Recent content by Benjamin Olson

It seems to me like it's a pretty bleak existence long-term in the D&D YouTuber sphere. You basically have to make D&D your whole life to keep up, and it still doesn't work because even someone playing TTRPGs around the clock doesn't generate enough thoughts and experiences about them worth...

Exactly what I do, with the caveat that the scribble part is a consistent scribble, which is all a signature needs to be.

Complexity in D&D classes is mostly a function of how many other things you have to reference and how much resource management you have to do. Sometimes a core class feature may be somewhat complicated (like rogue sneak attack, which a fair number of people are confused by at first), but you'll...

I've always assumed they didn't, but I suppose they could have retained them from their dinosaur-arctoid ancestors.

Alright, well there are plenty of unofficial options I'm sure (and there is no professional licensing for game designers, so "professional" is a pretty nebulous construct). I wasn't actually trying to put a burden of game design on you, so sorry if I was flippant about that. I just think the...

And waking up this morning to find I've been called an "authorian GM" (whatever that is...) for wanting the game to be manageable enough for me to feel comfortable running it, is the absolute end of this conversation for me.

It's not about control or authoritarian fantasies. It's about: 1. The fact that when I know a class and a less experienced player unfamiliar with it is trying to play it I can help them with it even when dealing with the myriad other things gumming up my DM brain. I can even spot when they are...

You could always just make a ninja class and institute it in your game. Why debate anything about how the game should be if we're going to pretend like shaping it to our whims requires no complication or social capital? Default rules matter, because every deviation from them is a negotiation...

There are two major barriers to creating a new official class in 5e D&D. One is that to run smoothly the game basically requires that a DM have a rough understanding of the basic abilities of each class, which means that while occasional new classes might get to come to the table, there is a...

So you've enslaved someone's soul and are gaslighting them into thinking you're on their side so they will better serve you? Seems plenty evil to me. If you were doing it for some sort of greater good purpose, if you came from a culture that normalized that behavior, if your Warlock patron made...

I'm willing to fail. I'm just not comfortable pushing in front of everyone to fail on a communal turn unless the thing I'm attempting is very clearly a good move on average or extremely cool. I mostly have fun with Daggerheart, it's just that in the places where it's initiative system doesn't...

The two games I've played a substantial amount of that use metacurrency ubiquitously are Daggerheart and Star Trek Adventures. I'm not generally a fan of GM metacurrency. Not only do I not want the GM (and hence the game universe) bound by such rules, but the methods that generate it can...

I think in the case of Gentleman Broncos the creators don't really want to say it's a Krull homage, because the scene in question is the villain's lame stolen version of the protagonist's novel (or really, more precisely if I recall, what the protagonist imagines when he reads the villain's...

On the subject of Arnold being too old I'm reminded of the fact that when they filmed the original Commando there is a scene where John Matrix is chopping trees on his land and easily carries a whole log (or something like that, I haven't seen it in forever) and evidently behind the scenes the...

I think hit point bloat is one of the original sins of 5e, and sadly undermines the bounded accuracy which is one of my favorite design intentions of 5e. Yes, it feels cool to graduate to more advanced enemies, but it doesn't serve the simulationist side of things well. And since 5e doesn't want...