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Since we're all complaining about skills, I think this is a fine time for me to complain about skills. Unless you take a proficiency at first level or somehow acquire it by alternative means, there's absolutely no way to increase skills that you still desire but don't intend to focus on. A...

Nobody "has" to put anything in a fantasy world. The inclusion of those elements is typically done to add verisimilitude a setting in the form of politics, economics, and anachronistic philosophies. It's perfectly reasonable for a fictional setting that draws from historical events, samurai...

I wasn't even going to post in this thread, but I'll go ahead and bite this ginormous fishhook. Dismissing deeply-entrenched cultural attitudes (especially antiquated ones from an era and region that are far removed from our own) as "blind devotion" or "idiotic" beliefs is an egregious example...

Artist: Larry Elmore Source: Dragon Magazine #267 Class: Cleric Serving the Dark Gods is fun!

I don't have much to add to this discussion, but I am reminded of a funny anecdote where a DM hit one of the player characters in our party with a curse that had all sorts of narrative consequences, but we just shrugged them off and used it to steamroll everything. It most definitely wasn't his...

The quality is a bit all over the place. The new quests and involved areas also stick out as very distinct from the rest, though I guess that's not completely avoidable.

Like everything, there is a cultural element to this. In multi-ethnic regions, especially those that have existed as colonies or served under suzerains at some point in their histories, people will often balk at the idea that they could be just as chauvinistic as their former overlord, perhaps...

I believe that this is a part of the reason why many people in this thread and those like them view permanent death as the only tangible consequence in 5th Edition. If you strip a player character of their money, the only loss they've suffered on a mechanical level is the privilege of paying to...

I guess liberal academia really does turn people satanic.

Much like a real person whose 9-5 job is "mercenary-graverobber," a prevailing philosophy in "old-school"-style play is to act recklessly at low levels where you have nothing to lose if you die, and cautiously at high levels when you might lose everything if you die. The investment is the time...

Anyone who didn't get into the hobby with Kriegsspiel is not a real fan, in my opinion.

No, but the DM can still soft-veto resurrection magic without actually meddling with the rules. As an example, the lowest-level spell of the bunch, Revivify, specifically requires diamonds worth 300 GP or a scroll, which casting the spell consumes, and the price for better resurrections...

I mean... they kind of do, even if it's not dying. Just in case it wasn't clear, I don't necessarily agree with their premise, it is just an effort on my part to understand where they're coming from. I myself don't think that any danger at all is required to have a compelling narrative, but I...

Now, I want to preface this by stating that I'm not really convinced by either extreme position. That said, I usually make the attempt to understand what people are trying to say, not what they have literally said. The point that Helldritch seems to be driving at is, no matter how many loved...

Now, I definitely don't speak for everyone, but the most characters I've lost in a single session of 5th Edition is two, and our group collectively lost five characters altogether that day yet managed to keep trucking. Sitting on a few spare characters just in case is a good habit.

Slavery is not a monolithic institution that was practiced one way, but an array of different systems that fall under a large umbrella. Even though the practice of chattel slavery (the system which most of us understand as "slavery" nowadays) has diminished, there is still a glut of the human...

There are more slaves on Earth now than there have ever been and we are its direct beneficiaries.