Recent content by Benjamin Olson

I use it for most campaigns because it is familiar with vast lore to draw upon available on a handy wiki, but nobody I play with is actually invested enough to care when we change something or make up our own stuff. Also it's so kitchen sink and cosmopolitan that it can accommodate almost...

My guess is that it is at least partly inspired by the fact that dragons in heraldry had to be reducible to simple descriptions (blazons) which generally meant each given object has a single color, which tends to be visually striking. But then again that wouldn't explain why other heraldric...

Well it may be a godawful small affair to the girl with the mousey hair, but I think it's pretty amazing news!

Love of (and time investment in mastering) 2014 5e is the fundamental reason I despise 2024 5e. While I generally like exploring new game systems, learning 2024 was just a miserable slog because it really does almost nothing new while making enough (often seemingly arbitrary) changes to force a...

So I just rewatched the recent Superman movie, and this time around noticed even more how consistently they follow up nearly every bit of violence with little verbal or visual asides establishing that everyone is okay. It was clearly a move to differentiate themselves from Man of Steel, and...

Some will be disappointed. Some will just see it as finally getting to take the training wheels off.

Yeah about 20% of participants really not liking the the thing being scored is bound to do that. Just as the 60 odd people who scored it 7-10 boosts the score up. Now one of those side's I agree with and one of them I don't, but I'll respect their statistical impact equally in those broad...

Or raise it. In any case this sort of rating will always call loudest to those who want to evangelize and those who want to complain. And yet most the proponents know it isn't a perfect ten, and even most of us detractors recognize and admit it could have been worse, so it's going to land...

A lot of D&D youtubers went down a clickbait route during the OGL-gate days and got addicted to those quick and easy views. Aside from being annoying, it also feels kind of short-sighted because that crap all ages like milk, whereas quality ttrpg-related content, particularly relatively...

This! I was a pretty happy 5e camper. Then the dark shadow of playtest nonsense began to cloud the horizon. I think the basic issue is that just running these games requires so much thought about game design principles that most people who really get into it become armchair game designers, and...

Well the thing about complicated game systems is they have lots of moving bits and pieces and you don't really confront them all at once, so I've been through the whole curve several times over with different aspects of this edition, and inevitably will again as they reissue random remix...

Well the downside of it being a group activity is this is a pizza where everyone at the table has to come to a consensus on toppings, and sadly I'm stuck learning and playing a system I didn't want or ask for at some tables, while still needing to remember the nearly the same but different one...

Yep, 5e was absolutely due for some sort of revised rules compendium from the moment Tasha's hit. I mean suddenly if I wanted my character to have all the core class features they were "entitled" to I was hauling a minimum two books to sessions as a player. And the PHB was full of little things...

2014 was somehow unusable because your character might have to make an ability check, but 2024 where the target always gets a saving throw is somehow more "usable"? I mean I guess that makes sense on the "I sometimes feel bad as a DM just auto-killing one of a low level PCs few spells for the...

I mean some people absolutely hated Counterspell, so I guess a nerfed to near pointlessness version seems like an improvement to them. The main lesson I got from the 2024 experience was realizing that the majority of things WotC and their boosters seem to have considered bugs in 2014 5e were...