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I don't ignore inspiration myself, but my players do. After a few sessions of "You guys have inspiration, use it already!" to no avail, I just dropped it. It's weird, because a few of them are always advantage-fishing, you'd think having a free use on their character sheet would be just the...

Been there, done that, got ten dead bandits to show for it. Oops. ¬.¬ Looked it up between sessions and explained the correct ruling to the players the next time out tho, we won't make that mistake again. -TG :cool:

The breath weapons that require Con saves are things that fill the area and you are "toughing it out" like poison breath and freezing cold, that you aren't just ducking out of the way of (otherwise it would be a Dex save). So in that case, cover shouldn't apply, no. There could be other...

Same, except I do worry about the large amounts of coinage because, having carried around the equivalent of 100 gold pieces before, that stuff gets really cumbersome really fast. It ain't like putting it all on your Bank of Waterdeep credit card. XD I also don't bother with downtime/cost of...

It's not the best piece of D&D art ever, but arguments about the feasibility of the giant's armor seem strange to me. Giants are OTT fairy-tale (or Marvel Universe) monsters to begin with, nothing about them makes "sense." My read on the piece is that this is a very specialized soldier whose...

If my group is any indication, four 3rd level PCs vs. a CR 5 Hill Giant will end with a curbstomped giant, but it might take half an hour to get there. If the giant rolls really well, he might get a big hit on one player. Granted, most of my players have 20+ years of gaming experience, but...

I played enough 1E to entertain the idea that Gygax was confused about his own game. ;) (Or at least, the game design equivalent of an "unreliable narrator." A lot of what he wrote was motivated as much by external factors such as marketing and brand protection as it was by what actually...

It's pretty common in older adventures, yes, but especially things like Keep On the Borderlands or other "starter" adventures designed to teach DMs the flow of the game. -TG :cool:

Alas, without the "normal" encounters, you have no baseline for the awesome ones to stick out from. XD -The Gneech :cool:

In my experience, 5E fights run exactly like 3E/PF ones if you crank up the difficulty and put a bunch of terrain stuff in. (I can't address how they compare to 4E because I never played that beyond Keep on the Shadowfell, which I'm told is not representative.) The main difference I've...

Honestly, I think Sly Flourish did it better: https://twitter.com/SlyFlourish/status/785609563999535108 That said, the DMG guidelines work fairly well as long as you keep in mind that what used to be a "standard" encounter in 3E/4E is considered "hard" in 5E, and what was "hard" in the older...

Excellent point! -TG :cool:

I played with this a bit, mainly she was playing the dragon cultists and the goblins/hobgoblins from Cragmaw Castle against each other for giggles. (The Cragmaw in my game were some of the survivors of Red Hand of Doom, since I'd previously run that with this same group.) She didn't have any...

I generally summarize the "big scenes" of the night, putting any significant player action and information they found in it. I also write up a short "intro" that I try to send a few days before the session, that reveals NPC actions or motivations or other things that might set up context or...

Heheheh. Thanks, SkidAce. -TG :cool:

I port stuff I like into my homebrew world, so canon isn't really an issue. I've got a "Sword Coast"-ish area, a "Bissell and Barrier Peaks"-ish area, a "Zamora and Stygia"-ish area, and so on. The world's "canon" is internally consistent (mostly) but the rest is mostly name-checks to give the...

I keep posting this, but it keeps being relevant! Angry DM: Unsuck Your Boss Fights http://theangrygm.com/return-of-the-son-of-the-dd-boss-fight-now-in-5e/ -The Gneech :cool:

Does remixing the classes count as an edition fetish? -The Gneech :cool:

I am currently loving the 1-20 table where you roll "1d12 during the day, 1d12+1d8 at night." Friendlier or more "natural" encounters happen in the 1-5 band, anything that comes out only at night happens in the 15-20 band, and 6-14 has a progression of gradually-more-threatening stuff, with...

I agree with this. The "pretender wizard" model of sorcerer could totally go here, with bonus spells (including Find Familiar), or a certain number of open slots that can pull from other lists (a la the bard's Magical Secrets). Really I was very surprised that an "Arcana" line didn't exist in...