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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Most of what you read online is incorrect, then, or at least misleading. Willpower isn’t actually a stat in D&D. When your character asserts their will, they succeed at doing so, full stop. The save is for whether or not the character has an opportunity to do so.

    What you have instead are Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma.

    Intelligence saves are how much your character knows. An example here is illusion magic. Illusions are imperfect, and better understanding of nuance lets a character see an illusion as false, and then exert their will to disregard it.

    Wisdom saves are about how much you can perceive and intuit. When someone attempts to control you, it’s subtle, and the saving throw is about noticing that something is wrong. Once you notice it, your character exerts their will and shrugs it off.

    Charisma saves are about your force of personality and sense of identity. When someone attempts to possess your body, they are attempting to change who you are, and is directly opposed by how strongly you believe in yourself, and how strongly you believe in who you are. Once you resist the attempt, you then exert your will and drive the spirit out.


  • You would simply say “The spellcasting ability modifier for this spell is Wisdom.”

    Wisdom is the stat that represents your willpower, your experience, and your ability to perceive the world around you. If something attacks your mind, it is most often resisted with Wisdom for this reason.

    Realistically, it probably shouldn’t be a spell, and it definitely shouldn’t be this complicated. Spells used to have this level of granularity in earlier editions, and 5e specifically moved away from that for clarity and speed of play.

    My recommendation is to decide if the person this item was created for (not necessarily the PC using it) is supposed to die or not when using it. If they are, then the item just kills them. If not, they fall unconscious at 0 HP, then suffer one failed death save as normal when the item detonates. Don’t mess about with charging it with death saves or exhaustion levels, just have it do some damage.


  • One thing to mention: The saving throw type should match the means used to resist the effects.

    Charisma represents your force of personality, your sense of identity, and your ability to interact with the world around you. This effect targets none of those things, nor can it be reasonably assumed to be counteracted by any of those things. Thus, this should not be a Charisma save.

    Examples of effects with Charisma saves are possession (resisted by your own ability to be in control of yourself), Zone of Truth (resisted by your ability to interact with others), and forced planar travel (This makes sense with a longer explanation, but can’t really be summarized.)

    This should be resisted with Constitution. It withers the bodies of those trapped within it, so naturally should be resisted by how healthy that creature is to begin with. Dexterity is an option, too, but that’s typically represented by effects that can be dodged with a split-second reaction without leaving your space.






  • I, personally, think this is a totally valid tactic, and wouldn’t be upset if a player used it in my game. One of the first things we go over in Session Zero, though, is that your characters, while unusual, are not unique. Any BBEG worth his stuff is capable of scrying on your tactics and hiring a hit squad that can copy or counter your tactics.

    If a player started doing this repeatedly and trivialized many encounters, maybe the next group has his own sorcerer that can do that, or knows disintegrate, or can teleport the big stompy guy into the obvious spellcaster’s face. Cheese isn’t an arms race the players can win.




  • Make sure your litter box is clean, and that your cat thinks it’s clean. Cats want to be able to bury their waste, and if there’s too much in the box for the cat’s liking, they’ll go somewhere else, and it’s often right outside the box if there isn’t something else they could use. It’s important to understand that it’s the cat’s opinion that matters here, not yours: you may need to scoop it every day, even if there’s only a little in it.

    You may also need to move the litter box and clean the previous area, including and most importantly the place outside the litter box that gets used. Use vinegar if you can: it has a strong smell that cats don’t like, but it won’t hurt them like bleach can. Lemon juice works well for this, also. What this will do is make sure that this area doesn’t smell like a place they have used as a litter box before.



  • Well, think about it.

    WiFi is electromagnetic radiation, and penetrates walls. The standard frequency is 5 GHz. With harmonics, we should expect similar behavior from wavelengths that are some whole-number multiple of this frequency.

    There are multiple such frequencies within the visible light spectrum, such as 500 THz (orange), but visible light doesn’t usually penetrate walls, it’s instead reflected or absorbed.

    On the other end, we have X-rays, which are in the range of 3×10^(16) - 3×10^(19) Hz, which are used medically to see into the human body. There are likewise whole-number divisors, such as 200, which put a potential fundamental at around 600 THz (green). Yet, we generally can’t see through people using normal light. That’s why we use X-rays.

    Now, this is all well and good, but it’s all purely academic, because the reason why you can’t use your infrared sensors to detect the color blue or purple is because the infrared sensors aren’t sensitive in that frequency, the same reason why you can’t use your blue cones to detect infrared.