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Half-elves could have been given a better name from the outset, but they are a good racial model for the common trope of fairy changelings, humans with a touch of fey/supernatural ancestry, or humans influenced by fey magic in other ways. I would be sorry to see them go. Half-orcs also have a...

I should start by saying that I haven't run very many published settings/adventures, although I have bought a few and enjoyed reading them. In my campaign I'm using several adventures from Ghosts of Saltmarsh and I'm pleasantly surprised by the encounter balance. There is a good mix of easy and...

I agree with the OP that PCs with very high skill levels should be able to do astonishing, nigh-magical things. What are these things? For some skills it is easier to imagine than others, partly because some skills are narrow and others are wide. Thieves Tools : disarm magical locks and traps...

Cliché : zero to hero Subversion: the PCs start at high level because they were involved in a magical cataclysm that infused them with power and corruption. They have one year to heal themselves and extinguish the source of the cataclysm or they will transform into mutated horrors. Each...

I think "balance" and "swinginess" are orthogonal. You can design a balanced, swingy game or an imbalanced reliable version of D&D easily enough. For me, too much balancing leaves a bad taste for another reason: balance and the grand unification of mechanics can discourage building characters...

Focus on skillful exploration and management of the risk/reward tradeoff. Should we explore one more room hoping for the big payoff, or return to town with what we have knowing that the dungeon denizens will have time to regroup? How can we bypass that fight altogether? At its best an old school...

Sorry, I was trying to make the point that ki is a member of a multicultural set of cognate words. But I haven't studied the languages in question so I may well be wrong!

I vote ki. It is an asian word but not a monocultural word, just like the "monk" as a person who pursues spiritual and athletic improvement simultaneously is an asian archetype but not a monocultural one. Should we tell every video game to stop using the word mana because it is borrowed from...

I think there are too many mythological inspirations for the bard to choose a common list. Also, the low number of prepared spells is a necessary limitation to balance their eventual access to all spell lists. I would be OK with each subclass adding one or two iconic low-level spells as bonus...

Your latest version is nice and not too different from the base class. Since they have the option to use Wis or Str for unarmed attacks, I guess you can make a Str-based monk without ditching your AC. That's a nice feature. Going a little further down that road, do you think the class design...

I don't want magic without components. To borrow a page from the HERO system, I think of components as limitations on magic, or ways that other people can prevent you from spellcasting. A magical tradition will teach spellcasting with one major and one minor limitation. Needing to talk (V) is a...

Oh don't even get me started on components! There's no good reason for every magical or psionic tradition to be based on words and gestures.

I like it, and I think that monk has always been a psionic class since 1st edition. Their powers are almost all psionic-inspired, just granted without a point cost. And if someone can explain to me a meaningful difference between discipine, ki/qi/chi, psionics, and the Force as power sources...

Fighters should be able to get more powerful mastery effects compared to others. Higher save DC, longer duration, multiple uses per turn, that sort of thing. I'm not convinced that just having access to 3 or 4 masteries instead of 2 is a big deal especially since they can be swapped with so...

The problem is that "hidden" is a relative condition, with potentially different values for every pair of entities in the area. All this wonkiness arises because they are trying to write stealth as an absolute condition : player rolls stealth and the PC gains some sort of "hidden" condition that...

I"ve never seen Conjure Barrage used since 2014. Is it really iconic?

Hmm, necromantic dancing bard with red leather armor?

So now we have some more visibility into the spell progression rules for the classes: All casters share the same spell slot table (same as 2014) Classes can be full casters, 1/2 casters, or 1/3 casters on the spell slot progression (same as 2014) The "number of prepared spells" is tied to...

Giving bards access to all spells in the game? Surprising but... acceptable. On first glance, as a full spellcaster, this makes them the most powerful spellcaster class. Why play a cleric if you can play a Divine bard? Why play a druid if you can play a Primal bard? Why a wizard if you can play...

This is an interesting question and timely... The DoMT is an awful magic item. It has a high chance of either unfairly augmenting a PC, or destroying them, and more often than not it can ruin the players' enjoyment of the game. And yet it attracts us, it inspires us... it speaks to the myths of...