Sounds like you wanted to interact with the GM’s world, while the GM wanted to write a book. You can’t make people value the things that you value: they have to choose to value them themselves, or they have to value you enough to make a change. And vice versa.

If uou cared about helping the GM write a super cool novel, you wouldn’t have broken the mould. If the GM cared about player choice, they wouldn’t have gotten pissy about you taking the plot off of their rails.

You have had this experience, but now you know not to play with this person anymore. Good riddance. Next time you have a session 0, you have a preference to probe. “Hey, GM, you’re not using a module or writing a book, are you? I’m hoping for some more fluid ad libbed interactions, rather than everything being preplanned.”

To the other player: “Hey, that’s cool and all, and I appreciate the suggestion, but I’m not going to take it. DM, I cast <spell>.”

Reduce your mental load to increase your speed: limit yourself to fewer additional stat blocks per encounter (e.g. if there is a boss battle with lair actions, you should ideally have 1, at most 2 additional monster stat blocks on top of that boss). Running something like 4 stat blocks is sufficient cognitive load that there is no way for you to play your monsters optimally and still be fast.

Reduce your reliance on small dice rolls to increase your speed: preroll a table of damage for any given statblock’s actions, so that you can dole it out quickly (still roll the to-hits live tho, in case of crits and misses and reactions, and have misses consume a line from the preroll table too).

Add a low-value off-turn minigame for players to play: I like to make knowledge checks free (History, Nature, Insight, etc). You could allow players the chance to each get 1 free knowledge check in per round, but only off turn. That way if it’s another player’s turn, and they are thinking for a while, you can have the other players roll their knowledge checks and tell you what they are looking for. Resolve them later, at the beginning of those PCs’ turns, which will also keep other players engaged since they are learning new info. Don’t let them ask tho, save it for when you want to provide the distraction.

I would imagine this is a “I heard it pronounced, and assumed that’s how it was spelled” situation (rather than intentional engagement bait, at least just this once). British english pronounces it the way it is spelled, closer to DAY-it-ee, while american english butchers it to pronounce it how it was misspelled, something like DEE-ye-tee.

There’s a tsunami of them coming, and they will all beach in the Great AI Outage of 2028, just you wait.

This assumes that Jr Dev wanted to be trained, and could be trained. I’ve known some AI-brain “devs” from before AI was a thing.

If someone can’t be bothered to read an error message, can we really be expected to teach them how to debug? Etc.

Mobile keyboard without spellcheck, I make thr exact same typos as thst poster with my thick fingers.

Do people not know their own language when they write shit for publication? It’s proscribed, not prescribed. Fuck.

It’s cool that Vestige warlock can get Spirit Guardians via War domain spells, and the Vestige itself seems pretty big on HP. Can take pact of the blade to be a melee bruiser, with the vestige backing you up from range. I haven’t checked to see if there is any other way to get both SG and Extra Attack by level 5 using only 2024 core-and-expanded rules yet, but this is an exciting development!

It sounds like you are talking about D&D 5e 2024 rules. Under those rules, chains are described as follows:

As a Utilize action, you can wrap a Chain around an unwilling creature within 5 feet of yourself that has the Grappled, Incapacitated, or Restrained condition if you succeed on a DC 13 Strength (Athletics) check. If the creature’s legs are bound, the creature has the Restrained condition until it escapes. Escaping the Chain requires the creature to make a successful DC 18 Dexterity (Acrobatics) check as an action. Bursting the Chain requires a successful DC 20 Strength (Athletics) check as an action.

You’ll want to manage a few separate things:

1. A free hand. If you are grappling with one hand, you need another hand free to apply chains. That means you cannot be weilding a shield or a weapon, unless you happen to have some extra appendages (though I think those only exist for legacy 2014 species right now). So if you’re Dwarf, no shield.

