Recent content by Epic Meepo

My apologies. I thought we were talking about grammar. Forget I said anything.

Incidentally, grammatical gender is only related to breeding if one chooses to interpret it that way. A grammatical gender category is just a specific type of noun class. One can choose to think of any such grouping of nouns as a noun class with no (biological or sociological) gender connotations.

It probably isn't your intention, but when you say the entire 2024 5e community is united in supporting your setting assumptions and social contract, you start sounding like a gatekeeper who gets to decide who is and isn't a member of that community. Your statement implies that multiple people...

Point of order. WotC can't be "lagging behind the mentality of the editions." WotC defines the mentality of the current edition of D&D. If WotC publishes a setting intended for use with the current edition of the rules, then by definition, that setting reflects the mentality of the current edition.

If you're playing online (or passing notes at the table), the DM can send direct messages to players with higher passive Perception scores embellishing upon baseline room descriptions. If any "tells" are present, the DM can add them to baseline room descriptions or to embellishments on room...

I'd argue the benefits of not having a baseline setting will never be fully realized in D&D until the PHB is written with modular design in mind. The DMG includes rules modules that can be switched on and off in different campaigns, but the player-facing rules don't really expose new players to...

I'll be spending some time this weekend tweaking the image compression I used when making the Forgotten Reams Travel Guide. Hopefully, that means I'll have an updated pdf with sharper map labels sooner instead of later. In the meantime, as of this post, the Travel Guide has officially broken...

Out of curiosity, has anyone here ever offered extra background benefits to characters grounded in a particular setting? Maybe something like, "Humans from Amadeusburg get Musician as an additional bonus feat," or, "Every genasi raised by a genie starts with a magic item from Column A." If so...

Dragonborn have an extensive history in the Realms, as mentioned nearly twenty years ago in Dragons of Faerun. The problem is that newer Realms products completely ignore Bahamut, the Dragonfall War, Sammaster's Rage, the Sisterhood of Essembra, and the haven of the dragonborn in the town of...

I can't speak for every setting, but in the Forgotten Realms, aasimar, dragonborn, and tieflings have had strong ties to certain deities active throughout Faerun since 3e at the latest. They don't always have monocultural nations, but they do have organic, setting-cannon reasons to congregate at...

If nothing else, this thread has convinced me that if I ever end up recruiting strangers to play in a pick-up game I'm running, I'm going to audition both the players and their proposed characters before accepting anyone into the group.

Thanks for the kind words! I hope fans of all those different lands get some use out of the Travel Guide. (And fans of northern Faerun, too.) I tried to cast a wide a net with this book to showcase the diversity of characters and regions present in the Forgotten Realms setting.

Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, would disagree with your assertion. Genetic traits can be recessive, in which case they don't appear in offspring whose parents don't both possess the same recessive gene. (In that regard, aasimar and tieflings both model real-world genetics fairly well...

If we're talking D&D magic levels, I'm not sure travel is much more restricted in fantasy than in sci-fi. Portals and long-distance teleportation spells both appear in the latest core rules. Both of those options allow for FTL travel. And even if we assume portals and teleportation aren't...

You ninja'd me by about 30 seconds. I was also thinking this thread was going to be about using a circus troupe as a framing device. Which would be my advice to the OP. If the table wants to field a party that feels like a circus troupe, you could always lean into it and say they literally are...