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This is really encouraging, from my perspective. LMoP gave out a stupid amount of treasure that my players never really needed. I ran a homebrew adventure afterwards and gave out almost nothing and no-one missed it. Tracking coins is not a high priority at our table. Just give out extra if it is...

Gold, Morrus. I'm also excited about this adventure, for many reasons that others have already stated. I was about to start running Tyranny of Dragons, but I'm holding off for this instead, because it seems to have a whole ton more personality. If I'm going to commit to a big AP, I want to...

Yep. Go look at the other previews - the demon Lords are appendix D.

Are you joking? The core books were released a year apart.

Good move. They've talked about being reluctant to release massive setting books, and I get their reasoning: it's a massive investment for them, new players will be overwhelmed and there's not enough space to go into much detail about anything. I'm totally with them - I'd much rather a detailed...

Ultimate evil can work as a kind of force of nature - something as pure and inhuman as a volcano or sandstorm. In that form, it can be an obstacle against which the hero's mettle is occasionally tested. But as soon as that evil becomes personified into a character that is even a slight...

Ultimate evil is such a tedious concept to me. I don't think it fits in a serious narrative. Characters who do stuff for the sake of being evil are cartoons. It's characters I can relate to doing evil things for human reasons that are really scary.

Amazing! I'd given up hope that the official adventures would offer anything but po-faced, "save the world, yada yada yawn". D&D is an inherently silly game, IMO. I'd LOVE it if all of the official stuff went down a route inspired by Alice in Wonderland, Terry Pratchett and Planescape.

Great review! I actually really like the idea of a random building table. Random treasure is all well and good, but it's the mundane stuff that is more painful to come up with on the fly.

I don't believe in killing PCs unless it makes the story more interesting. If they "die", something else bad happens instead. When a TPK happened in a random encounter recently, the PCs were all captured, lost all of their money, and the town of Phandelver was attacked, killing a random NPC (I...

D&D is not a finely balanced elven blade, it's a wildly swinging Flail of Unpredictability. Any party can be wiped at any point if their d20s decide it is time. Having some kind of precision treasure chart may reduce the probability slightly, but not dramatically. The best ways to reduce it are...

Mearls specifically used that term on at least one occasion. But like I said - I'm sure they've made the best decisions about what to include and what not to. They've been on the money so far.

Go do something else, I guess? It does seem that the book is less focused on the "hacker's guide" stuff than was previously described. This is a little disappointing, but they've obviously had to make hard choices about what's gone in, and it seems they've chosen to focus more on the basics...

I'm interested in hearing more on marking and morale from the combat rules, if you get the chance. Thanks for the answers!

I dislike it in theory (whenever I read straight-up lore my eyes glaze over). But I always seem to enjoy it in practice. I guess my experience is that it's a conceptually dull world where interesting stories invariably end up happening.

I'm working on a module for 5th level characters that I hope to release commercially so that people have another option for where to go after the Starter Set. My players will be the first playtesters, just as soon as they get through Wave Echo Cave.

I've been running (a somewhat modified) Phandelver for a couple of months. I reckon we've got another month to go. Currently working on a module that I hope to release commercially. I'll start playtesting that after LMoP and then move on to HotDQ, possibly with some cahnges to the group (I've...

You don't have to suspect - they've straight-out said as much. That intent has been carried into the novels, where they're leaving a lot of stuff covered by a "fog of war". And unless they suddenly change their philosophy, it's going to stay that way. Ed has talked about how this actually...

My take is that they're not trying to please (or recruit) Realms fans, they're trying to recruit D&D fans. They're setting the Realms up as the default, generic setting. Why use it instead of something even more generic? Because it does have some brand recognition, and because there's enough...

Perhaps, but I reckon they're betting on the majority of D&D fans being happier not being buried under a ton of lore. And I reckon it's a good bet. Personally, my enjoyment playing in an established setting is in inverse proportion to the quantity of lore I feel obliged to consume. All of what...