Tortle Tank - Bonus Pitches: Mew-Tent Mayhem

When they mentioned the “funnel” for the magic absorption sorcerer immediately made me think of Kirby!

The aside about wanting fighters to get some kind of counterspell-ish reaction makes me think of 2nd Edition casting time rules. It's been years, but the gist is that spellcasting isn't instantaneous. You start casting a spell on your initiative, but you're not finished until sometime later in the initiative order, and people can mess with you in the meantime. For example*, suppose you roll a 15 on initiative and want to cast a spell with casting time 5. The spell doesn't take effect until initiative 10 (15 - 5). During that window, any damage to the caster has a chance of interrupting the spell. *The example numbers are adapted for 5E; initiative in 2E was a lower-is-better system.

Mistborn reference! 🙌

The profoundly unmagical sword should be named 'sword' and look utterly unremarkable. In a high magic setting, it is so completely and utterly mundane that it's ordinariness warps reality.

You have no idea how many times I roll a 1 on my healing dice, it's incredibly disheartening

Murph is such an egglord!

I cannot get over Murph’s particular “eheh” sound at 6:34 Why is it so pleasing to my ears? New favorite Murph sound unlocked

I love the anti magic sword, it made me think of some of my favorite books. The Ropemaker by Peter Dickinson and the Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud are some great stories that feature characters who have anti magic abilities.

For the massive damage pitch, first off good job, second off this does not need to be a mechanical thing past lvl 1. If you wana fuck around, and you find out, like insulting a literal god at lvl 2 and getting blown off a few hundred foot tall tower, *cough cough Caldwell* you don't deserve a mechanical save. The only thing that should save that kind of shinanagins is a benevolent DM with good story telling.

"Mew all night, earn all day."

Emily is such a spellwhore... No disrespect. But Sorcerer is my favorite class and has no issues

Immediately pictured the anti magic sword from black clover

This pair of episodes may be the best yet of the Tortle Tank genre.

The Spell Thief Funnel reminds me a lot of Blue Mages from Final Fantasy

The western thing is amazing! Murph is so wrong this time!

On the upcasted cure wounds why not just have the higher spell slots use bigger dice? Who wants to multiply during gaming... D8 is 2x D4 D12 is 3x D4 D20 is 5x D4 More or less

The Two Crew needs to watch more Westerns. The mechanics of Slight of Hand -> Perception -> Initiative -> Firing is very good. They got lost in the tank a little comparing it to Victorian style dueling. So with all that being said, and in honor of the late Val Kilmer, the Two Crew should do a Tombstone Viewing Mixed Bag. Maybe even extend an invite to ol Deadeye himself

Not sure if someone has mentioned it, but for the anti-Magic campaign idea you should check out The DarkSword Trilogy. Some solid concepts to draw inspiration from!

Mistborne MENTIONED!!!

I wanted to add to the idea of the anti magic sword, but instead of a series it's a warhammer called the Malleus Maleficarum aka the hammer of witches, which history nerds might recognize as the quintessential witch hunting book from the 1400s. And it would be made from things that throughout history, or in games, were considered to be anti magic like iron and Sussur tree bark(a la BG3) Also, for the submission about encumberance, the game already has rules associated with encumberance but everyone just ignores it anyway. If you really want a crunchier TTRPG that has a limit to inventory, then you should look into Shadow Dark, it's a very crunchy system that is inspired by 5e but somewhat simplified and focuses heavily on dungeon crawling

Fun thing I learned from The Dollop, apparently duels were sometimes just a formality where both parties would intentionally miss. Also Alexander Hamilton intentionally waited for Burr to shoot first since both had to shoot and the inaccuracy of old timey guns.

Improved healing: multiply the bonus by the spell level bump *instead* of the dice, not in addition.

Related to that last death rule: my dm has a damage rule that where if you take negative 10 damage (or "10 damage past 0") then you instantly die and don't do any death saving throws. It's so fucking stupid. I lost a character to it. The dm and other two core players think it makes the game more dangerous because there are "too" many ways to heal and revive.

