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4e's rules weren't perfect, but they might be one of the best in the history of the game. You can make a Stealth check at the end of any movement you do, if you are in concealment, cover, or outside of sight. A "distracted" target is also valid outside of combat. You get a penalty if you move...

Human creative labor has intrinsic value to me and I will spend money in accordance with that value.

The Godsbreath adventure in JttRC is one of its best, so I'm excited to see Erin return for another round! It is SUCH a good little horror story in SUCH a cool location (southern gothic is a flavor that D&D has not mixed much with to my knowledge before!). Immediately weighting the book more...

I don't see "the scope needs to be big" as a battle, I just see it as kind of a constraint on what D&D-as-tragedy can look like. D&D's got big scope, and I'm OK with the scope of this tragedy being big (while still being related to the characters' own flaws). And I'm very much interested in...

Part of what this means to me is that the tragic arc needs to still be an arc of D&D-scale power. It's not that Juliet drinks poison, it's that Juliet makes a pact with Nerull and rises as a mindless zombie for her former love to slay or something. Mere murder is insufficient! It also means...

Seems legit! So far, pretty standard. A little situational, maybe, but with 9 attacks, getting a crit is only a matter of time, really, hahaha. Relies a bit on an external force, but extremely common tactic. Same - relies a bit on some help or some foolish monsters, but yeah. Legit...

Every .5 e had its own griping and grousing, too. 4e fans don't all agree on if Essentials was a good idea or not. Lots of people think parts of 2014 are better than parts of 2024 (and lots of people don't think 2024 went far enough!). Not everybody thought Skills & Powers was a good addition...

If you sign up to play an adventure game, you expect to go on adventure. If you sign up to play a horror-themed D&D game, you expect the night in the old abandoned house to be spooky. If you sign up to play a D&D game about dragon-slaying and dungeon-crawling, you expect there to be dungeons...

A D&D edition change is usually much more seismic than a "periodic rules update," or else we wouldn't have had the 3e/4e edition wars, and we wouldn't still have some very vocal 4e fans complaining about what they see as a kind of design backsliding in 5e. We wouldn't have the OSR trying to...

To drill down a bit: the big thing PS did was it made monsters into characters first. Those monsters included, for instance, fiends. Any D&D player can tell you that fiends are always evil, but in PS, being "evil" didn't mean they weren't nuanced characters first. It maybe told you what team...

System-wise, 5e did it best, understanding alignment as a rule for roleplaying. It's a little anemic, but that's nothing new. I was kind of enamored of 5e's Flaw/Bond/Trait/Ideal system as adding texture to it, though that was also a little underbaked. Though my honest answer is a little bit of...

People are doing that, though. The OSR is a wildly inventive space. Pathfinder's still chugging along last I heard. I bet if they OGL'd or CC'd the 4e rules, folks would jump on that immediately (heck, I might be one of 'em, there's a lot of interesting stuff to do with that fork of the game)...

There's some ambivalence here for me. Adaptation, evolution, and growth are inevitable and generally positive things. On board in principle. But, these are frequently employed as excuses to do things that aren't so much better as they are just different. D&D attracts creative people who want...

The appeal for the players is that it might be fun to play some tragically flawed heroes who have some personality trait that will eventually cause them to flop out dramatically. To set up those dominoes in play and watch them fall. To give the DM enough rope to hang the party with, and then...

This makes me think of horror genre again. If the PC's just choose not to spend the night in the haunted house, we wouldn't be telling a story about a haunted house. So what makes the PC's go into the haunted house? To do the obviously bad thing?

I keep thinking about the similarity in horror and tragedy. Like, even from a mechanical perspective (like with Sanity or Dread's jenga tower or...) - the idea is that to achieve a near-term goal, you sacrifice long-term stability. Walter White is willing to sacrifice his relationships to feel...

A potential nuance to this convo: If tragedy isn't something we can really inflict on a PC, how might we do a campaign with the theme of "tragedy" that maybe treats the PC's as a sort of chorus - the observers and audience to the great tragedies of others? The PC's should be pretty central...

I'm OK drawing with a fairly broad brush, so I'd say anything from classic Greek tragedy to Shakespearean tragedy to modern tragedies like Breaking Bad, Scarface, Brokeback Mountain, No Country for Old Men, etc. (even arguably things like Dark Souls)

So, let's talk genre in D&D. One of the harder genres to splice into the heroic fantasy of standard D&D is tragedy. To evoke the pathos of someone doing their best to do good and utterly, completely failing. How do you evoke this? What in D&D seems to get the most in the way of it? Can you...

Here's my take: Lore is mechanics. Combat stats should not be the whole of a monster's mechanics. There's no such thing as a setting-neutral creature.