Recent content by Igfig

They pretty much don't exist, yeah. The ones that were interesting—Minerals, Dust, Salt, Lightning, Ash—might exist as specific regions in some of the existing elemental planes, but they don't have any special connection to the energy planes. The sum total of the description of the energy...

The weird inconsistencies you describe with how positive and negative energy work are a big reason why, in 5e, the energy planes were moved from the Inner Planes to their own layer, separate from everything else. You can see them in this diagram, at the top and bottom: Positive and negative...

Extremely cheesy unlimited speed, UA permitted This one is actually really simple. Use the same Glyph of Warding trick as in the last two versions, but store the UA spell Puppet instead. Puppet moves the hit target up to its speed, at no action cost whatsoever. You can keep moving and...

Solo, UA not permitted Build Tabaxi Monk 10 / Barbarian 5 / Wizard (bladesinger) 2 / Fighter 2 / Wild Sorcerer 1 Feats: Mobile, Magic Initiate Spells known: Dissonant Whispers, Longstrider, Feather Fall Equipment: Boots of Speed, potion of Haste, scrolls of Shapechange and Glyph of Warding...

I revisited this recently, and managed to improve even further on our numbers. I ended up with two (well, three) versions, one with UA material and one without. And one that uses some particularly ill-made and deprecated UA to achieve theoretically unlimited speeds. All are solo; I'll look at...

I just realized: There's a small issue with the whole totem barbarian approach! They all require you to be raging to get their benefits, but rage ends if you end your turn and haven't attacked a hostile creature or taken damage since your last turn. And we don't have the bonus actions to spare...

One important point about the blocking approach is that it's only fun if A. it's a well-defined element of the setting, or B. it's the premise of the adventure. In the first case, the blocker is just one of the tools in your toolbox, the same way guards, alarms, and locks are. The key...

A couple off the top of my head: Some kind of huge bloated broodmother spawning aberrations. It's far too big to fight conventionally. The entire level is trapped in some kind of time loop. Every 24 hours, everything in it (including the monsters) resets to its original state; adventurers who...

My group doesn't like rolling much (except for certain kinds of one-shots). Instead we use a variant of point buy: "Floating-Bonus Point Buy" Ability Score Generation As the standard 27-point buy, but you only get 25 points to spend. Afterwards, put a +1 racial bonus in any one ability score...

Thirteen dragonmarked houses, one of which is split off from another. Thirteen holidays in the Silver Flame's calendar, one of which isn't celebrated by many these days (Baker's Night). Twelve nations recognized by the Treaty of Thronehold, plus (depending on your interpretation) either Droaam...

The big issue that plagues a lot of vitality/wound systems is that having crits go straight to WP means the game goes from a gradual expenditure of resources to a 1-in-20 russian roulette. It certainly makes the game seem grittier, but it also negates a fair chunk of what makes D&D combat...

I have a house rule that my group uses... it's close to what you want, but a little different. The main difference is that I don't add anything to the attack roll; bounded accuracy doesn't like when you add additional bonuses to a d20 roll, and especially not flat numbers. Note that Powerful...

For me, I think the single most important quality a new subsystem can have is that it minimizes the number of new mechanics. As much as possible, it should work with existing game concepts: d20 rolls; ability scores; characteristics and inspiration; hit dice; money in gp; the magic item rarity...

The proficiency die is swingier, but surprisingly it's not a huge difference on average. I threw together a quick summary on AnyDice to illustrate. The standard deviation for +1d4 is only 1.73% larger than for +2, which is completely negligible. Even +1d12's deviation is only one full point...

It was pointed out to me that this record still stands, but could be improved with the use of tabaxi instead of a wood elf. Our base speed drops to 30 feet, but we can double our speed for one round instead. That puts our new max speed at 7240 feet in one round, or 823 mph.