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Agreed. I think the thing is salvageable, but needs to be cleaned up (so overlap is very rare) or substantially clarified (so it's immediately apparent to players which choices are "traps"). Cheers! Kinak

As written, I'm fairly sure they don't stack... which I understand the reasoning behind, but will lead to some weirdly suboptimal characters like the guide. I think you're on a good track here, but I'd lean towards not granting advantage. I personally like the idea of having tool use you a...

That's probably true, although the flames of the Satanic Panic still hadn't gone out in some areas. Around that time (maybe a year or two earlier), my very Catholic grandmother was still hearing about how awful D&D was from her priest. I still cherish the Spelljammer boxed set she got me for...

Although I agree with Remathilis, this is very true and well-stated. I think it's probably better to say "use tropes early and often, but be thoughtful about your choices and whether your audience are tired of them." Cheers! Kinak

Welcome back :) Tying plot threads together like this is always great. Have you had any sort of pattern or theme with the guardians or artifacts? Do you have a strong idea of who left them there yet? It'll be easier to fit something into an existing pattern than choose something appropriate in...

Black Leaf and Tom Hanks That's a sign of the times, really. I definitely break that one early and often, calling people out by character name for their actions in initiative for example, but it's more of a sad reaction to the Panic of the 80s. Cheers! Kinak

Basically what @Ahnenois said. I've used Heal on a number of occasions for autopsies. For actual dissections (for knowledge other than cause of death), I'd go for the appropriate Knowledge skill. Also, if the player failed their Knowledge check on first seeing the creature, I wouldn't object to...

Thank you, I meant to touch on this. Attribute choices are going to way harder and way more interesting than normal with this character. Int is probably the only one I'd consider properly dumping, but Con might have to lag around average as well. Even with that in mind, depending on the point...

Most of these are sad signs of the times they were written in, but I have to chuckle at how a few reflect on my games around that time. '94 would have been around when my players were starting their campaign-long war against the Harmonium in Sigil (Sigil's police, effectively) for a big ol'...

Selective Channeling is a great choice. It makes channeling in combat feasible and is, in my opinion, the single most important healing feat. For other healing, Extra Channel is probably also something you'll end up using. Quick Channel has also been amazing in our game (allowing channeling...

Any d20 roll you just made. But it is an immediate action, so at most once per round. Cheers! Kinak

Agreed :) The thing that I think separates, say, the minotaur from the original owlbear is that the minotaur has some of those spaces filled in. Who cursed him? Why was he cursed? Where did he live? What happened? The minotaur of Greek myth is really hooked in to an entire setting, along with...

I think this is fundamentally right. That said, I'm watching Star Trek with my wife now (we're halfway through the original series). It's striking how much of the original series could be lifted. Most episodes involve new races or race that nobody remembers the name of anyway. There's the...

I think it's safe to say yes :) Yup. Iron Gods and Mummy's Mask are already in development and neither is Mythic. At GenCon, they said that they're waiting to see how people like Wrath of the Righteous. If people love it, they'll probably do another Mythic AP at some point. If not, it'll...

Thanks for quoting this. I'd sort of glazed over it in context, but it's an interesting assertion. He's arguing, in the rest of the paragraph, that Tokein's worldbuilding basically turns the races he uses into mythical archetypes. I'm not sure how good a job D&D has ever done of capturing...

One my players at one point found a bag full of dirt (normal sized bag, filled with a field's worth of high-quality soil) in a shop in Sigil. He, of course, promptly bought it. Dozens of sessions later, they were trying to figure out how to disable a foundry making weapons for the Harmonium...

You might be thinking of the old inherent bonuses table. I want to say it was in Unearthed Arcana, but don't quote me on that, it's been a while. The closest thing in the core rules are the wealth by level guidelines. The numbers will sort of fall out if you run through a couple builds, but...

I don't much care about orc babies or the endowments of dragonborn. Those are campaign-issues, really. But I do think James overextended his hand on science. Modern scientific understanding may not apply to a fantasy setting, but the roots of that understanding are just common sense things...

Sure! It's pretty cool and several of my players are really excited by it. We're considering using it for Shattered Star when we run it, actually. It's certainly another system to keep track of, but they do a good job of folding that complexity into things that already exist. So many of the...

A wide variety of reasons, the most common of which is a sort of social contract. I've GMed for several groups where we had a spoken agreement of "I won't kill your character unless they've done something stupid enough to deserve it, just make their lives interesting." It occurs in widely...