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Yeah, that's Tolkien's ethos alright. One part rejection of the modern industrial world and the horrors of World War I, one part a particular line of Catholic thought holding that the world was perfect at the beginning in the Garden of Eden and it's been all downhill since. For better or for...

That's definitely one way to do it. I've previously suggested that a generic Fireball or Magic Missile is what the upstart Wizard's Guild teaches, as part of their effort to standardize and codify the arcane curriculum for mass distribution. Meanwhile it's the traditionalists, the lone wizards...

Brackett is kind of a jump to the side, being a pillar of the Planetary Romance genre. Planetary Romance being the most direct descendent of works like John Carter of Mars and Flash Gordan, where you're using tropes and characters that got popularized by the mainline fantasy genre, but it's all...

The urge for low magic that doesn't meaningfully disrupt the pseudo-medieval setting is a mix of two things, IMO. One is Tolkien and his idealized pastoral gentry, and the other is the Hollywood mishmash of Arthurian epics and its near cousins of Robin Hood and Ivanhoe and the rest. If you want...

I was an avid World of Warcraft player for over a decade. What I learned in that time is that most "leaks" are clickbait spun by trolls to prey on the hopes or fears of the audience. They look reasonable because they chew up everyone's best speculation and spit it back at you. And the few leaks...

It's complicated, because in older editions while the mindless undead were less innately evil, the act of creating them was more so. In AD&D 2e the spell Animate Dead had a clause at the end stating "Casting this spell is not a good act, and only evil priests use it frequently." In D&D 3e...

I'm all for the shift to treating orcs and goblins as real people and not ethnic stereotypes. I see plenty of room for ghosts and ancestor spirits to be benevolent (or at least non-malevolent) post-death entities. But the undead, at least as defined by official game lore, are up there with...

Yes, that is certainly a take you obviously have.

You might as well ask why dragons hoard treasure or mind flayers eat brains. Because that's how the lore defines them and those are the narrative roles they fulfill. Is it possible to re-write the lore so that undeath is an ascended state, an immortality earned after a life of struggle where...

You're not wrong, and that's why reborn aren't an issue. It's the people asking for more than the reborn gets that set off warning signs for me.

Because people are still going to want to remove all the things that make undead unsuitable for a PC, which is to say all the big negatives like their special vulnerabilities and their all consuming hatred for the living. And If you cut out the negatives while leaving all the "signature undead...

Reborn are 80% a PC zombie option, if you choose to flavor them that way. They've just got less decay and the humanoid type because, as you say, the undead creature type has all sorts of mechanical issues. Not just healing and Raise Dead, but being vulnerable to stuff like Smite Evil and Turn...

Undead from birth is a contradiction. Two of the fundamental traits of the undead is that they are the remnants of formerly living creatures, reanimated by negative energy, and that they don't produce new life. It's fairly definitional. That being the case, rather than a creature that's born...

I've seen both methods. One where the DM calls for blind saves with no build up, and then narrates events based on the success or failure. The other where the DM sets up what are basically mini-cliffhangers, and then adds retroactive embellishments to suit whatever the result is. And this isn't...

Yes. I got my physical copy a month ago and the PDF back in March. But I'll be honest. The revelations about just how toxic the creative culture at Blizzard was, and the painful cutting of my connections to Warcraft after over a decade, soured me on everything associated with it so much that I...

Pretty much. Clickbait rumormongering kicked up enough FUD that WotC felt they had to issue an official statement. But because it had to get rushed out early the details are still thin, so people inclined to look at it in the worst light are free to continue to do so. What we know for sure is...

Looks like chatter on this topic has been loud enough that we've got an official statement on it. I don't know enough about the business side to parse everything, but some shots at Pathfinder with the royalty program, maybe? Or has PF2e diverged enough that it's clear of the OGL at this point?

Assuming the result will be the same assumes they have neither the ability or the intention of producing a substantially different work. I would argue the facts suggest otherwise on both points. It's readily apparent that WotC's design philosophy has shifted substantially over the last 10 years...

While I am a mere user, I've seen enough struggles with complex code bases over the years that I never assume it's quick and easy to fix. A decade with World of Warcraft rubbed my nose in enough of them. I remember the one time, they made a minor change in the tank threat multiplier. That minor...

If you read the flavor text, it can be a bit more general than that. The Cleric class starts off by saying, "Clerics draw power from the realms of the gods and harness it to work miracles. Blessed by a deity, a pantheon, or another immortal entity, a Cleric can reach out to the divine magic of...