Recent content by jmartkdr2

I used to hang out with a guy who was working on his PhD on English. He made a distinction between "stories" and "narratives." A narrative is a set of events happening to people and/or characters presented in a medium. Me telling an anecdote, a novel, a history text, a ttrpg session, a movie...

Found a paper on mental subtraction vs addition: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0732312301000608 It's just harder for people to do "10-8" than "8+2" in their heads.

Shadowcaster doesn’t make sense as an entire class in 5e; Shadow Sorcerer captures the flavor almost perfectly and warlocks captures the mechanical feel pretty darn well. “A proper shadow warlock” is about all you can ask for and hexblade is already halfway there. Which is broadly true of...

“It probably won’t happen” isn’t much comfort when it happens.

My personal experience has been that it’s very frustrating at low levels if one of the bad results come up. IE a tpk from a fireball centered on a party of level 2 pcs.

The problem is when someone else at the table doesn’t want that level of randomness.

The whip paladin is one of the best builds for a paladin in 5e. I have mixed feelings about this. Overall, though it's just a choice they made back in AD&D days to include stuff that looks cool but isn't necessarily practical, like whips, tridents, etc. (Actually tridents are pretty good spears...

Definitely want to level-lock those, although what level depends a lot on the edition. At this point it's more of a feat tax for humans and halflings.

The charm one shouuld probably make the user beautiful (after all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder) and grant an always-on charm effect. Give him/her lots of minions and ways to command them, but only give the eye-user themselves a cantrip-tier psychic blast. In this case I'd probably put...

Invocation-like features that grant resourceless use of low-levelspells and similar abilities. I assure you, at-will detect magic will not break your game.

And of course the other direction to go, rather than removing scores or greatly reducing their impact, is to put a lot of effort into balancing them and making sure everyone has ways to use all of them. For example, what if certain schools of magic required specific ability scores to master...

If we’re going that route I think we should remove ability mods from saves as well. Leaving them in retains most of the issues with some scores being far more important than others. Of course the question then becomes do we go with three saves or five?

I really miss the creativity of late 3.5. The Tomes of Magic and Battle, Incarnum, the Races of N series. Just tons of cool stuff. I think you could do a pretty good yet playable Binder as a Warlock Patron - you just pick a new vestige each day and it comes with set of Patron features, so you...

Need? Maybe two: a go-to cantrip and an alternate if that damage type won't work (resist, immune, etc.) That's the bare minimum, although if your main does a rarely resisted damage type like force you can get away with just that.

I'd propose a slight tweak: Implements work like weapons: they have a damage die, proficiency (possibly by category), properties, masteries, etc. They'd do cantrip damage as a baseline, with different classes/feats/etc allowing different kinds of additional benefits. You hold them in your...