Recent content by Shiroiken

There's tons of really good, if niche, TTRPGs out there. While I love 5E, and feel it's the best version of D&D, I still don't think it's the best overall. However, I'm playing a weekly 5E game and haven't played any of those other games in years. D&D is a monolith, and no matter how well...

Something that was suggested to me that I thought was crazy, was to organize it by creature type. While it seems nuts, I feel like it would actually work really well. You could break it up by chapter, with an introduction going into the description of each type. It would help the OP's situation...

The only time I was on the D&D forums was during the D&D Next Playtest. I don't know if that was Gleemax or not, but it was really toxic during the playtest. Everyone got super divided on different things (damage on a miss and martial healing being the biggest), and if you disagreed with...

Are they as bad as the old WotC forums?

I've allowed PCs to carry each other, both with and without flight as part of the equation. Earlier editions used to limit how much a creature could carry and still fly, but 5E doesn't have anything like that. Because I like to have flying monsters periodically grapple and try to fly off with...

The removal of PAM's reactive strike and Sentinel's halt combo was almost certainly intentional, and a good thing IMO. The change to the disengage action is interesting and I wonder if it was intentionally changed to not work with reach weapons. Personally, I could see changing the wording to...

As someone about to DM a campaign with an illusionist PC, I've been thinking a lot about how to manage illusions. My general view has always been that in a world of magic, most creatures aren't going to assume anything is an illusion without cause. This makes illusions strong, since this...

I technically didn't start with D&D... because my brother wouldn't let me play. So I made up my own game based on what I'd remembered from the 1E PHB. It didn't have the rules of how to play in it, so the game wasn't very good. My friends didn't mind, and we had fun for a few weeks until my...

RAI becomes tricky, because even the official rules guru for 2014 was wrong about how Passive Perception worked. He made the mistake of carrying over the way it worked in 4E, when the rules were written completely differently. One could argue that as the rules guru his interpretation was correct...

Passive Scores are used when you don't want to reveal information by calling for a check. You still have to take the Search Action to use Perception, per the PHB. I've deiced to edit to go into more detail and show my work. In the PHB, under actions, it talks about doing anything outside of...

Cool. As someone who runs old adventure's, I love this idea. Quick clarification: the characters that don't use the Search Action and succeed on the check would be surprised and have disadvantage on initiative. If no one succeeds at this, then the frogs have advantage as well (per the...

This is where people forget the DMG. In Chapter 1, under Players Exploiting the Rules, it specifically calls out that the rules rely on Good Faith Interpretation. I'd say at least 90% of people's issues can be resolved by recalling that simple principle. In this particular case, if the fear...

Pregen characters are for tournament style environments: i.e.one shots/single adventures. This allows the DM to customize them to fit the needs of the adventure, such as making sure they have a specific spell or ability available, and story reasons to be involved/invested. However, anything that...

This is exactly why I won't allow players to just pick their items. When I started Vecna: Eve of Ruin at 10th level, I rolled up the treasure the characters would have gained over those levels, with a few alternatives for class specific items. The players felt that is was actually more enjoyable...

Our group used Skype for years, but then switched over to Discord. I wasn't thrilled with the change, but eventually got used to it. If you use Roll20, I know there's a voice feature option, but we've never used it.