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Killing people with swords or lightning bolts is inherently evil, though, unless it's necessary to protect oneself or others. The game's just written around the assumption that those exceptional circumstances will arise on a regular basis. I think mind control should be viewed in roughly the...

True, but if you insist on that level of granularity everywhere, you end up with a monster manual of nothing but real-world creatures*. Presumably the black and brown bear are distinguished because the developers saw bears as more likely combat opponents than non-humanoid apes. *which could...

If anything, I'd argue that it's the proposed IQ-correspondence that's the coincidence. The 3d6 system was designed to generate all six abilities, but I've never seen any comparable relationship put forward for dexterity or wisdom. It's exactly the sort of system you'd design, though if your...

I'm not aware of it ever being officially stated, but it's a fairly natural assumption to draw from that curve being the original way of generating ability scores (and when 3d6 was abandoned as the default mechanic, this was justified not as a reinterpretation of the scores, but as the average...

I see the concern. Personally though, my stance would be that the it's best to focus on making the system work as well as possible for humanoids and then worry about how to caluclate stats for everything else. Taking advantage of the range from 3 to 7 can add a useful amount of nuance to...

I agree with most of this, but I'll note that 8 is only the minimum with point buy/standard array. If the point buy formula were adjusted to allow the range of scores possible through rolling, it could facilitate more nuance in portraying low scores.

For mathematical purposes, "average" generally refers to the arithmetic mean (though terms like arithmetic mean, median or geometric mean are generally prefered for specificity). It sounds like you're instead using "average" to describe values within some range of a mean or median. Doing this...

My preference is for rolling, but with one important caveat: I want to roll before settling on a character concept. Some concepts make sense with a single extremely high score, others with a more balanced array. And some make sense with an above or below average spread overall. Building a...

I think my preference would be for no ASIs or floating ASIs regardless, but I'd be much more sympathetic to arguments for fixed ASI if every ability was a reasonably effective choice for every class. With the current balance, though, where each class revolves heavily around one or two ability...

There are a lot of good suggestions here regarding ways for characters to spend money. I think its just as important, though, to consider the other half of the equation: an excess of gold can be avoided just as readily by reducing income as by adding expenses. This can by done across the board...

The question I found most amusing was the one about favorite non-D&D games. The multiple choice portion seemed, as far as I could tell, to be focused on computer RPGs. The free response portion didn't have any specifications about genre, though, so I started debating what Paradox game to put...

People will agree more often than not on whether an action is good or evil (though perhaps not in the cases where that question is more interesting). Trying to reach a consensus about how many points each act of evil or good is worth, though, is another matter entirely. And I definitely prefer...

This sounds like a good DM, provided the adventure also features an exceedingly generous supply of magic items.

This is one possible definition of the D&D multiverse, but it's a broad enough definition to be effectively meaningless. My understanding of the D&D multiverse, and the understanding that I think others object to, is based on the shared cosmology described in Appendix C of the Player's...

This may be true of some worlds, but certainly not of all of them. As I see it, published monsters and magic items are a list of suggestions, not any sort of fixed cannon, and there are enough of both that you're only likely to see a fraction of them in any campign, even before you start...

I'll add that this would be a fairly trivial errata/retcon. Over the thousand-ish hours of Critical Role gameplay, I don't recall the Curse of Strife ever being mentioned, and I don't think, based on what I've read about it here, that it's necessary or even helpful to understanding the events of...

Bringing the proficiency bonus down to +1 would make skill proficiencies almost irrelevant at low levels. If anything, my preference would for low level characters' skill proficiencies to matter a bit more. I don't think it matters much for combat proficiency, since characters are generally...

This is one possible interpretation, but taking it as definite seems like a large logical leap. Perhaps they simply don't want players to have to combine a race using the old template with a subrace using the new one.

I agree that trying to fit randomized abilities to a preconceived character can be problematic. While I like the idea of rolling ability scores, I'd never want to do it with a specific character in mind. Personally, I don't see the appeal of randomization mehtods that restrict ability scores...

I'd agree a lot of feats could use buffs, but bringing them all to this level woud have the downside of leaving non-primary ability score increases even further behind. Ultimately, I think characters relying on single ability scores for so much of their combat effectiveness is the game's...