Recent content by Mr. Patient

Agreed, and I would take it even further -- these four are not 'subclass' abilities. They're core. If you can perform these adequately, you're most of the way toward having a successful game. The rest of the subclass abilities in the original list are 'ribbons'.

I am very puzzled by this report that someone on the "management team" unilaterally increased all the monster hit points right before publication. It doesn't seem plausible that someone in a business role (as opposed to game development) would know or care enough to meddle at that level. I...

It's really just a mechanism to hand some minor narrative control to your players. In the "C" Team games, Jerry lets Kate Welch (Rosie Beestinger) narrate the travel between well-known destinations, which she spins into a fun, low-stakes story involving the other characters or very familiar...

I don't know how interested I am in this particular event, but the news that the player base is now about 50% women is really phenomenal. I never would have imagined it even a few years ago.

We play four hours as well, but lose about 1/3 of that every session to bickering. (We've been together for 23 years, and we're like a married couple of eight people).

DiA has you level essentially after the first encounter, and then again after completing about a 30-room dungeon. This was 3 sessions for my group. I think in another 3 they will have hit the 5th level milestone. So you might actually be faster, but then again you might have less screwing...

It is indeed really fast, especially in the beginning. The goal is to get you quickly to the point where you can reasonably survive Hell, which I endorse. I prefer that to extending the Baldur's Gate portion of the adventure just to grind out the appropriate number of XP. (Hell is the main...

Really, this whole fight is just a proxy for other social and political battles. There really are mobs of angry Twitter people who do overreact sometimes, so I understand the impulse to push back against it and man the ramparts. But that's not what happened here. We're talking about a couple...

I get it, and I respect your take here. But I still think there's a pretty good possibility that the developers themselves, once the concern was pointed out them, were glad to pull it and rethink their approach, rather than feeling pressure to do so. Like @Salthorae said upthread, we can't...

Leaving aside the question of whether they 'caved to the rage mob' or 'heard feedback from a couple of people and realized that they were saying something they probably didn't mean to say, and revised the material in an attempt to be as inclusive as possible', I guess what I find surprising is...

Knowing what little I know about the attitudes and preferences of people like Chris Perkins, Jeremy Crawford, and Kate Welch, among others on the team, I would be extremely surprised if they were resentful at having to make this change due to feedback on social media. I think it's much more...

What it does is completely trivialize it. Have there ever been occult-motivated misdeeds? Fine, I'm sure there have been a few. You win. We should discuss the two topics as if they're both equally serious.

Yeah, sorry, 'prank' was not the right term for what I was going for. You've explained it better.

You are seriously equating devil worship, which does not exist, to rape? Come on, man. I mean, we all play D&D here. We should know better than anyone that there is no such thing as real-life Satanism. The Church of Satan is a prank to stop local governments from putting up monuments to the...

There are no tieflings and warlocks in real life. People are drugged and raped in real life. We draw the line at being empathetic to people around us.