2. Action economy. A Utilize action and an Attack action (the latter of which allows you to make an unarmed strike to perform a Grapple) both cost your one Action for the round. You’d need access to some sort of ability that lets you Utilize as a Bonus Action instead. Thief Rogue 3 providea Fast Hands, which does exactly that.

3. DM fiat for easy access to multiple chains. If it is free, or at most only costs an object interaction to get a new chain from your bag, you’re golden. If it costs more action economy to get a chain from your bag, your DM might effectively limit how many chains you can “wear” for easy access. In a home game, this might be a no brainer, but in a westmarch it would likely require a server ruling.

Your best bet to make this work would be a multiclass of Thief Rogue 3, and the rest in Battle Master. The way you could make your action economy work, once you got to Rogue 3 Fighter 5, would be to:

1. hold a Chain in one hand, and have the other free.

2. Take your Action to Attack.

3. Use the first attack of your Extra Attack to Grapple.

4. Assuming you succeed on the grapple, use your Bonus Action to Utilize the chain and Restrain your opponent.

5. Release your grapple, and use your one Object Interaction for the turn to draw a Finesse weapon elegible for Sneak Attack,

6. Use the second attack of your Extra Attack to attack with that weapon with advantage (adding Sneak Attack and optionally a Maneuver).

7. Edit: Optionally, sheathe the weapon for free after this attack, to get both hands free again. You can do the full combo on round 1 and 2, but then have to attack first, sheathe, and then grapple on round 3 (assuming you wanted to do the combo again). Chances are you’ll still be working normal attacks on the first target tho, so its unlikely that the economy of drawing, sheathing, and getting chains every round will truly be necessary.

I think that if you are playing this character from early levels, I would take Battlemaster to 5, and focus on just attacking and using maneuvers to topple or some such, and then at 5 attack and topple, then maybe grapple to keep them prone. Work on the Rogue levels after you have Extra Attack, to be “feature complete”.

You might be able to make some version of this tactic work across two rounds earlier than level 8, but I think it would be more complex and prone to getting disrupted. You can do it once using Action Surge onxe you reach level 5 tho, which is nice.

If your DM is really kind, they might let you Utilize Chains as a BA even without Thief 3. Or maybe as a homebrew Maneuver. That’d probably be the best way to play that fantasy!

Sure.

But like, the author’s got some Bad Habits they are trying to bring over, and seem to consider their inability to replicate them as a problem?

I can’t find official apps for Airtable (which I use for work), Spotify, or Apple Music, but they all work fine in the browser in the short term, and I’ll revisit this later.

So, “I have to run these websites, that I used to run in dedicated memory-hungry Electron apps, in a browser instead” is something that’s missing? TBH, seems like a feature to me. Heck, things like Discord and Spotify run better in a firefox derivative than they do as “standalone apps” on any OS, Windows included.

He happens to be a well spoken oldster

Before you roll any dice, the chances of rolling two nat 1s are 1/400. But after you roll your first die, whatever it happened to be, your chances of rolling a nat 1 are 1/20. The chances of the entire scenario have no impact on the probability of the individual rolls

You’re resorting to personal attacks without knowing who I am, what I do, what I do or don’t have on the wall behind me. You apply a blanket label on all people who you class a certain way, and when I disagree with your label and its implications, and recommend nuance, you class me further.

It sounds like you think very highly of yourself, or lowly of everyone else, or both.

What makes your opinions here worthwhile?

You just described Geeks. Geek and Nerd group labels can sometimes apply to the same people, but they are not synonymous, and a person can be one without the other.

Jesus Christ, this is a real thing? I honestly thought it was invented on the latest South Park as a joke

Made it past the fire, but then it turns out that Paul can be overfed.

I got to “AAAHHH! Your password is on fire! Quick, put it out!”

5e? Goblin. Obvious fit for the vibe, and mechanically gies you a bonus action disengage after you booming blade in melee, which covers you for the first 3 adventures. Bonus action Hide will be useful for all 7, especially if you opt for Infiltrator.

Do you happen to read Brust? This reads very Brust.