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I am by no means someone that thinks monsters and player characters need to use the same abilities and rules, but having the creature type of the player option and monster version be different is dumb. When the Gith change came in Planescape, I was excited because I thought that meant Gith would...

They were ordinary. But now they’re not. Now they’re adventurers, and thus important enough for the D&D camera to focus on them. If they were farmers or nobles, the Farming Simulator or Crusader Kings camera would be focusing on them instead. A character that refuses to adventure in an...

I am not a character in a game focused around adventuring. D&D characters aren’t born, they’re created to fill a very specific role. If the adventuring party isn’t inherently “special” in some way and the camera could focus on anyone in the setting, why doesn’t it focus on employed workers...

But why are the players controlling them? Why are adventurers/heroes the ones that are focused on? Why is the game adventurers going into dungeons to kill monsters and take their stuff? Why aren’t the PCs playing farmers, or blacksmiths, or reigning monarchs? Why is it considered bad form in the...

I have not, but I also reject the comparison. A D&D campaign isn’t comparable to a golf tournament. The camera is on the party because they’re special and doing the cool things. They’re adventurers. 90% of NPCs are commoners with jobs. Maybe the PCs are just uniquely skilled, or there could be...

But why is the camera focused on them?

Mechanics do take center stage. This book has over 500 stat blocks and the majority have mechanical upgrades, making them more interesting monsters to run. I do not understand what “primarily focused on illustrative purposes” means.

I mentioned two specifics that I preferred (not including Archons and Guardinals and having less specific lore). But the main point of the post was to say WotC was pretty clear about the nature of the new monsters in the videos.

I thought you were. The book already has more monsters in it than any past D&D Monster Manual. What more would it take to satisfy you? Should they remove all of the art and only have stat blocks and tables? The purpose of art is to inspire encounters, adventures, and dungeons. You’re supposed...

That’s a very poor characterization of the discussion. They were complaining that they felt mislead about what the new monsters would be, making it sound like they felt it was false advertising. I pointed out that they previewed this direction pretty thoroughly. They never said anything to...

They talked about and previewed a lot of the monsters that were variants of previous ones. They made a big point out of saying that a ton of older monsters have variants now. The Cyclopes Oracle, Empyrean Iota, Vampire Familiar, Flaming Skeleton, Goblin Hexer, Haunting Revenant, and more were...

I also made one of those, but it wasn’t a melee warrior with monk abilities. More of a buffer/controller that moved people around the battlefield.

Winter Walker Review: Lore: I made an arctic ranger subclass pretty much thematically identical to this one over 4 years ago, and there's also a good amount of mechanical overlap between the UA subclass and my homebrewed one. Mine was even called the Frost Strider, which is pretty similar to...

I meant that Charisma or Constitution should be the ability score all of this subclass's features that scale on Intelligence. Meh. I'd only see that be a problem for players that severely misread the rules. A very rare possibility. If it hasn't come up for Drake Wardens I won't worry about it...

Huh. I just checked my 2024 PHB and it does seem that they got rid of the "you always have this spell prepared and it doesn't count against the amount of spells you can prepare" wording and simplified it. That's nice. I hated writing that every time I homebrewed a subclass that got extra spells...

Yeah, I think designing a whole subclass around slaying a specific creature type is too niche. Imagine picking a Dragon Slayer Fighter for Curse of Strahd, Storm King's Thunder, or Tomb of Annihilation. Sure, it might come up a few times in the campaign, but you'll definitely feel out of place...

Purple Dragon Knight Review: Lore: As I mentioned earlier, I think linking a whole subclass to a single dragon type is too narrow of an idea. These should just be "Dragon Knights," with "Purple Dragon Knights" being a specific order of them. Or if they want to differentiate them from the...

Yeah, those types of abilities can be brutal. The Warforged Colossus has a powerful laser blast AOE that kills and disintegrates anything reduced to 0 hp by it. It very nearly TPK'ed my party in my last Eberron session.

When I was a new DM and I hadn't gotten the DMG yet, I applied the abilities of the player races to the NPC stat blocks. One of my first games had a half-orc gladiator that had relentless endurance. I think new DMs are smart enough to do that, but I agree having a table to make that explicit and...

It's the word "thug" they're avoiding, because of the historically racist connotations of the word. No one forbid them from using the word "Orc." That's silly, Orcs are still in the game. They just share a stat block with the formerly-called-Thugs.