Recent content by BookTenTiger

I think it's interesting that a lot of people are conflating race and culture here. The "weird races" are only weird if they are part of a different culture, and nothing but the DM is forcing that. If the elephant-man wears the same clothes as folks on the Sword Coast, worships the same gods...

Other ideas: The rats are illusions created by a wizard who is covering up something secret. The rats are constructs who are stealing parts for a warforged hidden in the basement who is building itself a new, deadly body. The rats are actually polymorphed townsfolk, transformed by an invasive...

After the introduction, have the players all switch to playing Awakened Rat PCs who are hanging out in their own Awakened Rat Tavern in the basement, when suddenly they are attacked by giants!

I love that!

What are some fun, creative alternate Spellbooks you've experienced in your games? The PHB notes that Spellbooks can have different appearances: Xanathar's includes some really fun Spellbook ideas, including: My current dwarf wizard us an archaeologist by trade, so his "spellbook" is...

My thoughts are with you!

This is why my characters always search the couch cushions in a Wizard's house.

In the same way the Television Writers Strike helped create (or at least popularize) reality television, it will be interesting in 10 years to see how the pandemic changed Hollywood.

I think this is a Session 0 issue. I'm running a game inspired by Curse of Strahd. The players rolled up a Tortle, goliath, Tiefling, and Aasimar. Rather than have all these characters be strangers in a strange land, I changed the land. Villages of tortles were the first conquered by my vampire...

One thing I notice in these discussions is a focus on the "genetics" or physicality of lineages, which is kind of illogic since they are made up and don't actually have a genetic history. I think it's a much better idea to build a ruleset off of the "narrative truths" of each lineage. What...

Need to use the bathroom?

I fully agree! I fell in love with the series on Episode 1, and there were so many PARTS of the series I thought were fantastic. I loved the spoken word soundtrack, the characters, the acting, the settings... But the whole series felt rushed! They could have taken the first four episodes and...

I would some day love to do a Milestone Level campaign with milestones set by players. It would be neat to have player-driven goals set up that reward them with a level. I'm not sure how it would work concretely, though.

Initiative Tokens: You receive a number of tokens at the start of combat equal to 2 x your Hit Dice + Dexterity or Intelligence bonus. At the start of each round, you place forward a number of tokens. Order in combat starts with the combatant who put forward the most tokens. When you run out of...

I do it differently depending on the campaign. In one campaign, I awarded a level after a number of sessions equal to the next level (so 2 sessions for level 2, 3 sessions for level 3), capping it at 9 sessions for levels 9, 10, etc. That pace seemed to work really well for that campaign. My...