Recent content by Remathilis

Life's too short to waste on D&D I won't enjoy.

That depends. Did you tell me that when you invited me or when I showed up at your game to play? If you told me "Remathilis, I am starting this new game that is going to be all humans and very GoT )or Conan)." I can say "yeah, that's not what I'm looking for" and no harm no foul. If you say "Hey...

Clever bait and switch. So first off, if you invited me to play D&D 5e and then pulled out the Shadowdark book, I'd probably leave for no other reason than that you lied to me, didn't feel I would play if you told me that was what we were actually playing and I couldn't trust what other ruses...

Yes. That is my standard. Ten is what is in the current PHB, but that number would really be whatever is in the PHB you are using. But I'll be frank; it's NEVER just one. It's (warning: hypothetical example) "no Dragonborn, Goliaths, Orcs or Planetouched, no world tree barbarians, warlocks or...

I consider setting expansions books fair game for banning. I don't use Dark Gifts outside of Ravenloft, Dragonmarks outside of Eberron, and kender outside of Dragonlance. My walk proviso is for banning stuff in the PHB without a replacement for it.

No. I cited one example. Did you really need me to list every species? My point was 1.) it's never just one species (or class or subclass or whatever); typical it's rather large list of bans and 2.) there are hundreds of optional species in 5e alone. If you cannot find 10 options out of the 40+...

Poe-Tay-toe, Poe-Tah-toe. You can have a focused, fully considered and intentional rational for why every PC must be a Lawful Good Human Male Fighter with Blown Eyes, I still won't enjoy playing in it.

See post above. If your vision is too limited to allow 10 species and 12 classes (even if they aren't the exact ones in the PHB) then your vision is too limited for me.

These days, it's principle. In my experience, it's never just one option cut, and it starts the spiral of ever increasing limits. So my take is that if your vision is so limited that you can't find a replacement in your setting for an option that doesn't work in you setting, chances are you are...

I find that it mostly breeds resentment. "Here is a whole book of options you can't use!" The DM says with delight. That's not to say every option is equally valid (I would not allow Dragonmarks in a non-Eberron game), but if you can't find room in your world to accommodate the 10 species and 12...

My golden rule is "as many options as are in the PHB." If your setting doesn't 1:1 replace any removed options, I walk. I don't care if you're the next coming of Tolkien; if you remove Dragonborn you better be replacing them with some other option I can play.

Yeah, it's the mirror to DM entitlement and neither should be part of the larger culture, but I feel a small part of it is a course correction from decades of the DMs Master Plan trumping player autonomy.

Gryphon Hill might be the origin of many Ravenloft setting tropes, but it doesn't really work in the modern concept of Ravenloft. There is no way to get Strahd and Azalin into Modent the way Ravenloft is structured now. You'd basically need a conjunction like event rather than the "Dracula in...

It also assumes that the DM was willing to provide that benevolence. A DM was certainly under not obligation to provide cool stuff, and it is my experience that more often than not the opposite was true and the DM used the rules to bludgeon players into submission rather than provide carrots for...

I don't think people were saying it was the norm, but I think its fair to say that is was more common in decades past and there was a fair amount of bad DM advice that helped support it far longer than it needed to be. Some DMs figured it out for themselves and improved. Some DMs who were bad...