Recent content by I'm A Banana

A new MMO would be an insane thing to do in The Year Of 2025. But, given this is a Business Talk, I'm guessing that they are absolutely thinking of some kind of live game or something that fans can pay $20-30/month for in perpetuity since subscription models are really great money factories...

I like the Radiant Citadel civs so much more than Kara-Tur. But, there is some uniquely Kara-Tur, old-school D&D stuff that could use an update. Hengeyokai are mechanically light enough and varied enough that I wouldn't mind if they were exported form Kara-Tur into D&D more broadly, honestly...

Hengeyokai are probably the closest I know of historically, but there's not an official 5e version (likely because it's tethered to Oriental Adventures and WotC wants to touch that nest of wasps even less than they want to touch Dark Sun, I guess!). RE: Dragonborn as Kobolds: One of the big...

OK! Point-by-point... I'm in. Classes border on over-designed. How might you work archetypes/subclasses in here? Also, what's stopping you from going even further in reducing class size? Like, if we had 10 levels of play, but one class per tier. So, like, you'd be a Warrior from level 1-4...

I'm running through some of them now. After using The Lost City, I'm expanding the "Zargon Plot" using some of the guideance in 3e's Elder Evils, which provides some seeds for a campaign that revolves around Zargon's rise. I'm using that as the framing device for the other adventures, rather...

I'm not sure I'd agree that 4e's classes were diegetic (4e's systems were so decoupled from narrative that it's really hard to see the story gameplay even in it's very story-focused content, which there wasn't an insignificant amount of!). I would also probably argue that certain AD&D classes...

Mostly I just mean that the exact number of classes has varied over the years. Every edition has become a bit looser on new classes as in the edition time went on, but new classes have typically been significant events in D&D. I think subclasses are like kits or prestige classes: a half-step...

FWIW, I think classes are more effective at their role in the game when they ARE diegetic. The more you can focus a class on a specific story, the more powerful a tool it is to help define your character, and the more likely it can help answer the core question of "what does my character do?"...

How big does the difference need to be? Like, Paladins and Rangers and Barbarians are just Fighters if you squint. Druids are just clerics. Clerics are mostly a variant wizard. Etc. Etc. Etc. When it comes to class-based design, you are always somewhere on the Splitter/Joiner axis. The more...

Personally, I think a lot of D&D's success can be attributed to doing a lot of different kinds of games well enough that it's fine. That people who like tracking ammo and people who just want narrative drama can both play the same game and enjoy time together at the same table. Maybe neither one...

The aesthetic did change, and that's what I was talking about. The OP might be mistaken about the historical accuracy of D&D, but that mistake doesn't invalidate the perception of change they're talking about. It's not historical accuracy, but it's not nothing, either. D&D today is OK with...

I've played a Ravnica game that was pretty successful. The party consisted of 3 members of Selesnya (a paladin, a wizard, and a cleric), one Boros bro (a sorcerer), one of the Izzet League (an artificer), and my character, a loxodon warlock from the Orzhov (his hook was: "What if the IMF + the...

I am quick to bust out the Abe Simpson quote. Change frequently surprises people, even though it's inevitable. Every time one of my millennial parent friends gripes about Skibidi Toilet or Labubus, it's all just "We're 40 years old, of course this all seems dumb to us, embrace your cringe...

One of the interesting things about how D&D grew was that it grew out of wargames, where historical accuracy matters quite a bit more. Part of the enjoyment of a wargame is in exploring military history, and I think a lot of early D&D inherited this -- see the list of polearms, for example. 1e's...

Alignment as a restrictive rule that one must obey (as originally conceived) is borked. It was the GM's job to police your behavior, penalize you for playing out of character, and, honestly, the whole system was more than a little evocative of some racist genetic determinism nonsense. Alignment...