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I can barely get people at my extremely technical nearly all engineering 23% PhD workplace to understand what probabilities really are. This... this is too much =)

Let's be clear about what 5E is: high level characters act like Legolas in Return of the King. It is the "so good" fighting style. This is why a fighter genuinely can dance around the ankles of a giant and accomplish something. It is why the monk can dance around fight a company of archers...

I should probably mention your mileage with giants varies tremendously with your table. When I've got miniatures and Dwarven Forge set up, the more recent huge-category giants have incredible presence. They're terrifying and only the bravest, most prepared, and dumbest medium-sized NPCs would...

I like giants at any size. I'll just use them differently if they're reasonable (12-20') rather than mythological (20'+). The size of monsters has really gotten unmoored if you put yourself into your miniature's shoes. Many wargames focus on big heavy units forming your core. Anime has all...

I love the idea of replacing slots with scroll manufacture. You'd have to speed it up, but it would really really move the game. You'd change the dynamics of economy too as the party finally had a proper money-sink to manage. There would then also be physical assets for the party to stockpile...

I'm going to doff my hat to you while proposing to replace "didn't understand" with "thought they could sell more of something else and didn't want to spit in 4E fan's faces too obviously." But yes, I agree they jettisoned a lot of what 4E was trying to accomplish to cater to something rather...

I rather think they understood 4E perfectly. How much you want to bet there's an interview with 5E designers discussing how and why they designed healing in 5E with reference to 4E? The point of HD was to make magic healing less necessary for all campaigns and DM styles since you had access to...

Which part of the game specifically do you want to "adjust the feel of?" Most of your proposed changes make failure more likely and consequential. In play this disincentives combat more while encouraging "weird" builds instead of improving to-hits and ancillary properties like HP and skills...

As DM, half of these are basic tools for illustrating bad-guy badness. Does the undead's desire to kill all of the living count as genocide? I'd say... yes? Do the players constantly commit what would be considered murder by many of their victims? By modern standards, yes. I pretty much cut...

Well, yeah, most of Middle Earth is a wasteland. The Northern Kingdoms fell. Gondor is a shell with raiders running up and down its coastline. But that still leaves an interesting artistic choice to color in the areas where something has been written about in the 3rd Age and leave the rest so...

I've seen (and like) a fair number of Blando's maps and this one sticks out for me in that it feels visually unbalanced in a way he doesn't typically do. Obviously LOTR maps are tricky because Tolkien left a lot of blank space. I'll say we definitely have a copy of Blando's map-making book at...

Really odd map. I wonder how it looks in person. Highly detailed and contrasting regions in a few spots, lightly detail parchment style for most of the rest. Doesn't seem like it can quite decide between colorful, sketching, and cartoon. A lot of details are hard to read from being crammed...

My hopes aren't too high. You can see they used a huge amount of space for big illustrations of the dragon marks. Now, maybe, there's some decent info on each house next to the dragonmarks associated with them. Keeping track of the houses, as well as the gods and planets, is a big help in...

Not really -- Many AIME classes are noticeably weaker than core D&D classes. Like someone said, a bunch of the classes are built for traveling phases AIME has that core D&D doesn't too... so some class powers were bled off into that too. This gets to Lowkey's predicament: how do you drop...

Yup. Getting these too. The current crop are some of my favorite minis to get onto the table.

I have the old Khorvaire map on Vinyl. Would love to complete the set. A decent Eberron DM screen to replace my old printouts would be great too. Looking forward to more details. Does this... hmm... suggest a full hardcover Eberron adventure coming?? Gasp!

3rd Age Tolkien (like AIME) is all but the canonically "low magic." What little high-magic is left comes from remnants of the 1st Age and the abuses of Morgoth and Sauron. The construction of AIME hews pretty close to this. To call it high magic requires redefining what "high magic" looks...

Adventures in Middle Earth (AIME) is a perfect guide to reducing 5E's magic. They made all new classes and the baddy's powers are much less spell/spell-effect based. Despite being 100% 5E engine, the game is aggressively low magic and the merest speck of power is something wondrous and rare...

Another stranger river that comes and goes with the phases of the Moon. It leads to a place where the Pantheon's ancient secrets are held close.

I prefer to open a discussion when a player does something really out of character or metagaming. One of my gaming buddies' has a bad habit of doing this when DM'ing and has been told off several times. It feels like there is something of a generation gap in perception with this too... teenage...