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The adventure-cum-sourcebook does actually answer an interesting need that’s long existed. When using prepared adventures, DMs have for decades faced the conundrum of the players zigging when expected to zag and asking “what’s behind this [meant to be purely ornamental] door?” For example, I...

I think “material components” works when it means the caster needs to have a component to pouch/focus/holy symbol — the spellcaster’s version of a toolkit. Just as somatic requirements are an interesting limit for when you’re grappled or chained or verbal requirements when you’re silenced or...

The one part that interests me is how spells are broken down into Verbal, Material, and Somatic components as individual required actions — such that casting a spell could require up to three actions. I’ve been curious how the system might involve casting time in a chunkier fashion (having...

I think folks tend to overlook how feats can be used to diversify abilities as much as specialize them (even if it’s not an “optimized” use of the feats). Fighters have easy access to more skills or quasi-multiclassing through that ‘class ability’ compared to other classes (and the broader...

I always thought that coming to the game through 1st Edition was the best preparation for studying Anthropology in college, Gygax’s rulebooks not being the usual “create rules for a game we’ll play” one sees in most RPGs, but rather “distill the rules of the world we’re playing in to a form that...

I wonder to what degree the experience was due to 1st Edition and what degree it was due to Luke Gygax running 1st Edition. It’s often debated how tight or loose the rules of the game should be, but a tighter ruleset (such as more modern versions) is going to necessarily have a closer range of...

One of the things I enjoyed when playing Rifts was the assumption that few people were fully literate, such that even PCs would often only have literacy skills at lower percentage levels (and that even more literate characters could fail to fully parse difficult technical or pre-Rifts texts that...

Patrician Rome, that is. The vast majority of Romans didn’t have family names — we merely remember those members of the twentysomething families whose members are recorded disproportionately in history. Among commoners and provincials serving in the military, for example, literally “making their...

Folks are overthinking it. The draw are basically just a 1970s women’s prison movie.

Another option is not to figure out how to let them wield it, but rather offer a system in-game for them to destroy the evil objects and get a reward (either payment from a good church or XP as a sort of divine remuneration) for exorcising demon influences on the plane. They still end up getting...

Considering the four years of "Dragonlance is coming to 5e!?" courtesy of oblique references to the setting in the core books, it should take more than a picture of a Giff for folks to assume that a Spelljammer setting is in the works for 2018... ;)

Consider how a creature is differentiated from an object in the game (which is not necessarily the same as how they’re differentiated in other fictions or real life): the presence or absence of a soul or animating spirit. Hence why a dead body is considered an object but an animated suit of...

The problem of using Said as the expert on “Oriental” is that his 1978 work was a Marxist-Postmodernist polemic that 99% of folks arguing against the use of the term in gaming materials has never read, and Said himself is a notorious pan-Arabist and terrorist-apologist anti-Semite and...

Are they Quantum Leap fans? Oh boy...

The answer is five. In the usual adventuring party of six characters, having five elves means that you’ll likely end up with them all speaking to each other in elven, making elvish in-jokes, and otherwise making that other non-elf party member feel left out. Regardless of alignment, that’s just...

Does 5e still give partial-XP for "observing a trap in action" when one would usually be disarming it? As a rogue with the appropriate tools, walk around the dungeon with a ten foot pole and a note pad, clearly trying to learn dungeoneering as you go (setting off traps from a safe distance)...

How about the Minotaur from the Waterborne UA? Their d10 horns and charge attack should come in handy if the race were allowed.

It probably would be fine for a DM to allow that spell to be added/substituted onto the Oath of the Ancients paladin (or oath bonus) spell list if a player really wanted to get the Warden feel for a character.

I think that the problem is that video games and modern action movies, sources from which many fantasy fans draw character inspiration nowadays, focus by necessity on confrontation. That requires the protagonist to have enough power (and that power to be retain or regenerate, not just be...

I get the sense that the final PF2 game will, for me, be a toolkit of cool ideas to pilfer for D&D 5e (the notion about turning perception into a different sort of proficiency instead of a skill, given its use by every type of character, is the sort of idea that could be adapted pretty easily)...