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The fact that they're not allowed to move closer to you means you have effectively set up a wall cutting off half the battlefield (one which you and your allies can ignore). By combining that with actual walls or other terrain obstacles, you will often be able to block them into a confined space.

When an effect calls for a save every round, it specifies when the save takes place -- for instance, "when a creature comes within 10 feet of you for the first time in a turn or starts its turn there." Perhaps they meant to put in such a clause for Necrotic Shroud but forgot. As written...

I suppose at higher levels, a 1-round debuff can be worth more than the ongoing stream of chip damage. And now that I'm thinking about it, it could be a solid tanking move. Dart into the middle of a group of enemies, hit them with Frightened, then move back so that you're between them and the...

Edit: Never mind, I misunderstood -- necrotic resistance is a general aasimar trait, not anything related to Necrotic Shroud.

Yeah, it seems super weak compared to Heavenly Wings and Inner Radiance. Even the damage type is inferior; going by the 2014 Monster Manual, radiant damage is about 5% more effective than necrotic*. I'm really struggling to think of a case where I'd pick Necrotic Shroud. A 10-foot radius is...

That's some very risky logic. It opens the door for all kinds of ploys to get around restrictions against using spells in combat. I think it's much better to just change Friends so there's no save at all against an invalid target. Or simply leave it be.

I had not considered the "chaining" of Beguiling Twist. But that would be an issue with BT being able to trigger from itself. I mean, what happens if the party wizard opens combat with Fear? That's a strong opener anyway, and a Fey Wanderer could really amplify it. Anyway, like I said, I'd love...

By RAW, this does indeed work. Whether a fix is required, and -- if so -- what that fix should be, is an interesting question. Beguiling Twist is a 7th-level ranger subclass ability, so you're already heavily invested in a class with solid at-will attacks; this trick is competing with just...

I've spent the last couple weeks working on a project that uses an LLM to extract and classify data. It's been a fascinating process. "Prompt engineering" sounds pretentious as hell, but it's a real skill -- particularly when you need the bot to provide output in a form that can be parsed by a...

A smart dragon has a lot of advantages it can exploit against a city, without needing any bespoke protection. An attack on a cloudy night, for instance -- the dragon soars high and unseen, picks a target, strafes it, and is gone before the archers can get in range. Panic and confusion would also...

I disagree -- the rules should be able to handle that situation, because it's a tactic many parties will try. If you're tasked with saving a town from a monster, it's quite reasonable to ask the townsfolk for help. And while the townsfolk can't be expected to charge suicidally into melee, a...

6 hours plus 16 hours is 22, not 24. If you went to sleep at midnight last night, you can go to sleep at 10 PM tonight. It makes a fair amount of sense to me. The system will always have weird edge cases because it's trying to bucket the immense complexity of fatigue, sleep, and recovery into...

To clarify, for anyone not familiar with this: "Coup de grace" is French for "blow of mercy," and is used in English to mean a killing or finishing blow (with an implication that the fight was already pretty much over). In 3E it was an action you could take to insta-kill an unconscious enemy...

I used to track things like arrows and spell components (in days of yore, before spell focuses existed) very carefully. Never once did I come close to running out of anything. Eventually I realized it wasn't worth the bother. D&D doesn't want the hassle of a realistic encumbrance system --...

You might look at Zerg assets from StarCraft. The Zerg are basically a mash-up of Tyranids with "Alien" xenomorphs.

Sure, but those decisions are usually in the form of "X is allowed, Y is not." The DM chooses what tools the player can use; what the player does with those tools is "player territory" and outside the DM's purview in all but exceptional cases. Similarly, a DM might veto certain bastion...

My complaint about the old bastion system was that the system seemed like an insane amount of bookkeeping and was clearly designed as a "mini-game" with very little relevance to the in-game fiction of establishing a stronghold. Speaking as a DM, I don't much care either way. Speaking as a...

So Power Word Fortify does nothing, then?

Rend would be fine if they got rid of the distinction between slashing, bludgeoning, and piercing damage. I mean, how often does it even come up*? If you're going to streamline a system (which I generally favor), don't stop halfway. *Unless you're playing BG3, in which bludgeoning damage is...

The two remaining Silmarils were removed from the Iron Crown after the War of Wrath. The Valar intended to take them back to Valinor, but Feanor's two surviving sons, Maedhros and Maglor -- bound by their oath to reclaim the Silmarils no matter who held them -- killed the guards and seized the...