counter a spell. So to counter spell a fireball, you had to have a fireball prepared and “counterspell cast” your fireball. That said, there was some action economy problems in 3e that made it not worth it (you had to use an action to ‘ready’ a counterspell on a specific target, when the target cast a spell, you had to roll to identify the spell, and if they cast a spell you didnt know or have prepared, you were out of luck)

Presumably, someone attempting to mug you would probably be a bandit (+3 to hit, +1 to damage), not another commoner

i second the comment that you need to consider why you want to do this. You generally need a pretty good reason to split your codebase into multiple languages.

As far as actually doing it, you have a ton of different options, some of which have been mentioned here. Some i can think of off the top of my head:

• create a library (dll or so file or the like)
• set up a web server and use communication protocols (either web socket or rest API or the like)
• use a 3rd party communication/messaging framework like MQ or kafka or something
• create your own method of communication. Something like reading and writing to a file on disk, or a database and acting on the information plopped in

basically every approach is going to require you to come up with some sort of API that the two work together through, though, an API in the generic sense is basically a shared contract two disconnected pieces of code use to communicate.

same. Ive played it for about ~10 hours on the steam deck so far, and i have my FPS counter turned on at all times; never seen it dip below 40, and i dont think ive touched any settings. On an original steam deck, not an OLED, though

for what its worth, the new (2024/2025) monster manual supposedly has spellcasting monsters with more “magical” actions built in. While they do still have a list of spells, they have more built in tailored “magic action” type things they would be using instead of spell casting in most scenarios, like having a “magic bolt” type attack for a mage or something. We don’t exactly know how extensive this is yet, since we’ve only seen previews so far, but it could make running spellcasting creatures a bit easier.

windows can still play castle of the winds? i play it all the time. In fact, i just booted it up again a moment ago to make sure it didnt break recently or something. I dont remember ever having any issues playing it, and ive played it off and on for decades. In fact, googling real quick, it looks like my abandonware even has a “easy installer” for it.

I mean, as i stated, i can’t really vouch or argue against pf2e, since i dont play it and haven’t really read the rules of it since it was in playtest. That said, just googling, i see some things that could be considered exploits like a reddit thread talking about being able to do 520 damage in one attack, some chatter about a “resentment witch” being able to make power word stun or color spray effectively permanent, and a youtube video by the rules lawyer about “OP builds”, so it seems like there’s at least some system exploitation going on.

Obviously a tighter controlled system is less vulnerable to exploitation (see D&D 4e), but that also doesn’t mean that is necessarily doesn’t exist. Another counter example system with lots of rules and lots of exploitation of them would be shadowrun, especially older versions, which were even worse than D&D in some respects.

yeah, unfortunately the CoC rules have always been kind of a mess. it still has a lot of that early RPG “stream of consciousness” aspect to it.

But yeah, at the end of the day, the number of rules you have is far more relevant to how many “exploits” there are, so CoC/VtM being less “crunchy” will result in less exploits.

A character is limited to one successful treatment of both First Aid and Medicine until further damage is taken.

Pg. 65, under first aid.

i mean, if youre wanting exploitative rule mechanics based on wording/interactions, you need to look no further than base first aid and medicine in CoC; You’re able to make 1 of each per wound you take. Unlike older editions, they’ve done away with the heal cap on it, so if you’re down HP, simply deal yourself 1 HP of damage, make a first aid check. and then make a medicine check to heal at minimum 2 HP. Repeat until full. You can easily reheal yourself to full this way, which is definitely “unintended” based on how healing works (and older editions).

Edit: at the end of the day, my point is that pretending other games cant or dont have exploitative mechanics/builds/whatever is naive at best? It’s not a D&D only problem. It’s just more prevalent in D&D because 1) it has more rules and 2) it has more players.

It’s legit not hard to make an OP/powerful character in either VtM or CoC, assuming youre talking about making a character good at combat (which is usually what people talk about in this context with power gaming). I don’t play PF2e, though, so i cant speak there.

CoC take high dex, put 90+ in handguns, take the pulp talents rapid fire and quick draw, wear a bandolier of guns, and dual wield pistols that you fire 6 shots from per turn. If you dont care about going first, then fast load if you care about reloading, if not, then just take shadow and start combat hidden for two attacks with a bonus die at the start.

For VtM its easy as take fist of caine and lightning strike. If you aren’t playing as elders, this requires gaining some exp first. I know there’s other combos that i cant think of off hand that are pretty potent too.

Each of these do have counters in the form of monsters immune to guns (CoC), or celerity 5 opponents (VtM), but thats no different than a DM in D&D always throwing fireballs at the guy with high AC. It begins to be apparent when its happening all the time that the GM/DM/Keeper/whatever is specifically targeting your weakness.