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I describe them as taking advantage of natural openings that occur in the heat of melee that allow a skilled fighter to pull off extra tricks. Rather than making a separate roll to see if there's an opening specifically to also shield bash somebody, the openings created by the tide of battle...

I agree that while hitting the 40th anniversary would be nice and they shouldn't take more time than they need to (for a variety of reasons), I think that the impact of the 40th Anniversary may be getting a bit overestimated in this thread. D&D is not going to suddenly be dominating the news...

I think that another thing that really helps when trying to run 13th Age in an alternate setting is, rather than picking a group of icons that feel like the biggest movers and shakers in the entire setting, pick a group of icons that will all have direct influence on the campaign. Flea-Needle...

I understand the basic desire to not cross the streams, and I think it's a reasonable strategy (for whatever I would know), but I do think a Ravnica campaign setting book would have been pretty cool, or any number of other settings. (Dominaria, despite being Magic's home for a long time, feels...

There's no formal multiclassing rules at this point, but there is a passage on essentially swapping features between classes with DM permission. While different classes have different structures, all classes begin with three talents, and you can generally swap talents between classes without...

I played D&DNext a bunch of times (although not the first or last packet, and primarily as a DM), and I'm not sure whether I'm interested. My impression throughout was that each packet contained a mix of ideas that I personally felt were good and ideas that I personally felt were bad...

Conventional notions about what different scores in abilities represent maybe? In many cases, there's a pretty severe disconnect between how creatures with particular intelligence or charisma scores are presented and what the actual mechanical effect of those scores are. You could come at this...

I think that having the dragonspawn presented all at once as a giant shotgun blast of well over a dozen creatures didn't allow them to make a great first impression. That's too many for any to easily make a strong impression, and they're kind of a mishmash of intelligent humanoids, aberrations...

Does the extra complexity that comes with making magic items work differently for different groups of classes really buy us enough that it's worth it? Imagine that we have two characters in a party. One is a rogue with +6 to stealth, and one is a paladin with +0 to stealth. (The exact numbers...

To me, "fell-" connotes being unnaturally lethal and virulent and/or corrupted and tainted, which feels kind of off to me. Like, I guess drakes could be those things, but it's not such a good fit that I'd throw that right into the name. "Drake" is already a perfectly good fantasy work that's...

Yeah, Smite is in a weird position of being a feature that's much better than it looks, and arguably much better than it feels. Upping your minimum damage by a lot isn't glamorous, but it makes a pretty big difference in terms of how much damage you're doing.

That seems strictly inferior from both a mechanics-accomplishing-what-you-want standpoint and from an understandability standpoint compared to just referring directly to the class features. What does the first rule get you that "when you multiclass into a class that grants heavy armor...

I think that the best names for the class groups depend on what they're actually supposed to mean. Right now there's sort of a mix of different criteria suggested at, including mechanical similarity, thematics, party role, similarity to one of the "core four" along various lines, and general...

I'm guessing that's influence primarily from 3.5. In 3.5, clerics, wizard/sorcerers, and bards all get level 0 spells (cantrips/osirons), while rangers and paladins do not. At least for the past few editions - and I think even further back than that - the wizard and cleric have been presented as...

This is really neat. I'm definitely following along. :)

I know that lots of people disagree, but even long before 4e, I felt that Succubi were clearly misplaced as demons. I don't mean that they have zero features whatsoever that make it reasonable to call them demons, just that they're a far, far better fit as devils. Yes, they have abilities that...

If anything, the bigger problem with too-general backgrounds is that they tend to overshadow the character'sother backgrounds. Because only one background bonus applies to any check made by a character, it's natural for players to try to draw connections between their higher-ranked backgrounds...

What's produced the best results in my games is backgrounds that are highly specific, not in the "narrow" sense, but in the "actually describing my background" sense. On their face, "Arcane Lore +4" and "Reference Librarian, Arcane Academy (Concord Campus) +4" have the same primary thrust - the...

I feel as though it's not that unlikely that the packet will have many large additions and significant changes. I know that it's only been a month or so since the last packet, but since the packets are not complete images of everything they have done at a particular point, it's possible that...

I kind of wish the WoEB talent didn't have the grim/evil flavor attached to it. I know that you can pretty easily refluff/rework it, but it's a good talent for making the paladin feel more dynamic, whether or not it's actually particularly potent.