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I'm always curious as to whether all the players who always say "We only need four classes" actually play their games that way? I mean just because the PHB includes the other eight doesn't mean a DM is required to use them. All of us could be playing Fighting / Rogue / Cleric / Wizard all...

I automatically know I'm going to ignore parts of every RPG's rules even before the book is released. I play RPGs for the characterization and narrative and roleplaying and storytelling... and most of that can and will be done regardless of whatever "game rules" the product creates and uses...

Heh heh... the biggest issue of 5E according to the myriad of posters that were ranting and raving about the game when it first came out 10 years ago were the Sharpshooter and Great Weapon Master feats. Back in 2014 and 2015 those were the two things that were going to kill the game dead, if the...

If a new player doesn't know what the power level of a 1st level character is... then just sit down with them 30 minutes before the session and explain the difficulties of the various options a character might try to accomplish. Especially if there are dice checks that go into exactly what the...

I don't think you are missing anything... I don't think they've programmed the 5E24 Custom Background to give out Origin feats yet. I want to say that when I did create some characters with custom backgrounds myself, I think I ended up just adding them from and to the character sheet under the...

At my own tables I found an overuse of Perception when it was also being used for secret doors/traps/objects in addition to finding people hiding using Stealth (and an underuse of Investigation to "figure out how things work" because when I put puzzles and such into the game it's to challenge...

You can add skills to the bottom of the list on DDB, but it won't put these new ones into alphabetical order (not to mention the new skills end up having to be on a scroll bar down in order for them to show up.) You cannot delete nor rename skills... which has always been my one bugaboo with...

Multi-wave encounters are also usually a great time to bring out whatever "minion" rules you might use-- whether that's 4E style where every creature has just 1 hit point... or handfuls of very low-HP creatures thrown amongst the "hero" monsters. Especially useful if you have casters with AoE...

The reason for adding or removing skills would be to equal out the number of times individual skills get used. If one or two skills are getting called for way more often than all the others, then they probably should get split in half to balance their counts. Likewise, if certain skills are...

The DM thought it was a 4-hour slot but turned out to only be a 2-hour one. So I suspect a lot of the adventure ended up getting skipped or rushed through. Besides that though, it was your typical con module-- nothing that special or spectacular.

There was an Artificer, but I did not notice what their subclass was. With 7 players around the table we did not get much opportunity to show anything about our characters really.

I played it. They supplied 3rd level pre-gen characters, but I did not see the sheet of the one Artificer character to see if anything was noticeably changed. As far as the Eberron species... I played the Shifter Bard but their shifting ability didn't seem appreciably any different than what...

Not by Wizards of the Coast. Let someone release one on DMs Guild if it's needed that badly. Or let the DM who wants it for their game make it themselves.

At the very least, the indies have an extra 6 months to get their stuff out there to their audiences for this "revival" now that GTA6 has been pushed back and will get released in May of '26. Because that's going to be an exceedingly long spear driven through the gaming community's time for...

For me the first question any DM needs to ask themselves when it comes to their skill list for their game is "Which checks am I asking for or are the players making more often than the others, and am I comfortable with that inequity?" These are the "important" checks that you rightly mention...

I use Mechanics. I have no idea when the term 'engineering' entered the English vernacular, but it feels too modern to me for a typical medieval fantasy-era setting (acknowledging that indeed, standard D&D is itself more modern than the typical medieval era.) But I like to maintain a slight...

We don't bother with "actions" outside of combat, so neither of those have mattered in my games. If someone does something that requires a skill check outside of combat, they just make it whenever it is applicable.

Yeah, I know that's how WotC tried to patch their original mistake with the Tool system, but for my money it shouldn't have gotten to that point in the first place. And honestly the "solution" is merely a kludge in my opinion to deal with overlapping skills and tools... plus I think it greatly...

For my recent Theros campaign I did something along these lines... I renamed the 'Persuasion' and 'Intimidation' skills to 'Rhetoric' and 'Presence' as they had more meaning in the Ancient Greek-ish setting. So 'Rhetoric' was specifically about discussion and argument-- leaning very much in the...

I have to imagine that the game mechanics were not the thing they were getting most of their responses on... it was probably entirely all about the Purple Dragon Knight's narrative conceit and whether or not a dragon pet subclass should be attributed to that organization specifically. Whether...