Recent content by Burnside

I get what you're saying, but I do have enough experience with my brain to know that, all things being equal, "loads of irregular cards and tokens" is always much worse than "sheet of paper" for me personally, across the board.

Hot take: this format is in no way easier for my brain to process than a character sheet. That said, I 100% applaud the elimination of the 1-18 ability score numbering, which is a vestigial artifact of earlier editions and no longer needed in the current game. Next re-do spells so spell levels...

I'm working on an actual play right now sponsored by Green Ronin that uses their Adventure Game Engine, which has mechanics that pretty much mandate telling the player the DC (in AGE's case "Test Level" but it's the same concept) number for effectively any skill roll they try to make (and such...

In some cases, people use "player skill" to mean "system mastery." Meaning people can become very skilled at knowing how the abilities on their character sheet work and when and how to deploy them in play. For others, player skill means looking up from the character sheet and using more of your...

I actually think the 2024 rules are a step backwards towards 3E-level granularity and away from 2014's move towards DM fiat. The 2024 rules attempt to codify a lot more player actions than 2014 does, and assigns set DCs to many tasks where 2014 steps back from doing so.

As a designer, when making stuff for 5E I do my best to create encounters that allow multiple solutions, and can be solved by skilled play or by character-sheet-based options or by some combination of both. I don't always succeed at designing for that, but my strongest stuff allows for both...

I generally start at 1 but get to 2 fairly quickly (after ~4 hours of play). I’ve run Dungeon of the Mad Mage (never completed the dungeon despite multiple attempts) and started those at level 5.

Yeah, this is a weird one. For that matter, maybe like 30% of America is hot and dry. Certainly not Lake Geneva, WI.

Yeah - my dad is a Boomer, and not remotely counter-cultural, but liked Tolkien and owned the 1968 U.S. paperback boxed set of the three LotR novels which, by the time he gave them to me as a child, were already so well-read by him as to be falling apart at the seams. Those books were very...

Tolkien was HUGE with hippies. Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” is from 1969, with lyrics about Lord of the Rings in it, and the college kids all knew what he was singing about.

This is literally my entire point. Characters in your game don’t ask each other what character class they are or talk about their Wisdom score. Why then is the rule term “Species” more of a problem?

1E had monks because karate and ninja stuff was a big craze in the U.S. in the 1970s. It had spaceships and laser guns because some people thought it was fun. It has orcs and halflings and rangers because of Tolkien and dinosaurs because of Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle and vampires because...

I can’t think of ANY past 5E adventure where any characters have ever done this, so, again, I’m failing to see the big, “anachronistic” issue that “species” is causing.

I don't understand why people make an issue of this one. Why is this assumed to be an in-game term? It's a rules term. People aren't saying "Character Class", "Background", "Feat", or "Ability Scores" in-game. Why are we assuming that everyone in the fiction is suddenly saying "Species"?

Yeah, I stand very much corrected on this issue. There's no way this could be anything but Dark Sun.