Search results

Personally, when I'm making NPCs, I just give them the magic items I feel like they should have. I don't want to do math. The value is often an interesting surprise. I suspect a lot of deviation from default assumptions is not a product of some concerted effort to rewrite the game, but simply...

For people with no meaningful knowledge of any other rpg, D&D is probably their favorite. Probably for a significant number of other people too.

Not going there. The problem of incoherency is manifest in the way magic works (or doesn't). It isn't about outcomes, it's about having two distinct processes (d20 and the whole spell slot mess), and trying to merge them together. Skill-based magic completely fixes the issue, but we're clearly...

Probably age is a significant issue here. 2e was long-lived. There are a lot of people who started on it, and thus played it perhaps somewhat naively. ENW's demographic being what it is, there aren't that many such people here. The irony for me is that I've never met a DM who was anywhere near...

I'm not claiming that, and have never even hinted at that. As a matter of principle, if I thought I was playing "typical" D&D, I'd stop and do something else. So I assume exactly the opposite of what you're trying to say. I'm not claiming that I know what people do, only that I know one...

I've definitely seen the 3rd level party with more than 150,000 gp in equipment. Not as the typical party, for sure, but it's there. Heck, we had one game with a 2nd level character starting off with an artifact for no real reason. (I mean a real artifact-level weapon with commensurate power...

I could see that; a lot of times NPC creation is simplified in various behind-the-curtain ways. Certainly not the way I've done it, but it makes sense on some level. I didn't see this at all. What I saw was not complexity, but transparency. There was an absolute avalanche of d20 material...

Maybe not. But I'd argue that simply prepackaging a combination of abilities in an easily comprehensible way is the main function of a class. Exclusivity is fairly incidental. Well, fighter/wizard characters have pretty much always been garbage in any version of D&D. I don't know that this is a...

I do. I don't assume that everyone is deviating in any one particular fashion, but I do assume that given the number of opportunities to deviate from the defaults (for any number of reasons), anyone really adhering to all of them is a statistical improbability. It would be like trying to find a...

I would think another question would be what portion are even aware that they exist. Between experienced DMs who didn't bother to read the DMG, and new ones who learned through playing rather than reading, I've seen quite a few DMs who were unaware of significant parts of the DMG, often te "soft...

Well, there's still some building going on there. It does vary as to how much control the player has over the character creation process. "Build" does have something of a new-school connotation, I suppose. The point here is how the player exercises whatever authority he is granted.

I think that's true. With respect to places like ENW is that people conflate the two, or simply don't understand how the rules work when they're divorced from the guidelines. At the table, this isn't a problem, because the DM's voice is the rule and the stuff in the books is all guidelines. But...

If it was, how are there any creatures alive less powerful than the most powerful ones? Are all the red dragons sequestered from all the potentially tasty human commoners and numerous other low-powered fodder? There must be some reason everyone isn't dead. True. That's probably why that whole...

I don't see how. My style, personally, has evolved to the same kind of minimalism that I use in all parts of my life. AFAIC, the work would be planning. Generally, as far as encounter difficulty goes, I'm preparing specific creature stats months or years ahead of when they're being used...

I don't think that necessarily follows. I imagine most people are subconsciously doing some kind of encounter balancing, but I think that even if you just picked creatures out of the monster manual at random and populated the players' surroundings with them, you wouldn't be constantly wiping out...

It's generally involved starting with those things, and then, either through the course of an edition and between editions, tearing them down with variants and add-ons galore. 2e had lots of niche protection to start, but by the end you could kit up classes to do all kinds of off-type stuff. 3e...

I could and I do. Backstab most certainly should not be the defining characteristic of a rogue/thief, nor should it be that character's exclusive purview. And even when you get into magic, the possibilities for what could happen when a straight-up fighter starts reading a scroll or praying to a...

Yes, exactly. The less design elements there are embedded in classes or other character-specific abilities, the better.

Just once, I should actually do that just to see what happens.

Pretty significant punishment for Suarez, though still not as much as it might have been.