Search results

Someone earlier responded to "What happens to a hero in a burning building?" with "The same thing that happens to everyone else," paraphrasing of course. If the answer to both burning buildings and lava is "you die," there's not much granularity there. Either you die, or you're immune, with no...

Points 1 and 2 aren't countermeasures for casters, they're countermeasures for cheaters. If you have players routinely ignore components, swap memorized spells, and similar, your problem there is the players, not the class. Regarding point 7: currently, most challenging fights are left up to...

The issue here is whether the game should be able to make mooks dangerous at high levels, or whether it should by default make mooks dangerous at high levels. Those who have houseruled mooks to be dangerous in the past or who are advocating that they change it in 5e seem to want it to be the...

I would point out that Gandalf and Rand are the only mid- to high-level characters among those examples, and both of them are only threatened at all because they're holding back. Gandalf isn't using most of his power to avoid attracting the attention of the other people in the world who are a...

Oh, don't even get me started on the whole "NPCs don't use the same marriage rules as PCs" thing. Sure, the 3e rules were kind of time-consuming and clunky at times--having to go through a rehearsal dinner and bachelor party and prenuptial agreements and such just to fully stat out every NPC...

1) I realize that that's not the direction they're taking, and I believe that that's a mistake on their part. The question was whether unrealistic features is a good thing or a bad thing, not whether the designers agree with us. But I'll give 5e a try, just like I gave 3e and 4e a try even...

Perhaps taking a different tack would help explain my point of view better. RPGs benefit sometimes from having the players act on metagame knowledge. Existing PCs welcome a new PC into the party because a new player has joined the playgroup. PCs decide not to go to a certain area because the...

Let me rephrase in bullet points to make sure my point gets across loud and clear: --D&D has always had a power curve where you go from "bound by normal physics" to "bound by action-movie physics" to "Greek mythic hero" to "superhuman" to "godlike." The game fluff matches this power curve, and...

That's exactly my point, that you shouldn't treat marking as a purely metagame mechanic, because it creates more problems than it solves. The creature knows it's marked, which means it knows it's going to have a hard time hitting something besides the fighter. If it knows this because "the...

That's how it's been, by the RAW before houserules, in every edition thus far. As I said, whether you want it to be that way in 5e is up to you, but unrealistic falling damage and many other unrealistic mechanics have been features rather than bugs since before 1e. People who try to houserule...

To all the people who dislike that high-level characters can drink acid, swim in lava, survive falls, etc., and all the people who think that a mook stabbing you to death at night should be a threat at every level: Realistic heroes are low-level. By the time you get past 13th level or so...

The creature. That's the problem with having marking be a purely metagame mechanic. If a fighter yells out "I'm gonna hit you if you touch my friends!" and doesn't mark a creature, the creature knows this; if he yells the same thing and also marks a creature, the creature knows this too. If...

Spoilering a looong post for space. pemerton's post: The fear keyword implies that the forced movement is persuasive rather than physical, true. However, (A) it isn't a keyword for the forced movement itself (i.e. not all persuasive movement is fear-based, so you can't use it for every...

To each his own. I like to make a distinction between purely "screw you, players!" monsters like rust monsters, mimics, trappers, lurkers, brown mold, and the like and ecology monsters like delvers, gelatinous cubes, and such. The dichotomy there is one between necessity and choice. There...

The problem with those "prop up mechanically unsound concepts" PrCs was not that they existed, but that they required too much mechanical investment. Arcane Archer should have been a single feat for Imbue Arrow, really, maybe a second for seeking and phasing arrows if you didn't want to just...

Should White Wolf drop Storyteller for their games, or any system drop Referee, Judge, Seneschal, and similar terms? Nope. Even the name of the guy behind the screen helps evoke a certain feel or mood. Heck, hardly anyone uses DM screens these days, instead preferring laptops or tablets or...

I'm not saying that there must always be a one-to-one mapping of flavor to mechanics, I'm saying that there is a problem if you have some mechanics have one flavor in some circumstances and another flavor in others without consistent rationale. I completely agree that having HP abstract is...

The gelatinous cube isn't so much a "game mechanics" monster in the same sense that a rust monster or mimic is, as it is a "dungeon ecology" monster--it's there to explain how corpses are removed, dungeons are cleaned, and so forth, and its common use as a treasure-dissolver or PC-eater at the...

Solemnization has always been defined as being between one male PC and one female PC, period. That's what the 1e DMG said, and that's good enough for me. Many male players play male PCs more than female PCs, so if you want to allow players to choose that lifestyle for their characters, they'll...

Two points here. "Narrative" facets of D&D work well, and satisfy the "traditional" crowd, in two cases. First, when they have an in-game rationale provided which matches the mechanics. For instance, the Goad feat in 3e forces targets who threaten you to attack you in melee instead of...