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No... more like "Well, my character Aniska is a barbarian with an int score of 7 so maybe she wouldn't think about flanking the mage with the fighter but she'll definitely pop a rage and whack him with a battleaxe"' There, picking a combat option my character would go for rather than a combat...

I mean I guess?

I guess I don't see why combat can't be roleplaying. It's arguably not roleplaying at tables where combat is viewed as a mini-game where everyone thinks as intellectually and tactically as possible, but if you're role-playing as your character even in combat you might not think to flank an...

I mean, sure, but neither one of them is role-playing, because role-playing is just playing the role of your character, which is absolutely present in both which mechanical rule you decide to use to your advantage and the type of free form interactions you have as a character.

There's definitely a trend in fan projects based on video game properties to try too hard to replicate the mechanics of the game rather than the setting or feel of the game, and it almost always doesn't work out when the designer's goal is the former. By nature of having lots of their...

Hm, I wouldn't necessarily agree that 5E is soul-killingly bland but the third party content does suck for the most part. Funnily enough, some of the better-balanced stuff I've seen is the result of a single person's efforts rather than a company.

Thanks for the insight, that does make a lot of sense. I'm sure it would have been more disappointing to have a weak smite or a confusing smite which combines dice from multiple different class and subclass features than it is to have slightly less mechanicaly impactful subclass abilities.

I was not aware of that, do you happen to have an archive of where Mearls or Crawford said something to the effect of that on class design philosophy?

That backstory definitely encourages me to feel more sympathetically towards the game designers, but unfortunately it's still a very bad system in its original iteration. Making a character is a ten-step process involving multiple steps which are just variations of "gain a bonus to your...

Speaking of bad systems and disappointing books, I ended up looking back at my Modiphius Conan book and it really does not feel well-explained at all. I sort of don't blame my players for not having any interest in it. The actual crunch is hidden under a mile of fluff and is so poorly...

I feel ya on kickstarter regrets. The worst is when the product only ships like 2 years later after a bunch of delays so by the time you get it you aren't even upset anymore, just disappointed. :(

I definitely sympathize with that view. I am not exactly tooting my own horn here, but sometimes when I read the supplemental pamphlets I've purchased from unnamed companies making content for 5E DnD, I am just utterly stunned by how insanely unbalanced, incredibly niche, or utterly stupid the...

I ran into something similar when trying to design a psion class for 5E a while back. I realized eventually that what I had made was basically total crap in 5E because it was five times more complicated than any other class so I had to scrap the whole thing. Now when I work on projects, either...

Hey, it's all about the process, right?

I definitely found the 5E MM absolutely INFURIATING in terms of its organization. I get why dragons, demons, devils, Drow (who are listed under E for elves?), etc. are listed together, but why not the rest of the elementals, fey, undead, aberrations? Just seemed really, really silly because...

Exactly. Paladins as they are now essentially get most of their interesting abilities from the main class progression and the subclasses really only kick in very occasionally to offer some thematic flair or a single ability that makes your paladin... a little more, protectory or lawful I guess...

I think both the 5E ranger and the 5E paladin suffer from similar issues in that they are both casters with a strong melee focus who have barely any identity beyond being slightly magical fighters with abilities cribbed from other classes. If it were up to me and I were the badwrongfun .evil...

Aura is pretty nutty as far as party resilience goes, can mean the difference between taking massive damage or just a little bit, or the difference between taking a little bit of a beating and getting pulled off the deck of a ship.

Definitely. I think part of that comes down to realizing that not everyone is like you and not everyone finds it fun to sit down reading every rulebook sequentially and thus won't want the rules explained to them sequentially. It's much easier to hand a player a character, tell them how to do...

Paladins have unmatched single-target "nova" damage and are extremely overpowered at tables that don't run 6-8 encounter days. They can also self heal, heal teammates, play as both melee characters and half casters. I don't think they are weak at all under the right circumstances but they can...