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A reasonable subtle way to do it is with nonmagical inspiration. A character might notice or recall something as a result of their connection that provides a benefit of some kind - for example, they might recognize something that's otherwise not obviously valuable as valuable. In the middle of...

I'd be interested in hearing more in-depth what the playtest results turned up, although I understand the reasons for not wanting to overshare that (both from a PR standpoint and from a "let's not give away our market research for free" standpoint). The five statements in the article seem like...

One thing that might be useful to keep things both grounded in what's already happening and to make them less generic would be to start with what you see as the major plot threads happening in your game, and then from there think about how an icon relationship could affect that thread or tie...

Here's what I tend to do: i) It depends a lot on the nature of the actual relationships. There's a lot of possible ways that positive and negative relationships can be expressed. True differences of opinion, as NP notes, are probably best left handled by the players. As far as two players with...

If you just want your lion to carry you around outside of combat, you can just have it use the normal rules for creatures carrying things around, the same as you carry your bedroll or a wizard carries his familiar. Because you're a gnome, the lion has four legs, and it's probably pretty strong...

Planescape's win is made even more impressive by the fact that it hasn't been directly supported in TTRPG form for so long. I know that EN World skews older/oldschool, but it's almost 20 years since the setting last received a main setting book. (And 14 years since the very popular videogame.)...

While I try to mix up the shapes and sizes and delivery methods in actual play, the archetypal potion, in my mind, is in a flask-shaped container.

A lot of the interest in DDN for us was novelty-based. We're more interested in seeing what's new or interesting than in the game itself. (I do believe the game will be more interesting when it's done, of course.) With a series of relatively uninspiring and uninspired packets and kind of a lull...

If you don't make the damage dealt when the creature chooses to take damage instead greater than the damage that a weapon attack does, then trying to use a maneuver with the OP's rules is strictly inferior to simply attacking, so you're essentially removing maneuvers from the game entirely...

I don't think they make that big of a difference, because players aren't dumb. People don't play race/class combinations where the penalties make much of a difference, and when they do, they buy the stat up high enough (or put a large enough die roll in the stat) such that the character is way...

It'll ease pressure on heavily MAD classes (those that rely on several stats being high) a bit, but will otherwise be nearly imperceptible. People sometimes talk about five-point differences in point buy as though they're the difference between scratching in the dirt for roots to eat and leaping...

At the time of the MIC's release, one of the things that the community pretty widely considered to be kind of an issue was that in a game with about a skrillion magic items, most slots had a clear winner, maybe one or two other interesting choices for certain characters, and then a vast sea of...

If I'm deciding in-character which sounds more prudent, rather than deciding as a player which sounds more interesting, the key things that I feel like I need to know are: - Do we have a good reason to believe that the river isn't just a completely shutdown of an obstacle? - How important...

13th Age did a bit of a website overhaul a little while back - which made it easier to find basic information on the game - but that was when the core book was still further out itself than it is now. Waderockett's been super responsive to people's concerns about information visibility on the...

I also think that it's worth noting that if you're playing 13th Age on a physical map, it's still somewhat faster than grid play in recent D&D editions because you're not counting squares or anything like that. I sometimes use maps when I think that the nature of a combat encounter is such that...

You can't even use spells like Polymorph or Greater Polymorph to turn into a winged elf and get a fly speed, even though those spells do let you turn into things and gain their fly speeds. (Beast Shape II and Elemental Body I, which Polymorph runs off of, let you gain the fly speed of what you...

I mean, what I feel unclear about is why anybody feels like "+1 to everything is the new baseline" is a valid thing to claim. It happens to be the set of bonuses that one race gets. I don't see why it's more valid to consider that the baseline than any other racial set of benefits and/or...

"But let's take Next as an example. Humans get +1 to everything. That's your baseline." Why? I understand that mathematically the difference between -1 and 0 is the same as the difference between 0 and +1, but why, across all of the editions of D&D, across all of the various bonuses and...

Very little of that modularity involves anything that feels all that unique to Next; I have a more difficult time calling it something "the designers have been trying", rather than just emergent properties of those elements that are present in similar amounts in other editions of D&D. The big...

The easiest way to explain it is "they work like Next casters do". Basically, you choose a certain number of spells each day, and after that you can use any of your slots to cast any spells of the appropriate level. You're basically a sorcerer who can change their spells known every day.