Recent content by Manabarbs

3-6 is a bit below average. When you start to get into the realm of -3 or -4, you're starting to get into the range where the difference in the spread starts to be perceptible. It'd still be a pretty severe fiction disconnect to play such a character as outright unintelligent, however. Under d20...

I think the disconnect is less "some people think that the numbers on your character sheet affect what your character is like and some people don't", and more "some people believe that for some reason there's a HUGE gulf in competence between what an 8 represents and what a 10 represents, and...

I think that flaw systems are fine provided that they have built-in that whatever benefit you get from having the flaw only matters if the flaw's gotten a chance to matter too. Things like the UA flaw system are just exercises in finding the most irrelevant flaw your character can take, and UA...

3.5 makes it tricky to model people who are absolutely world-class at one skill or another but who aren't also incredibly resilient to attacks and surprisingly competent with a weapon compared to an average person. The way that skill ranks interact with levels and the way that levels interact...

I suspect that the survey question was probably designed to feel out how frequently people use random encounters in general. One sort of tricky survey design thing is that you have to be careful with "It depends..." options, because they tend to suck away a bunch of your respondents, not...

It was all but a given that they'd bring the swift action back. 3.5 realized that it needed some way to clamp down on that sort of thing partway through the run, and went back and reengineered stuff to use swift actions. 4e wasn't wrong to continue to use swift (minor) actions, although you can...

The spell Iconic Manifestation grants you the Axiomatic template, which has a Smite Chaos ability, although that's a mid-level druid spell so it'd be unusual for a Sapphire Hierarch to be casting it. I guess some Axiomatic creatures (which naturally have a daily use of Smite Chaos) could end up...

Depending on how you read the spell, you may not actually have exactly five extra lives; you can theoretically be resurrected an unlimited number of times. It's just that after a few times it's so risky to the person casting the spell that you'd have to have several high-level clerics willing...

I don't think that that was the design intent from the get-go as much as the still-not-great path of least resistance when it came to touching up the math. After release, it became clear that characters' to-hit and NADs slide a little backwards compared to the rest of the system, so they...

I singled out ELH over random terrible 3PP because I've actually put time into trying to bash ELH into something that even kind of works, while most bad 3PP products barely register with me enough for me to remember their names. In undergrad, one or two of the campus houses and maybe the TTRPG...

I don't think it's known yet. The first time, it was Abed Nadir (played by Danny Pudi), who's just a regular cast member. Spencer (Dan Harmon's actual DM, the guy who DMs on his podcast) isn't an actor, but who knows if he'll be involved in some fashion.

I'm mostly thinking of player crunch books. Other books just don't leave as strong of an impression on me. Best is probably Expanded Psionics Handbook (3.5). It's a hard call, but I feel like that book contains the most total overall awesome of any book I own with the least dubiousity. (And the...

By a hyperliteral reading of RAW, no, things don't stack. (I think you're projecting two separate auras.) On the other hand, I'd just chalk that up to the fact that by the time MoI came out, the game had about a million different mechanical options, and it's not unexpected that not every...

The creator and showrunner, Dan Harmon, was let go after the third season. He's been brought back for the fifth season. There's excellent reason to believe that the utterly dismal season four will just be an anomaly. (For what it's worth, bringing back a fired showrunner is essentially...

I think the LAST place it should be is the DMG. PHB is fine. If there's not space for everything and you have to cut some stuff, sure, prioritize cutting evil stuff, but put player material in player books and DM material in DM books. I don't have strong feelings about whether playing evil...