Recent content by Xetheral

Now I really want to include in my game a vampire nicknamed "Bubbles" who is trapped in a flooded, spinning torroid in some kind of horrid menagerie. (In Mist form they'd be immune to the acid damage from submersion, and even though in Mist form they can't enter water, nothing stops confining a...

I entirely agree. :) Fortunately I don't think anyone is quibbling on that point. I had just misremembered the phrasing of the Specifc-Beats-General rule, and as a result hedged where I didn't need to. The actual phrasing makes the textual argument in favor of vampires being able to shift out of...

Good point. The Specifc-Beats-General rule on PHB 7 talks about "rules", rather than about "abilities" like I'd suggested. So it's entirely possible to use that prescribed interpretative principle to resolve a contradiction that appears within the text of a single ability. I don't think that...

The Shapechanger ability states: "If the vampire isn't in sunlight or running water, it can use its action to polymorph into a Tiny bat or a Medium cloud of mist, or back into its true form." (Emphasis added.) This explicit statement that the Vampire can turn back as an action while in mist...

I don't follow your response. My example was: As an example, consider a murder mystery where the identity of the killer isn't hard to determine with the party's resources, but (1) the question about whether it was murder or self-defense doesn't have an objective answer, (2) there are competing...

There are (at least) two different approaches to this type of campaign that avoid it ending up like an MMO. The first was already mentioned upthread: the PCs comes with their own built-in motivations that will give them purpose and direction, either throughout the campaign or simply long enough...

I think it doesn't work, and the only reason it looks like it might is because of the unusual conjugation of the verb "cast". To my knowledge, there are no examples in English where a single instance of a verb can simultaneously have multiple tenses, even when the conjugations are identical...

How much did you fail the save by? Unless it was by exactly 1, having a 9 CHA instead of a 10 didn't cost you. Ignoring your specific roll and looking at it in the abstract, even if you'd had a 20 CHA your saving throw would have only been 6 points higher. That means that there was at most only...

I agree that contributes, though I'd emphasize it's one cause among many. I just wanted to point out that the challenge of combat comes from different places at different tables, and those differences inevitably lead to different experiences of the martial/caster divide. Quite possibly! A lot...

I of course agree with you on what the mechanics of to-hit rolls and skills checks are. I don't agree with you, however, that combat and skills necessarily "boil down" to application of those mechanics. Combat in 5e can be about trying to attack and deplete the enemy's HP before they deplete...

I think this is a good example of why the martial/caster debate is so intractable. If armed combat and skill use at one table "boils down" to the ability to roll high enough on a die, but at another table armed combat and skill use "boils down" to something else (e.g. the players' in-combat IC...

Personally, I get additional value out of building NPCs consistent with the PC rules (even if not to the same level of granularity) because I run sandbox and semi-sandbox games where encounters are not designed to be level-appropriate. Accordingly, I need to be able to telegraph the threat posed...

First, I disagree with your claim. Unless your definition of "social specialists" is confined to 13th level characters with expertise (11th level for Rogues), the variance in a d20 roll is too large to "almost never fail" on even DC 20 ("Hard") checks. Second, even assuming your claim is true...

The surest path to success for the players is to change the situation that required a roll so that they automatically succeed instead of having to roll. The character best able to change the situation to produce an automatic success won't necessarily be the character with the highest bonus. If...

I agree. Personally I'd prefer it if there was a wider variety of ways to make a fighter who can contribute meaningfully outside of combat. But it's not important to me whether that wider selection comes in the form of fighter class abilities or simply providing more options for everyone.