Recent content by Grydan

As someone playing both 4E and 5E currently, I'll say I definitely don't feel like I have more of a choice in 5E, or that the choice comes up more frequently or gets weighed for longer when it does come up. Nearly any time a group would say no to a 4E short rest, they'd also say no to a 5E one...

It feels significantly more magical than 4e's Hunter's Quarry to me. Oh, it starts off pretty much the same: a minor/bonus action, pick a target that you can see (4e's it had to be the closest, but 5e is less concerned with giving people incentives to move about in combat), deal a d6 extra...

0-1 Most days, we just don't have a need for a rest. Other days, we need one and can take one ... and on a good number of those, after we've taken the short rest we don't end up fighting again before our next long rest. Then there's the days where we could really use multiple short rests, but...

I play 5E because it's what the people I'm playing with choose to play. The group started as a 4E group, then after a couple of short campaigns switched to the Next playtest, and from there transitioned to 5E. Given the choice, I'd rather be playing 4th. Prior to 4E (and occasionally since)...

You don't need to be a mathematical genius. You can be horrible at math as long as the DM doesn't bother to check your work.

My experience differs: the single longest-played character in the ('been on hiatus so long that only sentimentality prevents me from declaring it dead') campaign I DMed was a dragonborn paladin played by a female player, who, immediately upon seeing the female dragonborn art declared that her...

A (possibly not all that helpful) counterpoint: How much would a castle cost? If we're talking an in place, in good repair, defensible keep with accompanying lands and supporting farms and settlements from which it derives income? Priceless. Not for sale. These are the sorts of things that are...

Sorry, no offence intended, but this made me chuckle. Appropriating terms to mean something different from the intention of the original meaning is a D&D tradition that goes back pretty much to the beginning. Cleric, paladin, gorgon, medusa, pegasus, Bahamut, Baphomet, Tiamat, troglodyte...

I noticed this in play, rather than spotting it in the rules, but as it's a head-scratcher that exists as a consequence of the rules, I suppose it fits here. When trying to prevent an opponent from attacking a more vulnerable party member or NPC (or even just trying to stop them from reaching a...

In my game? No. Because if I ever choose to DM in the system (I currently play both 4E and 5E, and have DMed 4E), nobody would be getting +1 items, never mind +3. +n magic items are a sacred cow that I'm quite content to put out to pasture.

No. As others have pointed out elsewhere, effective use of temporary hit points is having them in place before taking damage (thereby preventing as much real damage as possible). This runs directly counter to the idea of a second wind, which is a recovery rather than a pre-emptive event.

... really? I mean, I've certainly seen the major publishers occasionally make some noise about trying to get kids to read comics, but in terms of actual efforts it's abundantly clear that they're aiming much more at the Game of Thrones crowd than the LEGO Movie/Frozen one. I could go on at...

Given the existence of role-playing games that do not use class systems, this is clearly incorrect. If there is truly a single feature that we can point to that sets role-playing games apart from all other games, I would think it rather obvious that that feature is 'role-playing' (an activity...

Which is the approach that was used by Anne Boleyn to convince King Henry to make her his queen (rather than his mistress) in The Tudors (I'll leave it to others more knowledgeable on the subject to assert or deny the historical authenticity of the depiction) ... as played by the same actress.

The set of things that are 'not magic in the traditional sense' is not the same thing as the set of things that are 'non-traditional magic'. To assert otherwise is to assert that all things are magic, with the only meaningful distinction being between those which are so in the traditional sense...