Search results

By 5th level, your average rogue will have a minimum stealth roll of 10. He'll beat most monsters most of the time in normal lighting conditions, and in darkness, so few monsters have a PP above 15 (or blindsight/tremorsense) that failing a stealth check will be virtually unheard of. That said...

This is why it's silly to harp on somebody misremembering something. I mean, I remember the Berenstein Bears just as clearly as anybody else...

An idea I've been coming back to a lot...the Ranger lacks something centrally thematic, right? Sure, you can fix casting. Subclass bonus spells and spell prep help a lot. Adding some better spells to the list (I mean, a 3rd-level AoE spell that does 3d8 non-scaling damage? Really?) helps, too...

These aren't different statements.

Right, but a Ranger can't, in reality, have even that many. Sure, there are only 4 Paladin non-concentration spells. But a PHB Ranger (I don't have TCE, don't know it) doesn't even have access to 4 spells until 5th level, and probably won't have 4 1st-level spells until 8th level. The Ranger...

No, that's not the problem. The problem is, in the real world, technology and society are deeply intertwined, the size of the world is defined by the speed of travel and communication, and evolution, not wars between mythic gods in planes beyond, drives the development of everything. There are...

I gave Rangers prepared spells as a house rules, plus some bonus spells for the PHB conclaves. Trust me, it broke nothing whatsoever. It just let the class breathe a little more. In practice, an actually existing 10th-level ranger's spell list is 6 spells. A 10th-level paladin has around 40...

Realism arguments are silly, both for and against changing the Drow, because all the demographic information provided in D&D, ranging from population densities to the scale of war, is completely nonsensical. I mean, the answer to what Drow 1000 miles away in a different civilization from...

The argument that BoD should stack with armor is the argument that Wizards, Monks, and Sorcerers shouldn't actually get them, because Fighters, Rogues, and Paladins deserve them more. This is the diametric opposite of what the item is for, going back to their introduction roughly 40 years ago...

I wonder if someone related to her, or perhaps a personal friend, was the lawyer scooping up the legal fees.

At least Remarkable Athlete always gives you +1/2 PROF to initiative, and there are a few spells where breaking out of the restrained condition is a raw STR check, not an Athletics check. So even as a ribbon, it still does a thing.

Yes. That's why I scribbled out the undead bits, not the whole Channel Divinity section. And I'm being rather generous. Unlike Favored Enemy and half of what's in Natural Explorer, Turn Undead and Destroy Undead are actual rules with concrete utility when and if they come up in a campaign. "Any...

I am merely saying that if a fun and engaging exploration system existed, then the Ranger would be a good class. I'm not volunteering to design such a system, nor am I proposing how to do this. I am pointing out the lack of any such system in 5e means the Ranger, as it exists in 5e, is just a...

If a design team isn't up to the task of figuring out how to design an exploration system that amounts to more than "extra tedious bookkeeping," they shouldn't design a class centered the system they were incapable of actually providing.

There are campaigns with very few undead.

Knowledge checks would be useful if the rules worked like 4e: Instead, what we have is, "If the DM decides a knowledge check is appropriate, make a check using whatever skill the DM decides against whatever DC the DM has set. If you succeed, the DM will reveal to you whatever information the...

Sounds to me like products were priced high in order to get a bigger cash advance from Random House, so the money was on hand for Lorraine Williams to pay herself her salary, bonuses, and Buck Rogers royalties.

The issue here is that the 5e rules-writing team didn't give the Exploration Pillar its due. If 5e had a rich, robust exploration system, where having poor explorers meant your equipment tended to be in bad shape, you fatigued more easily, injuries lingered and festered, patrons tended to be...

Well, we've come full circle back to this point, made much earlier: A class feature which requires special DM attention to be useful is badly designed. Sure. I could inject a group of demons for the ranger to track in Out of the Abyss, make him feel like it actually mattered that he has that...