Recent content by tetrasodium

Its usually the case that a single player will find it easier to agree to join a game then maintain an overtuned baseline pc by poisoning the social atmosphere at the table with grumpiness over "unplayable" house rules aimed at raising difficulty as described in post 18 than it is to force their...

There's a difference. It's trivial to raise PC power by giving higher attributes st chargen higher attributes at various levels (as darksun once did) adding some insulation between being beaten down and death or awarding more powerful permanent/consumable magic items. Going the other way when...

I think complaining about creature ststblocks with things like an 18 attrib and mundane weapon rather than a 12 & choice between useless weapon or +3 weapon is silly. Attributes in creature statblocks need to serve the mechanical need that creature is designed to fill for the gm rather than the...

Cozy rpg Ravenloft alone makes it ,"watered down" because instead of providing the gm with optional sidebars for testing/recovery changes spell/ability changes and so on to fit the themes and tropes of Ravenloft it throws that at the gm and tells them to just do it to player abilities when the...

Ironically there is a lot of anime wuxia/cultivation and so on where the combat is overtly turn based with generally∆ near instant turn completion but not everyone can break free of real time observation into a heightened state capable of tracking it where they can casually observe & interact...

I think that the disconnect is that you are presenting magic item churn as some kind of player entitlement rather than a toolkit for the GM to manage player engagement via actions having consequences/benefits that are critically important to players and things like unobtrusively putting their gm...

It wasn't empowerment for any gms. Empowerment would have been guidance and advice on how those gms you reference in the bolded bit could learn to use those tools. The 5e design didn't just hide them so they were not "visible", it straight up designed against their use at a foundational math...

No. It is not "dm empowerment" to loot the gm's toolbox just because it's done while someone says that it's for your own good. I literally described how the gm is did empowered and you quoted the description telling me it was gm empowerment.

While I agree with most of that, it's 5e design choices that derail it not the local focus that details things. it's entirely possible but requires players to need things from the world at regular enough intervals that they can be considered eager agents of powerful fractions. You can look at...

Gandalf is a freaking maiar. The beings so powerful they literally participated in creating middle earth into existence

Ne even early 5e still had pretty solid overlap with that part of the venn diagram. A lot of the reason for that inescapable fact boils down to the way death saves and the removal of a need to heal all damage between 0 & neg ten from hovering on death's door birthed yoyo/wackamole healing...

While I agree & think there is probably some level of validity to that theory, there might be an alternate & more charitable explanation. Both 2014 & 2024 5e are practically shooting hard for coziest of cozy ultrahigh fantasy basking in the glow of freaking NightSun. It would almost take a...

Genuinely curious and no deeper meaning to read into this since I don't really know anything about him beyond the OP blurb on his recent work. What about him makes it "excellent"?

Can't help but notice that your bar for "good" just keeps going up. Another couple posts and I expect the "lore" choice to need +3cha +2 floating minimum just to clear "ok" or "workable"

IoW the RoLePlAyInG behind tiefling "lore" is so shallow that dropping from the MToF S+ choice for the broken OP charisma based warlock multiclass bingo dip builds to the mere A+ or S tier 2014 phb tiefling makes that RoLePlAyInG based on lore choice "poor". many of us may have been born at...