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Training was really "wonderful" when the DM was successfully building dramatic tension in the important quest, so we can completely derail the game into a very meta discussion about when the party is going to take a hiatus so some party members can level up. "No, no. We should wait a bit...

At first glance, I though a bard was playing her magical animated violin with her rapier, to charm a snake. Which would be a great improvement on what the cover actually is IMNSHO.

As far as realism goes, anything with more punch than a very light crossbow requires Str to wield under non-optimal conditions. Thrown weapons requires Str to have speed and accuracy. Non-light crossbow requires Str to load in a hurry -- there is a big difference between fighting for your life...

The Dex-based Str-dump fighter, meleeist or range-ist or combo, is very practical in 5e, more so than previous editions. Besides damage dealing, Dex is often used via Saves, Skills, Init. So I am not really seeing a balance reasons to limit Str ranged options here, because pure Dex builds have...

Because the initial big splash sales of the new edition was expected to be sufficiently profitable that the business plan gained approval (and it keeps the brand alive for other potential projects). The open question is whether Hasbro will approve a non-shrinking headcount and what is the job...

If they are getting physically weaker over time, that is best modeled by reducing the Con score itself. AD&D had optional aging rules for this. There are certainly game systems where the PC acquires traits, both positive and negative and mixed, over time. But D&D is not one of those. The...

A number of those D&D products people are nostalgic for were created under the "leadership" of Lorraine Williams. Just saying.

With a measure as coarse as rarity, we should expect some items to be "worth" as much as 10X as others in the same category. If you want to do better than that, you probably want a "price guide" or moral equivalent.

The point at which your new campaign line is cannibalizing sales from your other campaign lines rather than bringing in more than miniscule additional sales, probably comes very quickly. Most DMs will have one or two (or zero) favorite campaign lines and ignore the rest. Optimism in the wake...

You say that as if it were a bad thing. Who did not love Snails?

Not necessarily. It is perfectly normal for a game publisher to sell to distributors at ballpark 30% of the cover price. Amazon is both a distributor and a retail outfit. They have room to decide to cover that discount as a business decision. In fact, that may well be the profit maximizing...

Agreed. My belief is that people would feel the "magic system" is incomplete and too limited if there are not some magic items that potentially break the system, even people who do not want the system to actually break. That was one reason that 4e did not win me over, because the 4e Core magic...

It could kinda sortof worked in 1e/2e where the XP tables were close to exponential. Thus a PC could very quickly trailing the other PCs by only a level. I do not know what the 5e XP charts look like off the top of my head but I still have two other big problems with the start small approach...

OD&D/AD&D has always been schizophrenic on what kind of "reality" it is trying to simulate. It was sold as a game where you can play Odysseus or Conan or Frodo or Merlin (or someone who might aspire to such renown, if they live long enough). But they have exactly nothing to do with the...

An organization of Paladins is not fundamentally weirder than an organization of wizards. Individuals in both classes were presumed to have some special spark that marked them as very different from the other 99% of humanity. As for Lancelot and Roland, they were basically Lawful Stupid. But...

With probabilities so flat, there is a high likelihood of outliers and large variances between PCs. Let me ask you, do you see any potential downsides to PCs with 15, 14, 14, 13, 10, 9 and 13, 12, 12, 10, 9, 8 playing in the same party?

There is a lot room for innovations along the lines you suggest, although I suspect it would probably be too fiddly for most people. For example, I think there is a strong flavor argument that all spell DCs should be based on Charisma, even if your "primary spellcasting stat" is something else.

IME skilled players who want to focus are going to win that rat race regardless of your stat generation method. The place the less minmax inclined players can compete easily is in breadth. That seems like a natural strength for point buy, where you can get a good spread with a small sacrifice...

Please do not take this personally, because it is not specifically about you. But I am really unimpressed with all these many stories of wonderful PCs with a low Charisma that helped define the start of their quirky adventuring career. Ain't got nothing to do with rolling, because THAT is...

Even in groups that are trying to be basically honest, there are the "official table rules" and then there are the "unofficial table rules". As a newbie player in one particular campaign, I rolled up my PC and was pretty happy when he came out with the rough equivalent of a 30 point buy...