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But also a 100% awesomeness rate.

The first time I did something like that made by brain hurt too. D&D strongly suggests to us this notion of mercenary treasure-hunter superheroes; it's very difficult to unlearn that.

As with many things, the issue with the hexer is simply logical. Why have a prereq of Lightning Bolt as a divine spell? What is it about that specific spell that qualifies one to learn hexes? The answer appears to be nothing. It's just a proxy way of saying "this class is for adepts". But by...

I don't see it that way at all. A more structured plot-driven game can be written explicitly to set up meaningful choice points for players. With a more sandbox-y game, the DM has to make a lot of stuff up on the spot. The more off the beaten path the players go, what changes is that they're...

What did we learn from this week's GoT episode? There's something to be said for the big stupid fighter.

I'm predicting a new D&D trend towards spear-based fighters.

The sigh is because I've seen it claimed that this line of text doesn't exist. I wouldn't call that a "throw away line" but regardless of what descriptors one attaches to it, it definitely exists. Whether or not it's railroading is somewhat tangential. The question is whether it's legitimate for...

Sigh.

New thread: what should D&D learn from The Wire.

The odd thing about DMing is that it's both. You absolutely are a neutral arbiter of rules. But you are also supposed to do a lot of completely disparate things that have nothing to do with that, including being a player in your own right.

I don't think that players' involvement in the game can be summed up in terms of happiness, and that's the point I was making. People read books that don't make them happy, listen to (and play) music that doesn't make them happy, and they play rpgs that don't make them happy. The GoT stuff is...

Thus, I used the word "if". 5e was promised to be the customizable game that could do whatever kind of D&D you want. It's true that the rpg medium is more interactive and grants the players a type of authorship that novel readers don't have. However, I think the point of the thread topic was to...

It's not that strange. There are definitely people out there still playing 2e, and there are good reasons to do so. I am not a 2e expert, but I would think either a straight fighter or a fighter/thief (available to a halfling or elf, I think) would be the logical class choices. The good news in...

It can be. D&D is its own thing, and shouldn't be beholden to these other influences. However, D&D is not an island, and it ought to pay some attention to the world of adventure fiction.

It's also not LotR, not Arthurian legend, not a Greek epic, not Lovecraft, not Star Wars, not Harry Potter, and so on and so forth. And yet, it probably is informed by all of those things, and you'll regularly see people pushing that it should be more so.

I picked that example because it didn't strike me as being a preventable death. Would a player in this situation feel that this outcome was the result of their actions? I think not. And objectively, I think that it would be primarily the result of things outside of the player's control. Mind...

Setting aside that a DM does a lot more than a referee, have you ever looked at the way sports officials make calls? Some of them are definitely trying to provide entertainment value independently. Is every emphatic strikeout call a similar violation? There's also a strong case to be made that...

All of this again goes back to what we can learn from the GRRM books. Yes, a player may be connected to their character more in a long-term game than a one-shot, and yes, they may take the loss of their character hard. If the mortality rate is both high enough to be a serious threat and low...

No, rule naught certainly isn't a bad thing. But there's also the DM cheating idea, which is also potentially not a bad thing. As the DM cheating text I quoted above suggested, sometimes you want your players to believe that one thing is happening, even if what's actually happening is very...

Perhaps the pertinent lesson to this thread is that players should not necessarily get what they want, no more than GRRM readers get what they want.