Recent content by tetrasodium

You are splitting the hair a bit too finely there. The days of players being forbidden from reading the DMG are a long way past & it didn't even work out that well as an expectation way back then. The exact line I was referring to from dmg141 is "Use common sense to determine whether more than...

That might apply to the lack of gm facing advice, but not the mechanical subsystems that supported it on the player's sheets. Yes pre-3.x didn't have it either, but it could provide a much higher level of risk facing PCs to make room for the gm to provide stuff and a much lower level of CharOp...

There is an ocean of difference between a one off scry & fry because it's usedul to the gm or something compared to business as usual. My post accounted for that and at least one other poster has pointed out similar. The gm didn't need to be adversarial with it by " not handing out body slot...

Wrt that bolded bit the gm had a lot of ways to push back and put their thumb on the scale for each party member as needed by using things like body slot conflicts or magic item churn expectations. The "Christmas tree" was literally a bit of well designed gm empowerment with a dedicated...

To be fair though it was a long time ago and there were a bunch of superheroes/villains who developed power of some sort from cancer as a result of curing cancer or by the cancer reshaping their body in some way. Overall the bovd was a great book packed with useful stuff for the gm and a...

This thread was started talking about why it doesn't matter if there are quotable passages granting the gm authority between quotable passages encouraging players to view it like a single player game or worse "tell your story"∆. Unlike past editions the gm has no space to give while taking so...

Powerful build was just an example, one of the most obvious of the poison pill malicious compliance trivially accessable player options. That bold bit is where we disagree and why they can not work to fill the gap left by subsystems wotc did not complete over the last 11 years +not quite...

Not really. I tried quite a few boltons to fix, various gaping holes in 5e over the years and they generally collapsed under the weight of a system designing against doing such a thing. Take a proper carrying capacity system made somewhat early on (or not so early) and look at how was it is...

I agree on most of it not really existing in actual 3.5 play, which is light-years more than can be said about the game breaking 5e builds like "I take fighter great sword and gwm but make strength my high stat instead of intelligence" Posting this because I had never heard of muscle wizard...

Everyone plays wow in real time simultaneously. That's not a particularly valid comparison given that it's not uncommon for a 5e player's next turn to be ten or more minutes away even without stuns. The 5e focus is too much on the impact of things like a stun and not enough on how 5e itself...

Earlier on Mearls mentioned how wotc/ttrpg games (?) aren't really embracing gradual evolution over whole edition changes but failure to provide optional) variant rules for completely undeveloped 5e rules subsystems prevents 3pp from filling that void. I think wotc themselves caused that by...

Agreed, wotc has done awful with 5e variant rules, I quoted you by accident & meant to quote the post you were responding to.

That's like calling my car windshield modular because I could stick (illegal) tint in it, the windshield has not provided any special support and the tint is doing all of the work. What you are describing is often called a "fantasy heartbreaker", it's a total rewrite. The...

It's a 7th level spell. With vancian prep of the past it meant that you prepared spells by slot and it made for a an option you could reliably assume would be usable . Plus with banned spell schools it gave high level evokers a bit of a control option rather than the nukes in 7th level...