How feat it is, to be healed byyyyy you

middle aged mew-tent ninja tortles

on a long enough timeframe, d&d 4e will always be reinvented from first principles. healing surges were the absolute best version of healing/hit dice!

What if instead of rolling all 3 death saves at once (as opposed to instant death), you roll 1 death save per turn as usual, but nat 20s only stabilize you, healing magic doesn't heal you until you're stabilized, and you can only be stabilized by 3 successful death saves or a successful Medicine check. Revivify-type magic would work as normal. I agree with Emily that I think the odds should be stacked against you a bit since this in lieu of instant death, though I'd have to see it in play it out.

I stand with Emily. #TeamLemonBar

the mewtent bit made me cackle on the train

That sword would be amazing…I made a freaking terrifying paladin using the anti magic subclass in Hexbound and my partner helped make her more mobile and even scarier Love antimagic characters who just look at a mage and say “you’re done”

LEMON BARS ARE AMAZING

Talking about Mistborn 😍😍😍😍😍😍😍

The rolling 3 death saves at once has a big issue where you get a 6 a 1 and a 20 all at once, did I die cause I had 3 failures or am I up from the nat 20?

I ride for lemon bars

The powerful anti-magic character is similar to the plot of the manga/anime Black Clover

caldwell absolutely said Junifer for the record.

Shelloam!

Emily is right! Key Lime pie, Lemon Meringue pie, lemon loaf cake, lemon bars. All amazing!

the anti magic sword is very Asta a la black clover

I think the emcumberence one is super crunchy and is less of a tortle tank idea than like, you just want your game to have extra math. like murph said, I've never really heard of a campaign where any one character is trying to carry 10x their carrying capacity unless they're literally carrying around other humanoid creatures. I think if you wanted this to be a fun limitation it'd have to be a lot more restrictive. I think that you could also just take advantage of the simplified small/medium/large/gargantuan system that DnD already has and scale it down for objects. say, you can carry 15 small items, 10 medium items, 5 large items, etc. without a more simplified method, it feels like it just becomes are DnD court case because it's something super specific that multiple people would have to keep track of and could easily be miscalculated or misunderstood

Fun fact: The hit dice spent by the person healed is very close to how all healing worked in 4e! You had a limited number of healing surges that restored ~25% of your HP when used, and all healing spent them. It wasn’t usually a die roll for healing, but also most healing abilities added something on top of the 25%. Healing Potions spent a surge but restored a fixed value. If you ran out of surges you couldn’t be healed anymore. It really incentivized resting properly and managing resources instead of just healing people who dropped.

The party would have one guy as the junk guy, who carries everything in a backpack. Somewhere Balnor feels a shiver down his spine.

If you don’t think perception checks come into a classic western standoff scenario, I’d suggest watching the final three-way standoff in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. A good five minutes is just the three combatants looking around and sizing each other up. If that isn’t them rolling perception, and likely insight as well, I don’t know what is.

Please use the Magebreaker Sword!!!!!

Echoes of Weis & Hickman’s Darksword Trilogy!

Y’all slept on the Wild West shootout and made it worse, sorry cowpokes, maybe watch more movies. Love u ;P

Gotta say tortles i think youre wrong on the shootout. The four rolls perfectly capture each stage of the cinematic cowboy duel: the closeup on the eyes squinting at eachother (perception), the closeup on the twitchy fingers by the holster (sleight of hand), the draw (init) and the shot (atk). If the narration is done right each roll should rack up the tention and it should happen as slow as possible until the single climactic attack roll. I think the poster nailed it. I might just want to make perception the first roll to set the dc for the sleight of hand instead of vice versa.

I feel like a better healing buff would be a healer feat that involves re-rolling 1’s and 2’s like a weapon master

Devil’s Deal is very similar to the system Star Wars RPG (not Star Wars 5e) uses, where you place tokens down, and if it faces the GM side, they can fuck you, and if it’s facing a player side, you can use it to pass a roll, and then flip the token. The same problem persists though: GM’s can always just fuck with you. They don’t need a special token or devils deal. They can just do it whenever

Mistborn mentioned

Lemon bars are delicious!

