Recent content by Alatar

Yes. Yes to all of that. High dex, high Init, high mobility and a strong ranged game are how to spank 5e encounters. This was also true in 4e (perhaps less so) and 3rd. My memories of 2nd and 1st are less clear, but I don't think we started using a battlemat until 3rd. The thing is, most...

I really like building characters. Part of the fun, a good part of the fun, is pulling off the build within the constraints of the rules. From my point of view, the ASI/Feat conundrum is delicious. It's the secret sauce of 5e character building. If that tyranny were somehow tamed, building...

You might want to check out the 4e Monster Manual. Cooler Monsters for sure. Check out the dragons, for example. Porting those to 5e might be a thing to do. Distributing said thing, on the other hand, might not be a thing to do.

Variant human fighter 16 Str, 16 Con, 14 Dex heavy armor, longsword, shield duelist fighting style heavy armor master feat Languages: common, orc The orc has a +2 hit point edge. I have a +5 AC edge. Our attack bonuses are identical. We do the same average damage. I hit on a natural 8, 65%...

I've steered clear of that one. The WotC folk are doing too much shoulder shrugging on that issue to make it amenable to consensus. The terminology they chose to frame the issue, "lightly obscured" and "heavily obscured", and the definitions they assigned to those terms, wherein heavily obscured...

I've listened to the podcast, I've read the twitter traffic and I've read the text. The twitter traffic is confusing. The text defines one way to get total cover. It does so in one sentence. The text and the podcast are not in agreement. If the text is in error then it deserves an errata. My...

At our table, if you know the spell, that is to say, if you yourself are capable of casting that spell, then you can recognize the spell being cast. If you are a spellcaster, you can make an arcana check. If you are not a spellcaster, then no. But I'm a hardass. I don't ask. It all seems a bit...

Player's Handbook, page 196 Player's Handbook, page 285

I'm an anti-houserules guy and I see no problem with removing darkvision or reducing its utility, or instituting low light vision. It may alter the calculus that goes into choosing a race. I know that darkvision is a contributing factor when I choose a race for a new character. You may see an...

We dropped XP for a while in 4e. leveling every three sessions. We brought it back in 5e because we had a little turnover in the group and added a couple of new players. It turns out that they don't care that much either, so we may drop it again. Or not. We level the whole group together...

That's the rub with PDFs: cannibalizing their book sales. I would purchase both, if that's what it took, but making purchasing a PDF contingent on having purchased the printed book is an unwieldy logistical challenge. I don't know what the answer is, other than the answer we've got: NO. It's a...

If what you say is true, we should be seeing very few one-handed melee weapons wielded by fighters. Perhaps that is the case. Since I play in one group and I don't participate in organized play nor attend gaming conventions, I don't really know what it is that constitutes normative play. But I...

Well, Pathfinder did appear to outsell 4e. Before either, 3.5 had all of that market. I cannot gainsay that, having no insider information. I can attest to the fear, or at least the discomfort. I wouldn't even call that being shelved. The lights never got turned off. They published no...

Oh, I'm sure Magic was never threatened. But D&D... They created a direct competitor and ceded to it half their customer base. That was a strategic error. Gleemax was a horror show. The site had an undead Visual Basic vibe from day one. From there, it rotted. The fumbling that was DDI never...

I know. I've sat in the chair, and I've been at this for a very long time. This is a common complaint about 4e, and one with which I agree to an extent. They compromised too much of the atmospherics and heritage of the game in pursuit of an intrinsically balanced system. They succeeded in that...