Recent content by jmartkdr2

The more common pushback on B/X race-as-class isn’t the existence of limitations but the limitations not making sense from a worldbuilding perspective. Moridin has no clerics? No halfling has ever dabbled in magic? All elves have the same balance of magic and swordplay - but Wood Elves never...

I think the best way to have your cake and eat it too is to have different classes for each race: humans are fighters, clerics, rogues, wizards or monks, but elves are bladesingers, rangers, high mages or... clerics of elven gods (each god gets their own class though.) [Elves were one of the...

And for an elf - do they remember where they were when the heard Archduke Ferdinand was assasinated?

I realized I could make dragonborn and kolbolds two subraces of the same species, but at that point I'm feel like it's more "taxonomy shenanigans to fit an arbitrary limit" than an honest attempt at the question.

I struggled a bit with this one: Obviously the most popular species need to be there: 1. Human 2. Elf 3. Dragonborn 4. Tiefling To skirt the rules a bit, I'll include half-elves as a subrace of elves, and make Tiefling a subrace of Planetouched - which lets me squeeze in Aasimar as a core...

The most recent data seems to be 2023, which had dragonborn in third place. I would need some real evidence to believe they’ve dropped below fourth.

Given that dragonborn score very well in broader surveys, I think this says more about ENWorlders than it does about DnD players.

And then when new players join, they're spoon-fed everything regardless of whether they need it (as new players, they probably don't know how much they want to be spoon-fed anyways, so they don't object because they don't know better) and develop the habit of waiting for the dm to spoon-feed...

And? Like don't play with unreasonable players, don't play with controlling dms. It's not rocket surgery. If you meet a player who won't compromise, move on. If you have such an issue with every player - it might be you.

If you want to keep slots at all levels while giving away free upcasts, you're going to need to find a way to make running out of spells much more common or just tell your players not to play non-full-casters. Wizards are already considered the strongest class in 5e*, with the only real...

Another thing I've noticed: when discussing player agency and dm agency on fora, we tend to try to find a "just" answer that applies in all but extreme scenarios and respects absolute values and rights and so on. In real life, in 99% of cases, both the player and dm have at least moderate...

I think this is where the pushback is coming from you not liking the "leader role" in 4e - 4e "leaders" generally only gave other players free stuff, they never forced you to use your actions in certain ways. They might change circumstances which could change what options you might choose - but...

And to realize as a dm that if no one want to play in your game, that's on you to deal with.

Phase spider are the first thing that comes to mind when I think of ethereal monsters and they're monstrosities. I guess the answer is "not according to the game rules" though of course you can always homebrew.

Incidentally - Daggerheart fixes this but Pathfinder 2e does not.