I lot of these people looking for investment need to check out spheres5e, a 3rd party 5e dnd character building system. It's a Hit at my table.

Continuing to cook on the last pitch, I propose a third idea that can help this scale a bit better throughout the game. For every additional 50% of your max HP taken below 0, you incur a death save fail. For example: the 8 hp wizard taking 20 damage would go to 2 fails, but 25 damage would still be instant death. Later for a 30 HP wizard, taking 50 damage (20 overkill) would down them and give them one auto fail, making the impact of the massive damage felt without having to worry about an instant kill unless you do 90+ damage. Since this is a late addition to an already pitched pitch, all I request is one used leather baseball egg from the opening pitch of a dodgers game this season.

The encumbrance suggestion made me actively frown lol. I truly spend so much time in Skyrim bringing all my shiny little things to new chests and vendors and I genuinely do think it somewhat hinders my fun. That said, I think that it really depends on the kinda people your players are. I would straight up quit a campaign that was actively forcing me to deal with encumbrance restrictions but I definitely know people who would enjoy that

Didn’t expect a Murph mistborn pull and baffled Caldwell didn’t bring up black clover for the anti magic sword

Emily is absolutely CORRECT about lemon bars

I think the Western standoff pitch was perfect, no notes, and didn’t need any tinkering. The reason is because the Gunslinger’s Paradox is a very real phenomenon: humans have significantly faster reaction speed when reacting to something than when taking their own initiative. Therefore, using perception to perceive your opponent reaching for their gun absolutely makes sense to give advantage on initiative!

There are always so many splashes in the intro.

I feel like so many of the homebrews this round were just "I wish all the classes were the same"

Did anyone else think of Astas sword in black clover with the non magic sword pitch?

Devil's Bargin comes up a good bit in the pod cast Dumb Dumbs & Dragons. It can really change the story up, when the players don't know when the flip will happen.

MISTBORN MENTIONED LETS GO

Murph's talk about letting people spend their hit dice mid-battle to rally is very much like the Healing Surges you had in 4th edition, the Best Edition

For improved healing, I think it you should add your modifier to each dice your upcasting adds. That way three ones won’t be 7 hp but 15 hp. Same effect as the proposal without being potentially broken if you roll high/make it to a high level.

oh i’ve been ITCHING for an update on Jake The Cake’s Animorph’s journey and this episode delivered

I can't hold it in any longer, Hardwon's curse should've triggered on episode 82, 23:16 in the Patreon version, not during the tarrasque fight. 😭 He rolls a nat 20 saving against paralysis from Deep Rag's Flail of Paralysis. Everytime it gets brought up, it stings just a little

I can't believe they almost reinvented henchmen.

2024 PHB doubled dice for some healing spells, and the healer feat now also lets you re roll your 1s on healing dice!

Hazekillers from Mistborn

2024 D&D already buffed healing spells

https://www.instagram.com/p/DIBb_M6NRDP/?igsh=YnoxYTl3dW5oankw - I had too

Re: TPK I'll never forget Yugo causing the BoB to die in the snow

An addition to the Turtles' modified cowboy duel: Roll sleight of hand with disadvantage to aim properly and roll attack with advantage, at the risk of moving slower and letting your opponent shoot first

emily is so right, lemon bars slap

Mew all night, earn all day

Love the Mistborn reference

Caldwell, you were so funny on Smartpants. Dog Bless Bunmerica indeed.

What’s all the “Mu” (Mew?) stuff about? I don’t understand this reference. I mean, I know it started in the main feed episode- but what was the initial bit referencing?

I believe the new rules have already buffed healing to double dice (healing word is 2d4 per level)

Gunslinger music....??? Edit: OH this was so good

I think the intro needs one more splash

Soft-shells reporting in

I’m in therefore… I’m out

Man i love tortal tank