Recent content by Authweight

My honest opinion: just don't let people play moon druid. My play experience, and that if my friends, is that it is extremely overpowered at low levels. You could try and balance it, but then you're never sure if you've gone too far or not until you've played it. I would just tell prospective...

To me it's always been easier to just let them see it and trust them not to metagame too bad. If I really want to keep a surprise I'll draw it as I go. My dungeons usually aren't super large though, I often draw the whole thing to combat scale in advance.

First off, I don't think the DM necessarily should be seen as controlling the amount of wealth the characters have. In many games, it will be common for players to be able to make decisions about whether they will spend time pursuing wealth, or if they will go for other things instead. The DM...

I think a better way to look at it is that they took gold away as a factor in mechanical character advancement and moved it into the area of story. If your goal is to get better at killing stuff, gold is no longer especially helpful, but if your goal is to gain the favor of a king, rebuild a...

I've run a session with a moon druid, and several friends of mine have as well. The overall consensus in my little gaming community is that the moon druid is absurdly OP at low levels. With healing at a premium in 5e, any way to get free hp is automatically very helpful. When that way of getting...

This would have to be contextual. I would generally only allow shooting for the eyes if there was a particular situational reason it was a sensible choice. I think that, depending on campaign tone and style, both the beholder and cyclops ones make sense. What I wouldn't what, however, would be...

I would only allow a called shot if there was a clear goal in mind beyond "kill the enemy." The standard attack already represents the basic goal of "kill the enemy," so there isn't a lot of sense adding a new mechanic for headshots or something. I would allow a called shot to do things like...

I really like your approach with thinking of the slot as the power and the spell as a potential effect of that power. That's a much clearer way of explaining how wizard casting works in 5e than the way they do it now, at least for me. Bravo.

An easy idea you could steal from DW would be to give players XP for failure, a concept I love (we learn most from our mistakes). You get the benefit of a cool thing happening on a miss while keeping the simplicity of the "null result" in combat. This could lead to issues though, because people...

I would be most interested in adventures and adventure paths. I'm generally pretty skeptical of third party mechanical stuff, but third party adventures are often superior to what the big publishers do.

A few of my friends and I are looking into publishing some adventures. Something we're very interested in is creating sandbox/location oriented adventures. I've seen a lot of people on these forums post about what they want to see in adventures like this, so I'm looking for thoughts on what you...

I would focus on doing this in the story rather than in the mechanics. Push your players to develop their story about why they break the mold, and use that story to inform how other characters in the world respond to them. Make it part of your game, but not by changing XP around.

Hmm. Most people I know, when they think "setting" they think Forgotten Realms or Eberron, not Keep on the Borderlands. A term I've been hoping would come into usage is "adventure setting." It's a setting, but it has small scope, as opposed to the large scope of a campaign setting. It's meant...

I see lethality as something that is rightfully part of campaign/genre tone. A high heroic game should feature few random deaths, a gritty game should make it more common, and a one-off death dungeon should kill people off constantly (think tomb of horrors). 5e out of the box doesn't offer a...

I'm not trying to convince you that 4e is a magical system that will make you happy if you just understood it better. My initial post was not even in response to you. It was an expansion on the post I quoted, and was aimed at people who were talking about roles in 4e. Ideas like prescriptive vs...