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I was kind of soured on the idea from when I was on another forum, where a + thread was generally code for "here we can take pot-shots at the 'haters' and they're not allowed to respond". But in general, yes, it would be nice to have respite from a subset of posters who hate D&D, hate WOTC, and...

One thing I sometime do, just out of curiosity, is peek in near the end of any thread here that's gone for 20+ pages. Almost without exception, it will be 2-3 chronically online posters who have had their horns locked for days, and are well into Oh-My-God-Nobody-Cares levels of pedantry and...

Agreed. Reading the 4e Dark Sun book, it hit that balance for me where the world is doomed enough for that Dark Souls or Dying Earth-esque "grandeur of ruin" atmosphere, where the scope of the devastation has a bleak majesty to it--but there is still hope. But you're going to have to do the hard...

I think the best systems are the ones that use carrot rather than stick--go along with this persuasion and you get some kind of compensation (plot-influencing currency, willpower points, etc). If social interaction is all punishment for the players for listening to people, that's when things...

The difference is that that is a magical, obviously unnatural effect after which the character returns to normal. There's a distinction between having a spell cast on you, and being "genuinely" persuaded (especially when the player disagrees that the argument was actually persuasive to their...

--then you might be the protagonist of a harem anime. ;)

Another problem with social system is what happens when optimisation and min-maxing is applied (or poorly balanced or outright game-breaking combos), and you get the social equivalent of Hexblade dips or one-handed quarterstaves. We accept that combat is a bit abstracted, a bit cinematic and...

I read a book about weird sports of history, and....about a third of them are creative animal abuse. (The others are things like balloon jumping, going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, sitting on top of a pole for weeks, "polo but with cars instead of horses" and toddler boxing.)

Remember, the best way to defeat a band of evil clowns is to go for the juggler.

That was the highlight for me as well. "But I didn't do anything WRONG!" was such a chilling moment. Also amusingly meta, given how some parts of the community were already raving about how this would be some shocking reveal about how the Betrayers were actually the good guys all along, and the...

I gave players a bonus feat at level 1, from a list of "Things I've never seen in a charop guide."

I was more distracted by all the heroic orcs and grey-skinned drow who suddenly popped up (not to mention the sudden erasure of half-orcs). Which you can entirely do with the subclasses as written. Battle Smith? Your "steel" defender is an effigy of bones, stone or wood, animated by a...

At this point, I just don't use orcs. At all. There's no shortage of "brute" creatures if I need that niche filled, and most of the attempts at rehabilitating orcs just feel kind of insipid, ending up as "noble savages" or "green humans with big teeth".

One headcanon I read about in a GitP thread and which I'll definitely steal if I ever custom-build a setting, is that Ogres are male Hags. Just as Hags embody the stereotypical traits of "evil women" (cruel, petty, jealous, manipulative), Ogres embody the sterotypical "evil men" traits (stupid...

Yeah. People who whine about "cancel culture" are obnoxious and wrong, but there's still something deeply disturbing about the dogpiles that social media encourages, no matter how virtuous their cassus belli might have started out as. It's almost literally an Orwellian Five Minutes Hate.

So the writers were brining Skesi back?

In general for statting Vecna, I'd suggest looking up Sul Katesh, from the Eberron book. It's pretty much the perfect statblock for a "magical final boss", along with a 1/day trademark move of blasting everything in three 40ft radius bursts with force damage, and then having the areas become...

Orcs. As people here demonstrate, say you use them as written and you risk getting dogpiled for being racist. But how else can you use them? The default seems to be the "noble savage" being oppressed by them mean old humans, which is a cliche in its own right at this point. Or the insipid and...

Or just enemies with better darkvision. The drow and duergar can see you 60ft before you can see them.

And even if something is present in a setting, the presentation makes a big difference. Exalted, for example, has always had grim and unpleasant elements, such as slavery, war crimes, demons with alien morality, etc. When some books in second edition went into.....rather too much detail about...