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This is part of a trend of just putting way, way too much fluff into the core game. They seem to feel the need to explain every little thing -- and to do it in a way that implies it is so across all D&D settings. I just want a toolbox of monsters, spells, etc. to throw into a home brew fantasy...

As others have said, it's somewhat gray. As a GM, I tend to fire a warning or two before I act, when things like disrupting chatter are getting out of hand. A lot of times, folks don't even realize they're practically making the game impossible to play. I've even been on the disruptive side of...

One of the functions of having humans in D&D is to serve as a baseline against which to compare everything else. If actually doesn't matter as much whether D&D humans are real-world accurate, so much as that they meet player expectations of humans. With other races (elf, hobgoblin, aarakocra...

Unfortunately, various real-life issues (like kids' activities and an illness) have kept us from having a session since the book came out. So, my take is pretty theoretic. I think most of the player info is pretty well done. There are some archetypes I doubt I'll ever use, but I didn't see...

LMoP wasn't listed, but was actually fun. I tried to run ToD, but it was so tied to the Realms that I gave up part way through conversion to Eberron. Since I gave it a good shot, I still voted "Played, didn't like". We did do PotA. I think folks liked it, over all. There was some frustration...

So, it'll be even easier to make it do things (custom base classes) that DDB can't handle and has no plans to handle. Cool.

No worries. It's interesting to see how my thoughts have evolved (or not). I don't care much about the stat (skill) notation, anymore. But, my annoyance at the emphasis on the modifier has been renewed by DnD Beyond which uses the default WotC character sheet layout. After using MPMB's sheet --...

Yeah. In the intervening three years, I came to this realization. It actually took some playing around with Fate and thinking through the differences between FAE approaches (which are kinda, but not quite, like attributes) and Core (which is skill-only, with no attributes) for it to really...

But, Batman doesn't carry a gun.

But, he makes extremely heavy use of advance tech. Some corollary of Clark's Law may apply.

That's because the Ranger isn't "a woodsman". He's the ultimate resourceful survivor. A ranger knows spells not because he needs them to do "his job" or because he worships nature/a nature god. He gets spells because anyone in a D&D setting who wanted to always have "one more contingency" would...

Agreed. Some of that falls under what I called "quirky conventions". Some of it falls under having some published settings -- which I think are a good thing, I just don't any specific setting to be synonymous with D&D.

Depends on whether you want it to be a factor. I used to run the original I6 every year around Halloween. I'd say the PCs only worried about Ireena about a quarter of the time. That's not to say they didn't care. They just generally figured she'd kind found someplace halfway safe -- safer than...

I hear what you're saying. I don't lay it entirely at the feet of the Realms -- in fact, the Realms may be more a symptom than a cause. To me, as someone who learned with BECMI (before all the letters were there) and then migrated to AD&D shortly before the original UA was published, the idea...

There are ways to present "game lore" that make this easier and ways that make it harder. I'm pretty clear, to my players, that I'm a world builder, as a GM and that I'm totally comfortable banning certain races, classes, monsters, etc. if they don't work within the confines of a given custom...

I don't think I actually shared my thoughts on elves. There were even more elven subraces in AD&D. At some point, I just decided that the entire race tended to evolve/mutate fairly quickly to make up for their long lifespans. So, if a high elf moved to the tundra, their grandchildren were...

I skipped 4E, for the most part. But I think you're right. They must have made a big deal about bringing rolling back because my group actually tried it for our first characters. The only player who liked it was the one who rolled nothing lower than a 14. Everyone else was reminded, with fair...

"Primal Instincts". I could work with that. Maybe "Primal Surge" would sound better for a resource, but there are already enough things called "surge".

So it is. How unfortunate. Well, having racial mods makes sense, then. Clearly, I've moved further from "core" on ability scores than I realized.

Yeah. I've gathered that. I've got one player who's actually in a Fate game, but says, "I like Fate, just not for fantasy." So, that's a road block. I'm assuming it's because he's looking for the dungeon crawl, murder-hobo thing, which is not how I typically run D&D. We just stopped doing...