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No harm at all. I'd be perfectly fine with a PC carefully watching a combat with a strange creatures, examining the corpse, and then recalling tales about such a creature, its habits and weaknesses. Just not in combat. However, I know that approach runs against the grain of modern D&D, where...

Sure, but how many different animal threats might you run into backpacking? Not too hard to remember bear, cougar, and moose, their habits, and how to deal them. What if there are three or four hundred potential threats? Few of which you've ever seen in person, and instead have only heard tales...

Because some of don't play D&D combat as a deliberative, slow-motion meta-game. Each round is 6 seconds. Most combat takes place in darkened caverns, amidst shrieks, yowls, and the clangour of battle. There is not the time or the clarity to coolly assess what exactly you're fighting...

It's my impression PF2 affords more options for PCs and foes besides hacking away at huge sacks of HP, and more frequently generates extreme and surprising results. But I could be wrong - I haven't actually played it yet.

Agreed. Because they serve two masters - play at the table and reading material for people who aren't running a game - APs are written in a format that requires extensive re-working before you can think about using them in a live session. That's why I only buy APs in PDF format now - so I can...

I've come to the same conclusion as the OP. Combat is 5E just isn't very dramatic. It's little more than a HP reduction race. I find I'm having to try out all sorts of house rules around rests, crits, and exhaustion to inject some peril into the game. And the monster design is blah. How much...

I prefer the art in 5E to 4E's and 3E's highly stylized approach. But overall, I prefer a gritty, sword-and-sorcery approach to fantasy artwork that has fallen out of fashion in recent decades. Dave Trampier is still my favourite artist, and his work in 1E AD&D defines the tone I like my game...

Barrier to entry is a real thing. And it absolutely affects who enters a hobby. The barrier to entry to be DM in 1982 was very low - some graph paper, the monster manual, and a couple hours before the next game session. Which is why millions of young kids played the game back then (it's also...

This might not be a popular opinion, but I don't believe the system underlying a given edition of D&D has much influence the popularity of the game. The popular zeitgeist sets a climate where tabletop gaming is more popular or less popular. The official system at the time, and the presentation...

Pop culture is so much more fragmented today that nothing has the same reach as comparables in the 80s. Critical Role may seem hugely popular, but far fewer people watch it than watched the lowest rated show on network TV in 1983. Even a monster hit like Stranger Things has less reach than a...

It's worth noting that before character gen and optimization became a core part of the player expectations, you could happily run D&D for 20 years using the same core books.

Yes, in that sense CR fits in with a whole genre of Youtube videos. I wonder if the popularity of this genre is related to the dramatic decline in the amount of face-to-face socialization teens and young adults today experience. So the videos are a kind of ersatz 'hanging out with friends' for...

My concern is Mercer has the opposite effect. I started DMing when I was 11 because DMing in 1981 meant drawing a dungeon on graph paper, populating it with monsters and treasure, and running my friends through it the next day. That was an easy on-ramp to being a DM. And that ease of entry is...

No doubt that's the heart of the appeal. And I guess that's where I have different likes. I rarely feel an intense emotional connection to fictional characters, even when they're presented by a highly skilled novelist (which is my preferred format for dramatic empathy). I see fans of these shows...

I never said any kind of roleplaying is wrong. I said I found Critical Role comes across as contrived to me. All sorts of things strike me as contrived. Heck, every single podcast of live stream is contrived to the extent that everyone acts differently when there's a mic or camera in front of...

Yes, it does seem to be a feature of nerdom that even the slightest hint that someone doesn't like a property brings its fans out to man the ramparts with trumpets blaring and banners flying. Never really understand why people get so upset that others don't enjoy the same things.

People realize I have no problem with Critical Role, right? Someone asked why a gamer might find CR put them off D&D, so I presented a scenario to illustrate why that might be the case. I personally don't really care what other people play or like. Funny how threads become what people think...

No. It's an analogy.

Imagine a streaming show where the players gather around elaborately crafted Dwarven Forge dungeon setups, with the game focused almost exclusively on tactical maneuver and combat in the dungeon. The DM is adversarial and mocks the players relentlessly, while the players fist-pump, high-five...

Streaming has had good and bad effects on the RPG hobby. But one of the bad must surely be the fostering of the kind of intensely loyal and emotional fanbases that makes the fandom of many movie and book franchises so off-putting. We have enough tribalism in this hobby already with edition...