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I would say that a player that is only using Insight to detect falsehoods is restricting the usefulness of that skill, not exploiting its broadness. Also, a high Insight roll should tell a player that a person is lying. If the DM is concerned about a player metagaming, that would be a good...

I ask the player what information he or she wants to know. The higher the roll, the more different types of information they can obtain. Resistances, Immunities, special attacks, special defenses, weak saves are all on the table as information that a character could plausibly have heard about...

I don’t see why the absence of random encounter charts in the DMG is indicative of anything. For all we know, they are included in the Monster Manual.

Beats me. I was responding post 270 that suggested that the loss of hireling rules and level titles had something to do with sandbox play.

Gasp! Then maybe the 2024 DMG does support sandbox play!

Sorry, how is publishing more books « monetizing the DM experience » when you are a publisher? I went to a restaurant last night. The food was good, but I feel they were monetizing the dining experience. When you apply a term to everything, it ceases to have any meaning.

And they very quickly backed off the fixed ability scores stat boosts when their customers complained about not being able to make Dwarf Bards or Sorcerers, or the Elf Constitution penalty limited a bunch of Elf characters. Even before the revised edition came out, you could take the « two free...

Interestingly enough, this is a rather dishonest framing of what people have said. The majority of posters in favour of open rolling have said that they prefer to roll openly as GMs because it builds trust with their players (or it reduces their own temptation to misrepresent rolls).

RAW is not RAW.

Which raises the question: WHY do you need 3 « this is how nature works » skills? You don’t need separate Religion skills for different religions, or for rites and rituals versus knowledge of the undead, or for ministering to your flock. Same thing but more for Arcana. Some skills are parsed...

I kind of disagree with this. Yes, different groups can stretch the bounds of certain skills, but this ignores that certain skills just naturally have much larger bounds than others. If you are a magical themed class, you basically only need the Arcana skill. It covers knowledge of magic...

The problem with Animal Handling is that is overlaps substantially with Survival and Nature. A character runs into a bear in the woods and wants to chase it away without provoking it. Unfortunately, they don’t have Animal Handling. No problem. Seems like this use also be covered by both...

I think it depends how you evaluate the uselessness of skills. Deception, Intimidate and Persuasion all pretty much do the same thing using the same attribute, so it is rarely useful to be skilled in all of them. Knowledge of Nature is split between the Nature Skill, Animal Handling and...

Hey, I think it is a lot better than all those entities that don’t have degrees in developmental astrophysics and create a solar system anyway. ‘Cause that’s you get dark matter, people!

I have found that it is harder to run games set in modern times for this reason. My players know quite a bit about modern life, so stuff like movie hacking, secure facilities not having elementary security precautions and unlimited mooks that are willing to die for nebulous evil organizations...

I love that 7e’s commitment to modularity and to “getting the D&D YOU want to play” means that through the use of AI, each customer gets a PHB that is perfectly customized to them. However, it is now impossible to play with non-AI players as the different PHB are not compatible.

The splatbooks are increasing numerous and niche. Did we really need Tasha’s Guide to Xanathar?

Clearly not. You seem to be making two assumptions: 1. If a player invokes a background feature in a way that the DM believes is nonsense, the player doesn’t have a reason to believe that the feature is applicable; and 2. The DM isn’t wrong that the applicability of the background feature is...

There is a very important difference that you are eliding. If a player believes something is nonsense and does it anyway, they are being a jerk. If a DM believes something is nonsense, and stops the player from doing it, even if the player doesn’t think it’s nonsense, they are being a jerk...

This tends to be my experience as well, across my 3 active groups.