Recent content by EzekielRaiden

Do you disagree that D&D is and has been presented as, played as, and seen as a teamwork-based game for, at the very least, the entirety of the new millennium thus far?

Perhaps so. Personally, I just...naturally take a detail-oriented approach and attempt to respond to claims as they are made. When possible, I strive to capture the whole of each point, and when I fail to do so, I attempt to make up for it. Then... Shouldn't the design be to make basic...

This would seem, to me, to be just a more robust, detailed way of saying what I had said. But perhaps I should present that as a question: If you realized, on session 3, that your players have simply moved in different directions and speeds compared to your expectations, would you truly try to...

Which I just...don't understand. D&D is a team game. It has been since at least 2e, probably earlier. The rules are not designed for, as some on here term it, "character vs character" combat. The vast majority of groups do not particularly well-tolerate that particular kind of conflict...

My notion, at least when I formulated the answer, was that the number of sessions is 100% completely irrelevant for someone who gives that answer. The one, and only, consideration--for someone who gives that answer--is the XP total, and nothing else about how the XP was acquired matters. If it...

I am given to understand that a typical session for nearly all people who play is no more than 5 hours and no less than 2 hours, typically 3-4, with some wiggle room (e.g. if you end on a nice note at 3:45, you're not going to force 15 more minutes of play; if you are 90% done with a combat...

If we were about to hit 2016, I could absolutely buy this. The system has been out for over a decade. 5.5e--so-called "D&D 5e (2024)"--isn't so different from 5.0, "D&D 5e (2014)", that we are talking about people being terribly unfamiliar with the system, unaware of what could possibly be...

Er...no? If something is objectively, unequivocally insanely good ("absolutely stunning"), such that you get lots of gameplay value out of it, players are GOING to do that thing. That's....literally the thing behind the well-known "players will optimize the fun out of your game" maxim. Because...

I will agree not to continue engaging with you on this. Beyond this post, I won't respond to you further in the thread, unless you explicitly invite otherwise.

I would offer a slight correction: This "have to be top-tier" thing only applies in one direction, namely, the spellcaster picking up martial ability. Even then, different implementations handle it differently. The Blade Warlock basically has to invest half their character resources into it, a...

And yet, in 4e, the exact opposite was true. Ruthless personal optimization was significantly less efficient than teamwork and team optimization--to the point that there were several well-known team-synergy strategies, such as the Radiant Mafia. If players aren't willing to do it, maybe one...

And I just completely do not see that, at all, to even the tiniest degree. Show me the numbers, then I'll buy it.

Warning: Vote carefully, you can't change it later! Also, while this is categorized as "D&D 5e (2024)", it applies to both versions of 5e. I can't do "5e general" unfortunately. ((EDIT: Since session length has been a bugaboo, presume roughly once-a-week sessions of roughly four hours apiece...

6th level in 4e (campaign ended because GM had massive IRL family disaster to address) 11th level in 5e (LMoP/PaB; I know it was 11th because I got to use eyebite all of one time, and it was mostly useless because my targets were all immune to nearly all of its effects) Would be higher, but the...

Correct: they dissected the Warlord, divided it into tiny pieces, and then threw those pieces into the (four, separate) Fighter, Rogue, Bard, and Monk blenders. In other words, pretty much the exact opposite of what Mearls claimed. It isn't that the Warlord was a mix of Bard and Fighter. It was...