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Odin's alignment varies so much from portrayal to portrayal, if you want to put a label on him in a game book it's probably best to just slap a "neutral" on him and be done with it. Alignment-wise, one of my favorite Odins (or Wotans, I should say) is Wagner's. He is the codifier and enforcer...

Different strokes, I guess. This I think is something crunchy enough to discuss. The issue with increasing the point buy or encouraging more generous rolling is that any racial Strength (or whatever) bonus stacks on top of it, which puts us right back into the territory of goliaths being the...

Why not just say that you get (e.g. for goliaths) +2 Strength and +2 to any other score of your choice? Players will naturally put the free bonus in a score associated with their class -- and if they don't, well, that's a choice they can make.

What would culture do mechanically? Say you're in a medieval-history-based campaign and your party has a human noble fighter of the Frankish culture and a human noble fighter of the Kurdish culture. These two characters, if the players know what they're doing, are going to feel very different...

Yeah, 5E is very gun-shy about any sort of complexity in the grappling rules -- which is admittedly understandable. But it means you have to picture a 5E "grapple" more as "you are holding onto a loose bit of their clothing at arm's length" than anything like close-in combat. If I wanted to...

Setting aside the question of how to parse the words literally, I can't think of a good gameplay reason for reading 2. The whole point of the concentration mechanic is to cut down on the number of simultaneous effects you need to track.

I think that was intentional. They didn't want to spend a lot of page space enumerating exactly how to use each skill because that goes against the core concept they're trying to communicate that the DM should just pick an ability, pick a DC, and have the player roll.

I already mentioned altering the DC based on context. Another useful tool in the toolbox is flat-out changing the results of success and failure. If Brad Pitt and Neil deGrasse Tyson walk into a university physics department together, they're going to get different results if Pitt does the...

What you're describing sounds basically like 5E's core conceptualization of ability checks. But (at least the way I interpret it) this idea kind of got overridden in practice by lingering 3E/PF sensibilities, and character sheets have been designed accordingly. I'm not trying to shoot down your...

The barrier is not so much the elementary addition per se as it is the finding two different numbers in different places on a character sheet full of numbers. And it's not necessarily a total game-stopper. But if for every skill check a less systemically-agile player has to take twenty seconds...

Frankly, I think the current approach is just hard-baked into D&D culture since 3E. It actually is similar to what you describe -- whatever the 5E PHB says, I very seldom see anyone at the table say "Can I make a Charisma check with Persuasion?", they always say "Can I use Persuasion?" And yeah...

Attunement is the simplified 5E version of the item slot system. Seems reasonable to me that an item which physically becomes part of you would take up a "slot".

Xanathar's has a sidebar on this topic about "samurai" and "cavaliers". Short version: it should strive to be respectful, which isn't necessarily the same thing as accurate.

Also for a college fraternity on double secret probation.

Sorry. That's not meant to be personal, honest -- I just find this philosophically overeducated preschooler character really funny for some reason. I urge you not to dwell too much on the fact that he's a petulant child and instead consider why his line of reasoning doesn't work. How can the mom...

"You say dogs bark, but the sea lions at the zoo bark, and you say they aren't dogs. Contradiction! Yet again! Even more evidence that this whole 'dog' business is nonsense. You clearly stated barking to be the defining feature of a dog, that's the only way a statement like 'dogs bark' could be...

Whether or not that's true, it's not the same as people claiming that alignment provides a full description of the monster's behavior. Once. You have yet to do so. You may think you have, but your arguments have always relied on premises you have assumed which the people you are attempting to...

Making racial ability bonuses "+2 to [fixed score], +2 to any other score" would go a long way towards satisfying the stated design goals of most parties here. Your half-orc wizard is unusually strong for a wizard, and my elf wizard is atypically graceful, but nobody is missing out on Intelligence.

We agree on what alignment does: it lets you stab rakshasas real good. Disagreements about alignment are in my practical experience not common except on internet message boards where it doesn't matter. And notwithstanding your accusations to the contrary, I can describe alignment coherently. So...

But you seem to have unusual ideas about what people are saying it is accomplishing. For instance, you're spending a lot of effort saying that it doesn't accomplish the goal of providing a complete description of how a creature behaves, when people aren't saying that. Consider the possibility...