Recent content by Benjamin Olson

Given that, fundamentally, it is designed to be a violence game, having at least some enemies be readily identifiable as inescapably evil by nature cuts down on the number of moral conundra we need to explore. I don't dislike exploring moral conundra, I just prefer that some encounters be...

My charitable theory for why its inflexible (by default) in 2024 is that they got it into their heads that ability score bonuses should be inflexibly tied to something, so that sometimes people would choose something suboptimal, and since race was out it became backgrounds. My less charitable...

They got Jaxxon!

Well it would be like that, if Apple had historically been most well known for creating apps for Samsung phones, if tech industry rivalries were as collegial as ttrpg publisher ones, if Apple were a small-cap, privately held company, and if consumers relationship with Apple was defined by their...

Well, Dark Sun-ness aside, it's a rare UA where I actually like all the subclasses. The unabashedly evil ones are probably more likely to be something I use for NPCs, but I can definitely imagine using all of them for something at some point. As the above indicates, I don't find them boring...

Focus here seems to be on the decision to stick with D&D rather than promote their own game, but I'm more intrigued by what the particular campaign is slated to look like. That sounds very cool as a D&D campaign. I was probably going to suggest a veer towards Westmarches for my current group...

Really the inflextion point was back with the start of campaign 2, which established that Critical Role as a "franchise" was defined by it being the same (core) cast of nerdy ass voice actors playing the characters, not by the particular characters, which in the still developing media genre of...

While I don't see much value in "iconic" characters, I guess I'm just not that into official established characters in D&D. My least favorite part of published adventures is how they always want to shoehorn in some character from some other published adventure nobody at my table has played or at...

Only interested because of character options. I'm sure the books will be fine, and I like setting books in principle, but when I'm prepping for Forgotten Realms D&D I always end up just using the Forgotten Realms wiki and my own imagination, and I already have several books of Forgotten Realms...

Sure. The context is that I was creating a hypothetical for the premise that even if it were perfect I'm done with paying a monthly fee to the Paramount Global / Skydance Media conglomerate after this season finishes, not proposing that perfection was actually achievable.

Since prefacing names with "the Honorable", is the real world Anglosphere formal address for such people, I'd just come up with some variation on that that flowed off the tongue better as a title. "Honored", or such. Alternatively I'd just insist they always be called Mr./Miss by people of...

I think I'd cautiously put Strange New Worlds on top, after considering how many middling episodes there really are in all the series made for broadcast television. I mean TNG is my nostalgic favorite and it barely has any good episodes until season 3. But Strange New Worlds could blossom into...

I have nothing against impossible dragon physiology, but the number 1 rule for dragons is that they should look cool, and this just looks like an AI rendering mistake.

I really like that, and needed a short forest encounter for my next session. The party recovering other people's lost memories seems like a great exposition or quest hook opportunity. Of course the AI dropped the ball by not having the tree preserve memories in amber.

Seems like a prime opportunity for some sort of Waterdeep Griffon Calvary themed subclass.