Recent content by SlyFlourish

4e kinda did that but then they got greedy with other stuff and we still had insurmountable games to manage. Right now I'm running a 19th level game, soon to be 20th level, and it's been pretty manageable. I just give less of a crap about monsters and balance and other things and dish out a ton...

Many D&D-like RPGs have gone down to 10 levels. Shadowdark, 13th Age, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, and Daggerheart. Numenera goes to 6 (ish, you have sub-levels). So I think that's the common approach these days.

There are three high-level campaign paths in City of Arches, two of which go to 20th level.

Given how many people homebrew their games anyway and still don't reach high levels, I don't think this is a chicken and egg thing. I think most games don't reach high levels period. It's not because there aren't published high-level adventures (and there are a lot of them from other...

Vecna Eve of Ruin is high level but I don't hear a lot of people talking about it.

How they implemented backgrounds is one of the big failings of D&D 2024. Luckily, its a very easy fix by defaulting to the "Backgrounds and Species from Older Books" guideline on page 38 of the PHB, which lets you choose your own ability modifiers and origin feat. It speeds things up even...

For ten years I struggled a lot with this stuff and then Doom points from Tales of the Valiant came out. I renamed them "dreadful blessings" in my game so I could flavor them as things like "Blessings of the Nameless King" or "Blessings of Ibraxus" or whatever. I replace Legendary Resistance...

It's worth noting that Jason Tondro was the lead designer and he's been writing RPG stuff for a while. He was at Paizo before he was at WOTC.

It's really just my notes for the two shows I'm going to be on.

It's funny, I was just looking at sections of the new FR Heroes book's Guide to the Realms, where there are more than one instance of "this forest is filled with dangerous monsters". Many of them are good actionable descriptions but some are too vague for my liking. All the rest of what you...

This is one of the ideas that got me all fired up in this thread. I don't think I heard it here but in other threads and other conversations I heard: "I want a new D&D where they get rid of ability scores and bonuses and make it class-less and level-less" and I just shake my head. It's like...

On the topic of innovation, it was interesting to see that the new D&D 2024 Forgotten Realms Adventures book has a big focus on bastions and renown. You can decide for yourselves if you think either of those are truly innovative or if you like them at all, but WOTC is clearly focusing on that...

Having spent time with D&D before the delve format, than with the delve format at the end of 3e and throughout 4e, and now without it again, here's my observation. There was a time where I really felt like D&D was a combat game and the more they could to do reinforce and streamline that aspect...

I wouldn't get them if I wasn't planning to run games in the Forgotten Realms. You can always find stuff to steal for your home game but I don't know that there's a lot of value here. The work you'd need to do to reskin a lot of this stuff into a homebrew campaign is a lot more than turning FR...

Access to the maps is a good point. I'll add that in.