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Ok, I'm confused. I thought your entire point was that without the possibility of permanent character death, no consequences of any sort will ever be permanent because one could just wait to high level and use high-level resources and/or get a god to retroactively fix all the past consequences...

Thanks for elaborating! At my table we expect everyone to be proactive about helping to make sure that the tool doesn't break. So, deliberately doing the opposite would indeed be, let's say, problematic. :) Similarly, testing borderline cases to see if someone tells you to stop (rather than...

For my part, there are always enough simultaneous plots going on that failing at any one (or more than one) of them isn't a campaign-ending hard loss. The outcome of failure might indeed be tragic and irreversible, but the game doesn't stop because there's still so much to do! (Including dealing...

Personally speaking, testing limits is not condoned at my table unless we're explicitly doing a playtest. In actual play we're trying to use the system (including any houserules) as a tool, not deliberately test that tool to see where it fails. The idea that players would deliberately test the...

(Edit: accidentally quoted more people than I intended. My apologies.) Doesn't that only work if both (a) all problems resulting from failure have possible solutions AND (b) those solutions can be found faster than new problems crop up? If either condition isn't met you end up with a non-zero...

(Emphasis in final sentence added.) It's possible to go beyond just highlighting the Ranger saving the party from passive hazards. Instead, let the party turn those hazards to their advantage. This can be as simple as letting the players opt to freely ambush any encounters instead of avoiding...

Good catch. I had mistakenly thought that the Githyanki racial medium armor proficiency included shield proficiency.

My experience is the opposite. My players tend to try to talk to everything first unless they already know the creatures are hostile, in which case they set up an ambush.

So, when you hit zero you curse, put a hit die in the swear jar pop-up healing jar, and get back up?

I'd suggest a Githyanki melee Wizard. The character will start with a 20 STR and 18 INT. Optimal would be to go Quarterstaff and Shield, with PAM as the 4th level feat. Take Booming Blade or Greenflame Blade, and Haste. Usual combat round (after Haste is up) will be to cast a leveled spell or...

It's even better than that... note the "engaging" and "pointlessly" in addition to "flail".

Mirage Arcane is the true army killer in 5e. Any army that fits within a square mile and stays there for more than ten minutes (and lacks access to Dispel Magic) can be effectively imprisoned in an adamantine structure for 10 days, which could easily be a death sentence unless they're packing a...

I'm fine with monsters that require out-of-the-box solutions, but only if the DM is open to a variety of possible out-of-the-box solutions. Trying to guess the one particular out-of-the-box solution that the DM is looking for tends to either be trivial (if it's telegraphed well) or maddening (if...

I entirely agree. My intent was only to refute the claim that all clerics do what their deity wants them to do.

Some clerics certainly do, but not all. If a setting has distant, enigmatic, or whimsical deities there can be clerics who have no idea what their deity wants them to do, clerics who have no idea who their deity is, or even clerics who actively oppose everything (they think) their deity stands...

I require backstories before a character enters play. I'm flexible on length and format, as long as it gives me and the player enough material to weave the character into the campaign setting and connect them to the other characters before play begins. Also, since I never start campaigns at 1st...

But did the flail pierce the monster's DR?

I did a variant of that type of game as a 5e campaign. To address the exploration issues mentioned above, I had all food grown, caught, or created in the region be inedible to anything from outside. So all the food for the exploratory expedition had to be imported or fished in deep water (i.e...

I think having the subsystem (or homebrew spells) is valuable even if it doesn't see play, because it adds depth to the setting. The players can better feel how warfare and magic mix in the setting if they can see the rules designed to support it. Whether the added depth is worth the trouble of...

I like adding dedicated battlefield magic to my game world. The PCs can learn it too, if they want to and can find someone willing to share a copy (or invent their own, similar spells). The most flashy is the 4th level Ballistic Fireball, which has longer range and allows blind fire by arcing...