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If you are better at fighting than stealth, or if that's the way you like to roll, it's not the wrong approach. There is no "wrong" approach in D&D, unless you die (and sometimes not even then!). I don't feel it's for the DM to decide how the players should go about their business as long as...

If it's that important to the campaign, why not just remove chance from the equation and assign an array in the range you find reasonable? Maybe 14-13-11-10-8-6? You have to let players rearrange scores anyway, if you want them to be able to choose their class before rolling, and the...

I always scratch my head when people complain about how much fun the players are having. My advice on running 5e: If encounters are too easy for the players, increase the number of monsters, not the stats or the CR. The difficulty increase that happens when additional monsters are added is NOT...

It sounds like you're not an evoker. If damage is your primary gauge of effectiveness, you probably should have been. If you specialize in another school, you should be playing to those strengths (and framing this discussion in those terms).

I wasn't trying to prove anything, as the rules speak for themselves. I was only trying to provide a way to think about what the rules represent. Believe me, trying to inject realism into the game will never be my primary goal.

That's true; you don't have to move away without Disengaging. I'm glad we agree.

I do agree that the rules would be better with the addition of your passage.

Never mind. An odd display issue was mashing things together for me and making it look like something it wasn't.

All level 20 characters are already capable of amazing, insanely superhuman, nearly game-breaking things, even by D&D standards. If they got even more powerful, I feel like the very notion of combat would stop making sense. To me, "epic" is not about being a god. It's about being powerful, yes...

Statement withdrawn -- the poll was displaying oddly in my browser.

Nah, the rules as written make sense, and they work fine. It only becomes a problem when DMs think their only means of shutting down a blatantly exploitative player is to read rules at them. The 5e rules are not written with punctilious rigor in mind, so such a rigorous analysis as we see in...

Actually, compared to Magic Initiate and Spell Sniper, the whole thing is pretty weak. Since you're not letting them stray outside their class, I'd just go ahead and give them the whole list of cantrips available to their class.

I understand that, and I certainly will. I just think it sends the wrong message to have this written in the rules. (By the way, I'm only referring to XP rewards in my rant, not treasure.) In many cases, XP is an illusion, anyway. DMs everywhere fudge here and there to make the party level up...

Electronics became very popular at gaming tables during 4e -- to some people, they were almost a necessity. But having seen what that did to the social dynamic of the game, I'm strongly urging all my players to leave their electronics at home. It's just too much of a distraction for some...

I might let a wizard swap out a cantrip by learning a new one from a scroll (and forgetting an old one), but the wizard progression table very clearly defines how many cantrips a wizard can know. This is not a gray area.

Step 4 of "Evaluating Encounter Difficulty" is still way off base IMO. It's basically saying, "The risks for this encounter are significantly higher than you'd expect, but we don't see any reason to increase the rewards." As an example in episode 3 of HotDQ (as related by my DM -- I haven't...

I hate flimsy soft-bound rulebooks. :p

It's not about what the enemy can or cannot do; it's about whether you have broken the momentum of combat to step backward. A rogue can do this because he or she is specially trained to direct that momentum in unexpected ways. Everyone else can only dodge sideways. The enemy doesn't get an...

After checking the entire list myself, it seems "a couple of cantrips" is literally accurate. They are prestidigitation and thaumaturgy, and it's not hard to remember that those do not require concentration. Etherealness is harder to remember, but I don't feel like it's going to come up that...

There's no such thing as a threatened square in 5e. I guess we disagree on what an attack of opportunity actually is, why it exists, and possibly 5e combat dynamics in general. Your argument sounds a lot like a desire to put the 5-foot step back into the game.