Recent content by Parmandur

It's not exactly Dune, but I really enjoyed it as a fun pulpy yarn. I thought it was the best game tie-in novel I have ever read, which is damning with faint praise I guess.

I know some book purists are less than fond of Maury Chaykin's performance in the early Aughts TV show, but his curmedveonly delivery is extremely nostalgic for me.

Be that as it may, in 5E the first two Levels have always been quick intro Levels, with Level 3 where things come fully online. And I have never, ever seen anyone not begin RPing their 3rd Level Subclass choice from Level 1, for any Class. That is is just how it works, and the 2024 changes...

Who said anything about Level 20...? Getting to Level 3 takes two whole sessions if you are counting XP. Planning two sessions ahead isn't all that weird, and frankly it seems a strange idea that a Wizard or Druid would discover what tradition they belong to before Session 3 just as much as...

Sure, I get that. Nevertheless, the books do suggest that, which implies a lot about how much the designers care about flavor not being fully online until Level 3.

Interesting idea. The Stormlight Archives RPG uses a generally fairly 5E style d20 system, but one big difference that I think could be adapted to 5E is that Advantage/Disadvantage do stack...But only for different dice. So you roll damage dice or whatnot alongside the d20, and you can have...

I mean, if you look at D&D Beyond or Baldur's Gate 3 stats, Humans & Elves (and Half-Elves) totally dominate play.

So, here is the thing about this discourse that I find weird: in big literary Fantasy hits of recent years, they tend to be more restrictive than Tolkien was (the Stormlight Archives has RPG has two playable Species, the Mistborn RPG will have three, and Sanderson is hardly unusual in this)...

Yeah, right now the UA tealeaves suggest three possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive: something Ravenloft, something Dark Sun, and something on the scale of Xanathar's and Tasha's. They already tested as many PC options between May 2025 and now as they did between May 2019 and May...

I worked in e-commerce for a large company for a while that had a fair number of Canadian customers...it's not fun, and honestly for a given American corporation the motive to really understand it is unfortunately low.

Well, he is speaking from experience, because he got hit with non-book tarriffs when he bought the Forgotten Realms books direct from WotC in Canada.

It would fit alongside Xanathar and Tasha well enough.

Yeah, the motivation seems to have been to stop Amazon's ability to undermine other retailers, now that WotC is "other retsilers" themselves. Easier said than done...

Well, the UA provided tests for both the Van Richten's Subclasses, I imagine we would see the Dark Gifts reimagined as Backgrounds, revisions of the Species, but mostly DM stuff like Monsters, Bastions, and Campaign Frames.

Yeah, a Forge of the Artificer style booster to Van Richten's Guide would not be Barovia centric.