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By page five, the main thread on Jeremy Crawford's comments on alignment have already gotten predictably heated, so I thought to post some thoughts on what surprises me about this separately. Apologies if I should have kept it to the main thread. The first thought that occurred to me, as I read...

Apropos of nothing, this feels like an adventure hook. We’re all sitting in the tavern when an old man whispers something to us about the True Will of Gygax, buried deep below Castle Greyhawk...

I voted no. I thought that the math of epic levels in previous editions quickly got well beyond unwieldy and any sort of feasible within the game world. Particularly with 5e’s attempts to rein in the numbers on a curve, expanding out that high end would have the same issue. Rather, the Epic...

In the Dragonlance generational campaign that’s been going on and off for twenty five years, the vast majority of my human characters have happened to be black Or mixed race — despite my being a very white guy. That’s because I’ve been mainly playing characters within and connected to a...

This is where I think environmental design is key. The “I spam X” method is largely an outcome of Black Box Design in encounter layout, versus Puzzle Box Design. The more dynamic the environment, the more objects to be interacted with and ways to move around and behind things, the more different...

I don’t think that Fury, War, and Destruction need be necessarily viewed as wholly negativistic. “Fury” can be presented as full emotional expression, not just rage. War and Destruction can be interpreted in terms of Creative Destruction, the constant tearing down and rebuilding/redefining of...

Don’t think that my next Dragonlance character isn’t going to be two kender in a suit of “borrowed” Solamnic armor (the top one wearing a fake horsehair mustache, the bottom one peeking out through the displaced codpiece)...

Per the matter of horror and comic elements, there’s the matter of how classical drama rules work; the storytelling spine of role playing adventures being surprising conservative in following dramatic structure. Horror as a storytelling element works largely by changing up the expected build and...

“Anyone could have been Three Kobolds In A Trenchcoat all along” Well, the questions of racial identity and racial alignment may still be live ones, but we’ve officially now solved the problem of what to do when a player is suddenly absent for the latter sessions(s) of an adventure/campaign...

I’m surprisingly not a fiction guy, so I’m taking advantage of being stuck alone in an apartment for a few months to read a lot of classical philosophy. I spent the first two months plus reading the complete works of Aristotle (although I’ll admit to skimming a bit through the animal biology...

As others have noted (and I’ve done the same), references to Spelljammer by developers and comments that Spelljammer won’t be a setting aren’t necessarily at odds: in the “D&D Multiverse” nature of 5e, it makes sense that a lot of SJ elements are being brought into the core planar cosmology...

I think it’s the very nature of D&D that makes it a bad for for a theme park — and even I say this as a guy who has run a few fantasy larp systems. Even though Dungeons and Dragons borrows from and subsequently creates settings which feature the sort of immersive environments around which parks...

That was my immediate thought too, although I wonder if having a new player using a play test class that involves new systems might be a bit much — it would be hard to answer his questions if you don’t have experience with the answers yet. You might take the basic idea, though, and use a...

As versatile and potentially powerful as Magic Users were, I could never bring myself NOT to play an Illusionist when I wanted to play what we now call an arcane spellcaster in my 1st Edition days when I could, because they just the right amount of flavor baked in (without constraining the...

You just beat me to it (making the grammar save, that is — although I agree on the AD&D terms too)!

I always love how delightfully 1980s Elmore’s DL work always looked (the lack of perms in modern DL art throws me off). It’s the sources and models that make it work!

I always think about how you could take the three books of The Chronicles, the intistial books of The Lost Chronicles, the various bits of Tales and Meetings Sextant that occur within and around the two trilogies, and have the complete through-line of a television series on he War of the Lance...

My initial question seeing this, having not used D&D Beyond, is whether this breakdown includes multiclassing. Fighter especially is a class where I could see characters with a few levels (amid another class) essentially double-counting classes used (with Fighter being so often discussed as the...

Given the amount of work that the Acrobatics skill already does towards the Thief-Acrobat concept, I wonder why there needs to be a whole subclass for it (aside from legacy). It strikes me that what remains missing from previous editions’ versions could likely be handled in a 5e feat. That would...

Given the choice between saying “I shoot the goblin” and getting to quote the French guard from Monty Python & The Holy Grail, the math is irrelevant.