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Something that seems to get lost a lot is that the Realms are, in fact, a specific weird setting. The Generic D&D World has never actually been published as a full setting - even Greyhawk and Mystara have their quirks.

65. "You can't do that. It's not realistic." Make that your catchphrase. Especially good if you focus it on the basic concepts of your players' characters, and you preferentially apply it to only certain players.

64. Watch your players very carefully. Learn which parts of your campaign, and the game as a whole, that they are most interested in, and the parts that don't interest them at all. They just want to fight the monsters and come home to boast about their deeds? Great, figure that out. Then...

Zero of D&D's mechanics always map 1:1 to things happening in the world. They're all abstractions. Once you understand this, you are free. EDIT: Realized I didn't actually answer the question. A lance charge in 5e is one single attack in-universe, which is resolved using 1-4 attack and damage...

I've got limited entertainment time, even more limited time for tabletop RPGs, and even more limited than that time as a player. In 5e, cutting options off from one another doesn't cut off "builds," it cuts of concepts - options, in 5e, are big broad things that all say to you, "This is what I...

Oh, if you read my posts you'll see I've been waiting for so long For another book to read And add things to my game But 'cause AL's got this silly rule, you see, To make things work out there They've got to reprint rules, you see And waste pagespace I'd like to use For something new For my...

Yep. I don't like it. That... I thought was obvious. But before the Adventurer's League's restrictionist approach was a thing that I could simply ignore if I wasn't playing AL. Now, it's getting into one of the very, very few player-focused supplements we've gotten, and that makes it a...

Without huge mistakes being made, 5e is in no risk at all of becoming Pathfinder/3e. And it's not the amount of content, though the slow release schedule does help. Third Edition was broken from the start, and 3.5 did not fix it. Playing 3e with just the Player's Handbook, and a nonzero number...

I'm not saying they don't have evidence that people like the rule. Of course people like the rule! There's people here insulting me and misgendering me just to defend it. I'm saying they don't have evidence that this rule works better in the wild than just letting people make the characters they...

Nope. I'm concluding that their data isn't meaningful, because it's built on assumptions that wouldn't pan out at a larger scale. I don't think they're lying - I think WotC's folks are great people! I just think they're wrong.

'Cept, y'know, I do know what they've tried, because what they've tried has been tried publicly. They can't try things like this privately; you don't know how they work until you let them loose in the wild. We all know what they've tried, because we've watched it.

They have no control group. I can definitely see it working better than the previous, even more absurd "story origin" rule, but they haven't actually tried "let people make the character they want."

Yes. Yes, it has, because it exists as an organized play thing for D&D when D&D itself is the best game it's ever been. It would be BETTER at that if it didn't make tons of boneheaded decisions because apparently restricting options for players is seen as a virtue among its leadership. And now...

We have now reached the culmination of the negative effects of Adventurer's League's stupid insistence on limiting character creation options (folks, it's Fifth Edition, if it ain't broke by itself you ain't gonna break it giving it interactions, and if you do it'll be easier to spot-ban). We...

I want infinity monster books. More monsters are always a huge help in GMing. Psionics. And tons more subclasses. Oh! And a final version of Battlesystem. I've used the playtest rules to great effect in my Mystara game, but they're glitchy.

Eh. They always struck me as being at least in part player-facing material (material segregation in 3e was not very well-implemented). The problems with 3e's PrCs were the problems with 3e as a general system.

Anyone else notice they didn't do the usual writeup of last month's survey results this time? That's usually the best part of the new survey going up.

If you're going to hide rolls, then to avoid basically removing the best part of the iconic ability of your player's chosen subclass (seriously, Cutting Words is THE reason to do Lore Bard), you really should just let the bard use it after you've said if a roll is a hit or a miss. That keeps...

So... I just finished running my Christmas adventure! It was a pile of fun - the setting was Blackmoor, with the twist ending (the space ship) in place, and a group of villains called the Fierce Five trying to disrupt the Starmorgan Winter's Peak festival. Of the members of the Fierce Five, the...

I didn't know there was a thread about the Wall. Doesn't matter much, though, because the main point here was Kelemvor the person, not Kelemvor the soulmason. His soulmasonry is tertiary. Shadowdale was pretty good, and definitely by far the best of the series. I... totally forget that the...