Recent content by Staffan

I liked the nomadic halflings of 3e, particularly when drawn a little bit farther with the dino-riders of Eberron. That's a way better niche for them than hobbit, and one of the things I disliked most about 5e was the return of the hobbit as the default halfling (that, and the bit about some...

My understanding is that there were plans for Planescape that involved letting the factions back into Sigil, but the setting got canceled before getting that far. Another setting that's gotten a lot of flak for changes wrought by metaplot is Dark Sun. Personally, I think the revised Dark Sun...

IMO, this removes one of the main drawbacks of being a defiler: the lack of subtlety. A defiler should be more powerful magically than an equal-level preserver, but it's super obvious when they cast spells because there's a great big black circle around them. Ideally, defiling should be an...

While it's not particularly likely to happen with any of the "upcoming three", one thing I'd love to see would be a fire-and-forget setting that's basically designed to run a single campaign which then irreparably changes the nature of that setting. Original Dragonlance would sort of fit with...

If you go by the published backstory, psionics predate arcane magic on Athas by millennia. The backstory goes something like this: Distant past: the Blue Age. The world is mostly covered in water, the sun is blue, and the only intelligent species are halflings (and maybe thri-kreen). The...

The basic state of invisibility is that your foes can tell roughly where you are (which square), but you have total concealment so they attack with disadvantage and you attack with advantage. The easiest way to think of it is like a "predator" effect, though you can also think of it as the sound...

Yeah, I did a thought (heh) experiment a while ago about using the sorcerer chassis for a psion, and I came to the conclusion that while it would suffice for a psion, I don't think there is enough psi-like stuff in the PHB spell lists to make a class with plenty of breadth. But you could...

The original Dark Sun box consisted of: Rules book: 96 pages covering new/modified races and classes, new proficiencies, what monsters from then-published materials were appropriate, changes to magic, and assorted other rules stuff. The Wanderer's Journal: Another 96 pages of mostly "fluff"...

This would be ideal. Or maybe not exactly the Cluster (as I recall there were some iffy parts of it), but something like it.

Original Spelljammer had various native cultures on Al-Toril and Krynn be actively involved with spelljamming, to the point where those cultures had distinct spelljamming vessels (IIRC, those were the tinker gnomes of course, as well as Shou Lung, Wa, and Thay). I also distinctly remember one of...

I pretty much agree with this. "Classic" Spelljammer suffered from focusing on two things at once: "Connective tissue" between the Big Three settings at the time: Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and Dragonlance. Weird effin' space shenanigans. The issue is that the first of those is, um, bad. Most...

Exactly this. The best aspect of Eberronian religion is that it is primarily about people. The gods don't directly mess around with the world or even directly talk to their worshipers, so things have to be taken more on, well, faith. So you don't get nonsense like "Cyric has created a book that...

Again, six saves were not a consequence of wanting to avoid dump stats. They are a consequence of wanting everything to be an ability check. Traditional fire-and-forget Vancian casting can go die in a fire. I have played D&D since 1990ish, and that's one mechanic I have never liked. 5e...

The reasoning is pretty simple: they wanted to make ability scores central to the system. The core mechanic of 5e is pretty simple: if you want to do something, roll 1d20 and add an ability score modifier. If it is something in which you are proficient, also add your proficiency bonus. So, if...

The thing with on-boarding is that what you want from a teaching manual is very different from what you want from a reference manual. When I'm playing D&D or Pathfinder, what I want the rules to do is to quickly tell me "what does X do?". How much damage does a fireball do? What does the...