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I agree the game was definitely designed around people just picking whatever, except for healing which seems close to mandatory. My point was people still seem to think it's important to build a whole party as a unit, when it really isn't. In 5e, what you mainly want is: someone who can heal...

DMIng advice from the very earliest rpg book ever written is 100% infallible, so it's a good thing you brought this up. Otherwise we would be lost. In unrelated news, why do they keep posting speed limit signs of 65 and 70 mph? My Model T Ford only gets up to around 45 tops. Surely there is no...

This is the sort of dismissive attitude I'm talking about. Better to call everyone who disagrees with you a name, like a rules-lawyer or a whiner or a power gamer or a munchkin. As long as you don't need to consider they have their own desires that are worth considering.

IMO in both 4e and 5e, people take party construction too seriously. I always encouraged people to just pick a class they wanted and play it. If you end up with a party full of rogues, awesome! You can assassinate whole rooms before they even know what's happening. Party full of wizards? Wipe...

Hey, I just wanted to point out that it's not really fair to jump back and accuse the other side of calling your playstyle "baswrongfun" but then tell them they're missing out on something and are playing the game poorly. Either there is a right way to play the game and we fight over what it is...

A lot of it also comes down to the fact that 5e tends to be deadlier than prior editions, and PCs have fewer tricks up their sleeve to deal with difficult situations. It means that that the mathematical balance is simply less important, and the situational balance is far more important. It means...

I love my 4e threats to the nentir vale monster vault. A book with the best-designed monsters they ever made for 4e, organized by faction/group rather than by creature type, along with punch-out tokens for every single creature in the book (including many multiples for group creatures). Probably...

It seems clear that we have very different experiences. Here's some stuff I hope we can agree on though: 1) If everything is going fine and nobody is bothered, then there's no need to worry about rules interpretation. 2) If one person is getting very upset and everyone else thinks it's fine...

I haven't really played enough 3e to judge if this is the case or not, but I'll believe you. Either way, for brand new players, it's not really what they think of when they think "barbarian." This seems to me like something both editions got wrong. The barbarian, IMO anyway, should be a big...

The slayer was a good addition to the game, but my table ended up never playing any of the essentials stuff. My players didn't really grok the idea of there being more than one fighter, so every time I brought it up they were just like, "uhh... nah, I'll play the original fighter." They also...

Hmm. If you're playing where clerical healing really can make scars heal and reattach fingers, isn't this kind of a logical thing that people really would do in the fantasy world? I see it as something that the average joe might not do, but the bold adventuring type may very well be willing to...

Well, there's two separate things here. The first is that niche protection does not necessarily mean party building. It's more about how nobody is sneakier than the rogue, nobody hits harder than the fighter, and nobody is better at tracking enemies down through the wilderness than the ranger...

5e seems like a return to earlier editions, but if you really look at it deeply, it isn't. The wrapping is heavily retro, but what's inside is deeply innovative, and builds on 4e in important ways. The balance in 5e is a good deal tighter than in any edition aside from 4e. Fighters are...

I really believe that everyone at the table should have an attitude of openness and willingness to compromise. If the DM has a really cool idea, the players should accept it and roll with it. If a player has a cool thing they want to do, the DM and everyone else at the table should be willing to...

Haha yeah. I was a kid in the early 2000s, but I figure it was similar then. I had way more games brought down by dumb rules arguments than brought down by trying to cling to rules none of us liked. The difficult part was not in realizing that the rules are malleable, the difficult part was...

Obviously if everyone is fine with a rule/interpretation, it's best to go with that, and overthinking it can make things unnecessarily difficult. The issue, though, is when not everyone is fine with a rule/interpretation. IME that's where new groups usually run into trouble

I guess my problem is that this is sort of like saying, "is your car broken? Well if it is, you should go fix it." It's not wrong exactly, it's just not very helpful. To good DMs, it's advice so obvious as to be pointless, and to beginner DMs it's advice so vague as to be unhelpful. The...

I'm with Hussar. If it makes sense to everyone at the table that something should work a certain way, then sure, just do it that way. If people have different ideas of what makes sense, though, you need to navigate it with some delicacy. Obviously, rules disputes are impossible if only one...

Nowhere does it say a creature automatically perceives everything around it and the only things stopping sight are specific rules like concealment and lack of light. What it says is that "most" creatures in combat are aware of everything around them, so if you come out of hiding it "usually"...

I do think, however, that the case becomes strongest for blindsight as auto-detect once combat begins. Outside of combat though, I think it's very questionable that blindsight is an auto-detect. And either way, if RAI was that it disallowed all stealth, it seems to me like they would have...