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In general, murdering the guy in the door way is much easier than trying to wrestling your way past him. It just has worse social consequences. If it is too difficult to turn the fellow blocking the doorway into a corpse, it's definitely too difficult to move him aside / move past him. But...

Morgan's Maxim from Poe's Law? Marty Lund

You can get the +2 damage bonus if you are "wielding a melee weapon in one hand and no other weapons" (PHB 72). That's fine with a longsword, but it means you aren't wielding the weapon in two hands, so you use the base damage, not the parenthetical damage entry next to the Versatile property...

I'll happily continue to scorn Drizzt for being used as a one-man-army protagonist in every dang era after every godslaying upheaval and world reboot. I'm also happy to scorn the publishing decisions that continue to milk the character at every opportunity, creating that situation. AND I'll hate...

I guess it all depends on how you want to role-play it. If you actually want to implement a culturally conscious samurai in role-playing your fighter then you need to be able to handle a horse and fight from horseback at range and close combat. Your katana has ceremonial significance and is...

My complaint is that the Scimitar and the Saber are lumped together. The Scimitar should be 1d8 Finesse slashing. The Saber should be 1d6 Finesse, Light Slashing, but Drizzt Ruins Everything. Marty Lund

The problem isn't the Max or the Mean, it is the floor. The problem with reducing the damage dice and adding the raw modifier (turning Firebolt into some sort of arcane Shortbow) is that it scales poorly: 1d6 + 3 is fine; 2d6 + 4 is poor; 3d6 + 5 is just sad; 4d6 + 5 ... are you even trying...

The only real annoying part about being a low-level wizard is that your Cantrips don't add your Intelligence Modifier to your damage. Your damage floor with the blasted things is just terrible. Marty Lund

Remember, "petting the dog," does not disqualify someone from being an immoral monster. Plenty of serial killers, rapists, and the like act as model parents and neighbors - or at least "normal" people in their communities. They can even sincerely believe they love and help the people that...

There's always the self-directed existential crisis too. I mean, in a world where there are Evil and Good (and apparently Neutral, for whatever that's worth) "gods" of equal stature, how to you decide which divine will (if any) is correct? Yes, Good and Evil are metaphysical forces that persist...

Happy with mine for the cost, especially with the $3 off code from the Wizards site. I basically paid for a T-Shirt and got extra swag. I'm thrilled with the Princess Bride playing cards especially, and I could always use a spare flash drive. Marty Lund

That's kind of my point - the pirate chest full of coins model is not only misrepresented by Hollywood, it's also anachronistic for most fantasy settings leaning to the middle ages rather than the age of sail. As to ransom, a knight's ransom is really still transactional. If we're talking...

And that's the other point that gets missed if we slavishly adhere to the "Hollywood pirate chest" model of coinage - non-transaction denominations of money (ransoms, hordes, tribute, etc.) were not handled in precious metal coins in most eras (middle ages, classical, and ancient, anyway). They...

The Solidus is small, and justifiably so. Gold is dense. Most people really have no idea how heavy gold is compared to copper and silver, or how heavy those are compared to, say, rocks. A pound of gold takes up little more than half the space of a golf ball. The real problem is the Pirate...

They should have because it is closer to the classical / middle-ages norm and more convenient. The real-world "Gold Piece" standard of the middle ages was the Roman Solidus, produced by the Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire in modern parlance) in Constantinople. The Solidus originates as a coin of...

Every day there are thousands of people in the United States who routinely visit sick and terminally ill kids and adults in hospitals to pray with them. You really think anyone, in this day in age, is going to publish an article positing that there might be a pattern to how a handful of people...

Yes, I think Lesser Restoration is the most important option on the table. If I had to pick a suit of cantrips, though, I'd go with Spare the Dying, Minor Illusion, and Mending Marty Lund

The very thought of getting a revised d20 modern system running on the 5E chassis makes me drool. Seriously. Please. Make this a thing. I'll gladly buy a PHB5E for d20 Modern that's like 2/3 re-skinned reprint. Marty Lund

Eh, I'll spring the $13 for the basic rules and a 1 month on ultimate to run a few games and take it for a test drive. It'll be a good gauge on not only how much value I'm getting from the core utilities but also on how much customization and manual entry I can do and how much time the PHB and...

Barred school: necromancy?