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I can't say I'd ask "hey do you want your characters to die" at the beginning of a campaign, either. It should be a foregone conclusion that it's possible. I would, however, tell them that death is always on the table.

Because the designers of 5e don't want it to be a game of attrition, even though it should be.

Old school games just tend to be more inspiring to my creativity, IMO. Looking at the Monk in Swords & Wizardry and their "Mastery of Silence" - stopping their heartrate for 1d6x10 minutes. What are the implications of such a cool ability? We wouldn't see anything like that in 5e's monk because...

I was actually wondering this too, because I don't recall any variant rules that talk about altering the death cycle.

For a long time I was not aware that 3rd party content could be and often is better than 1st party content. However, I also wasn’t able to discern what “good” 3rd party content looked like, so once I delved into it, I spent too much money looking for the right content before I was able to narrow...

They’re not fun. That’s kinda the point. Should death be fun? But if we attack a downed character, then we’re specifically going out of our way to be a jerk and will get flak for it. Maybe the fix is that “downed” characters aren’t actually on the floor, but still standing and fighting but...

Crawford said as much here: x.com What kind of terrain might I find in an adventure between locations? What penalties or ways to attack resources might I use beyond just spell slots, ever-climbing HP, and maybe exhaustion?I know there’s 3PP, but if the greater world of DMs isn’t terminally...

Information, as well as the designers setting a lower baseline. I’d prefer to be able to raise or lower challenge per some variant rules, then have to twist and contort the current baseline to take it from super heroic fantasy to just heroic fantasy.

Is the core problem here that players don’t know just how much the game is weighted towards them? Are we doing such a convincing job of pretending they’re in danger that they believe we might actually kill their PCs in every combat? If so, then it would explain that introducing variant rules to...

If a PC obtains resistance to cold damage and all my frost giants are now fire giants, I’m sure challenging them, but that’s just a jerk move, lol.

I believe exploration is definitely on-topic regarding balance in this thread, and not too diverse, if we’re looking at balance as a whole.

I don’t think it’s purely a matter of challenging them in combat because we can always use stronger monsters (though default monsters are pretty dull to run), but that the sense of challenge is only merely temporary. Got knocked unconscious? Eh, you’re not dead yet. 1 point of healing and you’re...

Time for a "back to the dungeon" edition!

By my meaning of exploration, I'd like varying survival and tracking mechanics, environmental conditions and hazards, different wilderness terrains and their effects, varying temperatures and their effects, weather, tables to make maps of different terrains. I don't think any of them would be...

I don't particularly care for influence systems or point systems when it comes to social interactions (I value roleplay at the table over rollplay), but I really do wish there was more around exploration. It doesn't necessarily need to be tables and tables of hard rules, but if it's provided and...

I think each feature (including potential weapon damage and potential spells) and downside should be balanced on a point scale for characters at each level as a whole, where players end up ~60:40 advantaged. For example, ability scores used to (mostly) balance out - you'd get a +2 in one score...

I think there's a lot of crossover in "annoyance" and power gain. Things that are inconvenient are annoying, but taking them away also can make things absurd. I don't like quantum quivers where ammo is infinite because it's not realistic, but tracking ammunition for players is annoying. I think...

I want to remove Darkvision from most ancestries and add Concentration to the Light spell to balance out the efficacy of it, and make the dark threatening again. I know for certain that my players will balk against this because it's weakening them. Is this such a significant balance change that...

Fair. But then if we're talking about balance, we probably wouldn't end up talking about WotC at all :ROFLMAO:

I agree with you! Capabilities should be weighed across the whole of the game, not just combat. It needs social and exploration tiers to balance the characters appropriately. If the fighter could be best in combat and the bard is balanced to not be combat-focused, that's fine with me - to some...