Recent content by Benjamin Olson

Well there's a lot of people who came into the hobby with 5e, struggled through learning that one system reasonably well, and just don't want to learn a new system (not unreasonable, people have lives and varying interest in learning ttrpg rules). I doubt many of them would personally know or...

Well, well, well, a celebrity in our midst!

In 5e Classic Eldritch Knights didn't get arcane foci of any kind, much less get to use their weapon as one. They used component pouches. Foci were a perk of being a full caster. I can't say if this was intentionally held over into New 5e, or an oversight. Honestly I don't even know or care to...

Yeah, I don't know. As I remember it, in the short stories there's a bit of "fantasy James Bond" vibe so far as his luck with the ladies goes. People seem to be drawn to him despite him being gruff and making little social effort. It feels more like he has a 20 in Charisma and is being played by...

The comical thing about anti-colonial backlash aimed at Thanksgiving is that the annual holiday in the United States was actually created to give thanks for the Union winning the Battle of Gettysburg (something I for one am still thankful for) and generally to promote the idea that the future...

A creature attuned to this writing desk immediately becomes fluent in 1d6 non-existent languages and gains an irresistible impulse to worldbuild. Any writing the attuned creature creates at the desk will eventually be published, no matter how trivial or incomplete.

Yep. It only worked for me because I often brought in battlemaps, sometimes even when there was no battle, which meant that I could provide the visual clue of having the gargoyles as "room decor" without actually saying "you see gargoyles" and that the players didn't immediately assume as soon...

One of my coolest encounters was gargoyles. I had mentioned that one of the temples in town had become so rich they covered their large dome in sheets of gold and the party decided to go up there and heist it. Amazingly nobody reacted to the many gargoyles on the battlemap, presumably because...

Well the one I think we need to raise awareness of is the Bonnacon: It is a cowardly bull-like creature who runs away from its enemies, but beware pursuers, for when chased it will spray its trail with fecal matter which has the power to burn you like like a sort of fire, and it can lay down...

I seem to recall having similar problems a few weeks back on my computer but I think I just had to restart my browser and log back in here, and it doesn't sound like that will resolve your issue.

It's a point of milestone leveling for some people. One may also want to have a milestone simply to bring everyone up to appropriate level for the next phase of the campaign, in which case it doesn't really matter if someone got there a session or two early, or the milestone may simply be a very...

There seems to be a divergence between a ttrpg folk tradition of spectacular crits and fumbles and what most actual game designers want to put into actual rules. This is most prominent in 5e D&D, but I'm pretty sure it's true of other games as well (ie: my Daggerheart group definitely makes...

XP should be for accomplishing things the game wants me to accomplish, whether killing monsters, overcoming obstacles, finding locations, hauling treasure back to town, just making successful checks, some sort of downtime training activity, or reaching some sort of milestone. The key thing to me...

Take your content and run with it? Are you worried about someone stealing your ideas or just about the game getting out of your hands in some way? I wouldn't worry about either. I think the ideal plan to find playtesters for D&D content is to play D&D in general with a lot of different people...