Recent content by Paul Farquhar

EN World is worth reading because it is open and honest about its commercial role as a shop window, plus it carries advertising. It doesn’t pretend to be free.

Which proves the point. In 1st and 2nd edition magic items were not incorporated into the rules in any kind of mathematical fashion. What you found is what you got. Trying to figure it into the game mechanics was very much a 3rd edition thing. 5e is like the earlier editions in that they are for...

So obviously it looked like 3e if you hadn’t bothered to read the rules! It plays just like 1st edition if you have only read those rules as well.

Speaking as someone with 3e experience, you are very wrong. 3e is rules and jargon heavy, combat is incredibly slow, and roleplaying rather squeezed out by focus on min maxing builds. It’s a game of build optimisation. 5e is much loser, flexible, free of jargon and combat less slow, leaving more...

When Perkins described 5e as the successor to 2e he didn’t mean it was all that similar to 2e, any more than 3e is similar to 2e. He meant that 5e ignored a lot of the evolution through 3e and 4e and took the game in a different direction.

That wasn’t really an issue in 1st edition, since paladins didn’t get their spells til level 9, and DL1 was 4-7. A at least one of the Solannic Knight orders got cleric spells in any case. Mostly it was to sell books. There where alternative versions of wizards and clerics in that book too, even...

Yes they were. Paladins were added to the game in the 1st edition AD&D PHB in 1978, Solomnic Knights (as a class) were added in Dragonlance Adventures (1987). Soth appeared before then (around 85), but with a Deathknight monster stat block. I think they may have started to notice that the...

Insufficient cynicism makes people vulnerable to manipulation by influencers, politicians, fraudsters, cults etc. It concerns me that people are so critical of cynicism. It's like vaccine denial.

Not just me then! A lot of it was recycled by Durlag's Tower in BG1 DLC.

1st edition was a toolkit. It was designed to be heavily modded to suit individual tables. Hence the word "advanced" in the title.

I’ve watched first two episodes of Shadow Lord. It’s another genre pastiche - in this case film noir.

Asajj Ventress while in full night sister mode.

It’s not a particularly powerful in the hands of the PCs though, since monsters rarely get resurrected. And as pointed out, D&D is asymmetric. NPCs don’t get the same stuff. As for horrific - great, makes for a good story. It’s based on Stormbringer. Which Elric has from early on in his...

Both apply, but in D&D terms, the line is traced back to the anti-paladin in the 1st edition and blackguard prestige class in 3rd, to oathbreaker in 5.0. And WoW took it from D&D. But WoW is starting to fall off the pop culture radar now, with BG3 better known. And the best known was a Jedi...

Sure. It's also bad for anyone who doesn't hit people with weapons. And the lich is a mechanically bad choice for anyone, but particularly for non-casters, since it's strongest ability restores spell slots. Poster boy Soth wasn't a paladin. Nothing forces fighters to have a bad charisma (14...