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I feel like the best villains are the ones the have feelings, experiences, and/or motivations that are absolutely relatable for the audience. Look at Kingpin in the Daredevil Netflix series. He's a murderous crime boss but we get to see him be a little awkward at romance and experience anxiety...

The dumbest headline I've seen was something like, "10 fake rules you should use in your D&D game." Nothing telegraphs the fact that an author knows nothing about D&D as much as calling house rules "fake rules."

Mandragora. I first homebrewed a human-sized and human-shaped plant race with sonic abilities in 3.5 because I felt the game could use a compelling plant race based on real-world folklore. I had different subraces based on different plants and environs like a poisonous nightshade and a hardy...

I tend to favor an approach where the folklore is just incomplete or false in a way that doesn't completely screw over PCs' plans. I used to try to be clever and sneaky with lore drops and info but over the years I've found that it's way too easy for players to completely overlook the subtle...

Personally, I'm a big fan of the trap philosophy of 4e where set-pieces were a stronger element than maiming or killing "gotcha" traps. I could put a trap that shoots fire in the hallway and just toasts whoever doesn't notice it, but putting a rotating stream of fire in the center of a room that...

I feel like that kind of stuff makes the game more fun. I've been in way too many fights that were just hp sacks where the party just used the same tactics until the monsters died, so I'm hoping to find ways to make the players feel smart for using different strategies and do things with their...

Sure, "powergaming" is when you have racial ASIs and some choices are more optimal. As it was originally designed. It shows that racial ability mods are a power choice because some are more optimal than others. If everyone has the exact same bonus, none are more optimal than others. It...

When I played with groups in the 4e days, pretty much everyone, down the the individual, always picked a race that gave them the best ability score bonus for the class they wanted to play. The numbers were baked into the racial choice and that's the most obvious way to optimize your initial...

Effectively the exact same as floating but with the points in the point buy instead of added on the end as an extraneous step. So, not really distinct as all.

The assumption, based on the comments, is that we're talking about a 5.5e or 6e here. If you design the system for point buy and no ASIs, then you're just choosing your ability scores based on points without having a min/max situation based on racial math. If you design the system for point buy...

If you're playing with point buy, no ASIs is effectively the same as floating ASIs. This survey doesn't tell us anything about that though, so we only know how many are against fixed ASI.

I chose floating ASIs without restriction because Tasha's has been a great move away from making race a min/max choice and opening the way for more viable RP options, at least compared to the default game. After reading the comments though, people make a great point if we're looking at it in...

I never played it back in the day and never touched a dungeon boardgame until the Ravenloft and Drizz't games came out. Anything that easy and customizable would be cool as my group back home say that Gloomhaven takes hours to set up.

I would buy that in an instant if any of my groups were still in-person.

Dark Sun, Spelljammer, and Homebrew, so it looks like I got an A+ on this test. Looking forward to seeing what they do to reboot Spelljammer and I hope we get more psionics with Dark Sun.

I've heard it in conversations about Eberron and how it differs from Forgotten Realms. From the discussions I've read, High Magic = there's powerful, world changing magic in the setting that influences things. A few god-like wizards that control entire nations, for example. Wide Magic or Broad...

I keep seeing these arguments/discussion popping up about what exactly race or lineage is and how they're moving forward. I can't imagine caring less about the technical verbiage as long as the mechanics of how it works is clear. Is it a race? Is it a lineage? Does it matter? It doesn't effect...

This is what seemed weird. I put 2nd edition as the first edition I played. There's a bunch of questions about what I bought and how much I bought after first being exposed to the game... which would be around 1990. I put boxed sets, but those were completely different from the boxed set...

Between 2 campaigns, I've never had an encounter where it wasn't active. If you play in a game with more combats, you might have to choose to fight without it sometimes but I've never been at a table that averaged more than 2 or 3 combats each day. Once your prof bonus is 3 or 4, its pretty much...

A Weakness for Weaknesses. Fighting vampires? The locals say that garlic and crosses keep them at bay. Werewolf hunting? According to the gypsies, the smell of wolfsbane repels them. An evil fey has you trapped in an unending labor? Finding out his true name strips him of his power. From...