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It's not that it's "too hard to balance" - it's that 5e game design is about never breaking within normal parameters. Unless you have a weird race (e.g. plasmids) then large races are stopped cold by small doorways and the like. Which means that a lot of dungeons are simply going to fail. 5e's...

Last time I checked Soulknives, Psi Warriors, and World Tree Barbarians were all highly supernatural - but none of it was spells.

Pathfinder 2e doesn't because it has a larger system. Races are just ancestry feats, and you get to mix and match Daggerheart also has explicit guidance for taking some features of one race and some of another. The systems that need dedicated half-races are ones which, like D&D, don't have...

And mechanically one, and only one of them gets weight put on it. There MUST be a primary race you consider yourself to be and game mechanically the rest are purely cosmetic. So you literally can't make yourself mechanically a blend at all. Which has always been a D&D problem with using race...

No it isn't. It says straight up "you have to take after your dad OR your mum if they are from different groups. You must choose one to be dominant, and can not end up as a mix of the two". You must choose one pigeon hole that is dominant. Mapping to real world issues that D&D race can be a...

I'm fairly sure it's 20. You've six picks for your first stat, and five remaining for your second so thirty combos - but you're double counting (because you could have picked either order). For your third there are four remaining - and you divide by three because you've equivalent triplets (As...

And I'm not sure why you think that it's bizarre. I think one of my players reached sixteen pages of background. That was an 18 year old. How old do you think someone needed to be to be a squire? Or a monk in the middle ages? (14 in both cases generally). We're not all the sons of nobles - but...

Shield and Sleep use the same resource. If all that's been used to stand someone back up is Healing Word then you need precisely one hit after that to knock them down (and it can be AoE damage). And then once they are down attacks on them take a death save - and melee attacks two thanks to the...

"I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a king". And your characters must have lead some pretty boring lives before adventuring if they fit 100% into any one background based on the sixteen. Acolyte Artisan Charlatan Criminal Entertainer Farmer Guard Guide Hermit Merchant...

I run "doubling down" rules; on a Natural 1 the player may reroll. If the player does then if they hit they hit. If they miss it's a critical fail (DM's choice). Which is frequently Friendly Fire.

The point that makes me want to riot is the apparent lack of half elves. The children of two worlds who are a distinct group all of their own and not either of their ancestors are an important thing in their own right. It covers things like second generation immigrants. And I think that @Ruin...

People unironically quoting villains to support their argument always amuses me. And the flavour and diversity has only improved since Gygax left D&D and let a succession of others each add what they thought was cool, not beholden to him. And damn right modern D&D is more about your class (what...

Yes it is. If you Sleep those foes rather than Shield or Strength of the Grave you don't get hit at all. Strength of the Grave you claim is stronger than Shield - I was using benchmarking for Shield. The question is whether at first level Strength of the Grave is stronger than Sleep. (We can...

Oh, I'm not disagreeing with all that. But I'd rather have simple sorcerers (right to the point of 4e elementalists) and complex wizards, and simple barbarians and complex tactical fighters than aim everything at average.

One of the things I think 4e could learn is the power of subclasses and of more intuitive design. 4e for me was great for almost anyone who count translate from the mechanics to the actions, and anyone who made it through character creation. But ... not everyone could. Subclasses were a 4e...

I don't think I've ever seen a statement about class based design I disagree with more. If you make all the classes average then you're taking all classes away from everyone at the extremes. And you're narrowing down the range of playstyles even for those left (for some games I want to outthink...

If there are only one or two the bard is going to be great. But the bard doesn't know many spells. They can get an absolutely superb collection but a level 20 bard has 22 spells to spread over nine spell levels. That's fewer than three spells per spell level. The bard can do anything but can't...

So how do they cast spells differently? And I'm going to circle back to this. How is looking up spells in books and casting them slowly out of books while referring to your notes not part of the wizard class fantasy? How are the spells cast with mystic circles and dribbly candlewax not a part...

What we haven't seen is how much better the wizard spells are than the sorcerer spells. Also the sorcerer doesn't have that many spare slots, especially as the subclass only helps with L1-5 spells. To take one example of where the Wizard has a huge advantage, we can look at True Polymorph. Cast...

The majority of characters have Darkvision anyway. If they already have it (because they aren't humans) then no it doesn't. Not even close at first level. I'm not saying that Shield is the best first level spell for a wizard. I'm saying that Shield is comparable to Strength of the Grave for a...