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I think it's obvious that both Doctor Strange and Iron Man have exactly that defining moment of realization. Tony Stark's brief stay IN A CAVE WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS is particularly iconic.

That's not really the problem here. If I were writing a scout, I would like it also to have cool things to do in the wilderness.

That depends. If sorcerers are akin to Marvel mutants, then the limited but sometimes eclectic repertoire of powers at their disposal could be right on the money. Later 3E was doing this sort of thing with a number of classes like the warmage, dread necromancer, and beguiler. Just pick a theme...

I can't quite agree with this. As has often been observed, the irony of D&D's wizard/sorcerer split is that mages in most modern fantasy works are both: you have to be born with the "gift", but you also have to find some schooling to learn to control it. This is true of characters from Harry...

Fanatics with codes of ethics but "end justifies the means" attitudes are common examples of LN or LE villains in sources that discuss the topic, like the Book of Exalted Deeds. This is especially the case when that attitude leads them to take innocent lives. There is nothing culturally relative...

I'm afraid I'm missing the point here. Aren't these just cantrips by a different name?

I did it! I found the other Discovery fan!

In my experience, the games that do it have approaches that are (a) more comfortable with "DM may I?" resolutions to PC abilities, (b) slower paced such that calculating whether a particular effect is possible and how much it costs isn't a jarring break in the action, and possibly (c) lower...

Yeah, all that stuff from the Beyond playtest seems to have evaporated. It's frustrated me a few times too. Let's table the discussion of what happened back then; it doesn't really matter anyway. We've got the sorcerer class we've got.

Walk me through the reasoning by which WotC shows the community a class specifically in order to see whether or not they like it, gets the response that they like it, and decides to kill the class anyway. Whatever WotC saw in their feedback, it clearly told them that it would not be a good...

Don't let me dissuade you from looking for yourself, but I did check all that and wasn't happy. 4E's emphasis was heavily on combat options. The ranger class identity worked in that edition, but in a 5E environment, it doesn't make sense to load it up with all the bow and dual-wielding tricks...

Touché. Oh, man, I didn't even notice his alignment. Yeah, he is... not good. Even neutral would be generous. He is, bluntly, a terrorist, and the central dramatic conflict of the story is Arronax and company trying to reconcile their feelings for his genius with their feelings about his...

I went through 4E material extensively looking for inspiration for my own ranger rewrite, and was frustrated at how little there was to mine from it. 4E utility powers are really... specific.

Well, that is certainly a... motivated perspective on events. But it doesn't make sense for WotC to have killed the playtest dragon sorcerer if it got broadly good feedback. And I don't see how "wizard players" come into the picture at all -- that sorcerer didn't have Vancian casting, neo- or...

5E does. Or do you mean further back? 4E definitely didn't (what would that even mean in an AEDU world?), and I don't think 3E did. I'm not as familiar with the 1E and 2E DMGs, though, and they were full of surprises, so maybe there.

The Willpower system was a little more granular than it needed to be. If I were going to build a class with this transformation theme, I'd just give it warlock spell slots: spend one slot, get transformation A, spend a second slot, get transformation B, and so on.

I'm not sure your account is accurate. Development during the Beyond era did focus on the "Core Four", and they did adopt a "we'll get to them eventually" attitude towards the other classes (which seems to have been to the detriment of the ranger in particular). But if I'm recalling correctly, a...

The revelations of The Mysterious Island are dubious because it's set sometime during the American Civil War, which ended in 1865, while Twenty Thousand Leagues begins in 1866. There's a chapter in Twenty Thousand Leagues entitled "Everything Through Electricity". That's obviously a handwave...

I had this idea for a detective class feature, but it's kind of unprecedented and open-ended, so I thought I'd ask for a few more eyes to take a look at it. Does it make sense? What problems do you foresee running it? It is it overpowered? Underpowered? Both? Does it seem fun? INTERROGATOR By...

If I were designing "inborn power" mechanics from a blank slate, they'd look more like the warlock than the sorcerer. And "borrowed power" wouldn't look much like the warlock at all. In fact, in a 2E-like paradigm, you could have a single low-level wizard spell that contacted a fiend willing to...