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Even if the dungeon inhabitants are from a society where violence is commonplace, there are still the issues that (a) violence is likely a spectator sport thus drawing others to watch, and (b) the cries coming from an unscheduled brawl with another inhabitant or group of inhabitants of the...

Whereas I have a hard time imagining how a party can pull off separating the dungeon inhabitants' combatants into six different groups that can be defeated in detail. Maybe if the party has access to a permanent Silence effect and a lot of wall spells that lack verbal components? Or a dungeon...

I would say 0-2 combats per adventuring day is the norm at my table, with a very high variance. The variance stems largely from two factors: how willing the PCs are to resort to violence against particular foes, and how organized the opposition is. I think the highest number of combat encounters...

That seems a fair synopsis, yes. There's a slight caveat since I'm also actively seeking mechanical diversity at my table, but your description is still sound. And I entirely agree that both viewpoints are valid. I know I'm pretty far down the path of being pro-multiclassing. :)

I do the opposite, and actively encourage multiclassing at my table. I'll help to make sure all the characters are effective enough to be fun to play, but otherwise I'm fine with any combination of classes, including dips, even splits, and anything in between. Whether or not the player wants...

Speaking only for myself, I choose D&D because that "minutiae" is sufficient to create the perception that the rules are modeling the game world, and because they provide enough detail to make mechanically modeling a character concept a fun exercise. In other words, the minutiae of D&D create a...

It's hard to invent new magic items with 5e's default magic item rules, because how long an item takes to make depends on its rarity! A unique prototype is going to be (by definition) at least as rare as the rarest item, so the production would take as long as the rarest items: 20,000 days...

In my campaigns, treasure is hugely important, because it gives the PCs the ability to start shaping the game world in an open-ended way. Whether they choose to do so by building their own home base, engaging in politics, upgrading infrastructure, building a network of contacts, engaging in...

All the time. And usually my PCs factor that in to their strategy, either by trying to learn enemy spellcasters' rest patterns and timing their attacks when the enemy is low on slots, or else engineering a situation where the enemy will want to use lots of slots and then attacking them after...

"Choked flow" refers to the maximum speed at which a fluid can be driven through an orifice by a pressure differential. Increasing the pressure beyond that point doesn't increase the flow rate, and the fluid is said to be "choked". In liquids, the effect is caused by cavitation--increasing the...

In the context of choked flow, there are a lot factors that go into determining how fast the liquid can go before becoming choked. Given that waterjet cutters are designed not to choke, I would assume that they can achieve higher flow rates than would be possible in the trap. (Also, critically...

In one of my 3.5 campaigns, in a tomb that the designers built to keep out tomb raiders, the funerary gifts were sealed in a partially evacuated stone chamber. The difference in air pressure made the stone door basically impossible to open by normal means. When the PCs finally just disintegrated...

Since the block is falling downwards and the displaced dead cube stuff is going upwards, the net downward momentum transfer to the structure (and the ground below) must exceed the original downward momentum of the block by some factor X. There's no reason to assume that X=2, which is what would...

This type of analysis doesn't work either, due to the issue of "choked flow". You can't simply make an opening smaller in order to increase the flow velocity arbitrarily high. I don't know enough fluid dynamics to calculate whether the flow would be choked here, but given the 99-1 ratio you've...

I do! :) If there is no way for monsters in a given locale to get food, I simply won't put monsters there that need to eat. More broadly, I won't put any monster anywhere unless there's a good reason for it to be there.

Of course, the farther it spreads the less dense the spray. Even if we assume dead cube stuff is still harmful (after being subjected to a sudden, massive pressure change no less) at some point it's going to be too finely dispersed to be dangerous. We're firmly out of the rules here, so the DM...

But not quickly. See below. Note that shorter impact times necessarily happen over shorter distances. Shorter impact distances displace less gelatinous cube material during the impact. So the higher the dynamic pressure, the smaller the quantity of cube material that will ejected by that...

I entirely agree that the errata is a useful clarification, whether or not it's functionally superfluous. Everything related to weapons and types of attacks would have benefited from being written much more clearly.

I tend to agree with your conclusion, I'm just describing both sides of the debate. Note, however, that if all attacks are weapon attacks or spell attacks, then the errata would be superfluous--unarmed strikes would be (melee) weapon attacks simply by virtue of not being spell attacks, and thus...

I believe the confusion surrounding "melee weapon attack" was conclusively resolved, but the phrase "weapon attack" is still (arguably) ambiguous. "Weapon attack" could be a superset that includes all "melee weapon attacks" and all "ranged weapon attacks" or it could mean "an attack with a...