Recent content by Amrûnril

I think the biggest advantage of ability scores is that they facilitate a system where skills can be partially linked, rather than being either identical or independent. A character who excels at Performance may not be trained in Persuasion, but will likely still perform better in that field...

Here's the video with the original comments, starting around the 55 minute mark. Erika Ishii, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Aabria Iyengar and Lou Wilson are discussing why they chose to use to use D&D for Worlds Beyond Number (a narrative-focused campaign in which combat encounters are relatively...

I definitely wouldn't include the third and fourth attacks in such a feat. Doing so would effectively put three levels worth of class features in a single feat, and it would allow other martial classes to easily replicate one of the Fighter's few unique features. As for the baseline extra...

A key feature of our legal system is that both parties in a dispute have rights. If you pressure the other party into accepting a settlement before they can apprise themselves of their rights, you are behaving unethically, even if you remain within the letter of the law. WotC, in the MtG cards...

While I agree the Alchemist needs a boost, I don't think these changes solve the underlying issue. Almost every class in the game, including the support oriented ones, gets either extra attack or full spellcasting progression. The exceptions are the Rogue, which instead gains sneak attack and...

While I have a hard time imagining how Eurogames' approach to randomness (randomized options with deterministic resolution) would apply to RPGs in general, it does occur to me that this could be an interesting approach to spellcaster class design. Imagine if a Sorcerer, for instance, chose some...

This, I think, is the reason the developers' descriptions of their survey analysis methods bother me. If the first version of Mechanic X receives 55% satisfaction, for instance (however % satisfaction is actually defined), it would be perfectly reasonable for the developers to say that based on...

I'd say the biggest unanswered question is how much spells will change. Spells make up a significant fraction of the PHB by page count, and constitute the overwhelming majority of class features for many classes. But whereas we've seen playtest versions of almost every non-spell class feature...

Class balance will never be perfect, but it should be a goal that designers aspire to. If some characters are intended to be objectively stronger than others, that can be represented by making those characters different levels, or by giving them features independent of their classes (higher...

As far as I can tell, it's completely arbitrary. And not arbitrary in a remotely useful way. The class figure expands the 0-100K range to fill 2/3 of the y-axis, even though there's only one data point falling into this range . The variation among the remaining 12 classes thus has to be...

I think the expected length of the campaign is probably an important variable. A per session or per encounter risk level that results in 50% survival for a 10 session campaign would make character death a near guarantee in longer form campaigns. I also think it's important to avoid conflating...

If gold is expected to be accumulated at rate corresponding to level progression and magic items are expected to be available at specific prices, then magic items are a de facto part of level advancement (with a couple of intermediate steps that add unnecessary constraints to worldbuilding)...

As far as I can tell, the only substantive roadblocks you've described are layout issues with the books and character sheets. There's certainly room to improve these, but describing formatting and editing issues as "passive aggressive efforts to remove magic items" is not a constructive way to...

It seems odd to say the developers are trying to remove magic items from the game while at the same time noting that they've devoted over 100 pages to them. One can dispute whether magic items should be a standardized part of level advancement or an orthogonal, campaign-dependent axis of...

If you compare the wizard's damage in their best two rounds to the fighter's damage over a full adventuring day, of course the fighter's going to come out ahead. The wizard also has 3 lv2 spells, 4 lv1 spells and unlimited cantrips to contribute to those 6 encounters. Depending on encounter...