Search results

No, not really, because (as this very post shows), some folks want A, and some folks want Not-A, and some folks want "a thing that manages to be even more Not-A than the previous thing". I want more classes with well-defined thematic purposes (I have a specific set of exactly 12 classes which I...

Then we cannot actually design a game that won't create massive perverse incentives, which in turn will distort the story we tell about those things. Perverse incentives discourage people from playing archetypes they actually enjoy, and instead encourage them to play archetypes that give them...

I've never found it all that rich in most cases. What would you say makes it so? I find the Vampire/Werewolf/etc. stuff dramatically more rich, because it aims at something simultaneously more concrete and yet harder to exclusively quantify. That isn't to say I dislike it--as noted above, I...

Other than Hussar's games, I have no interest in playing 5e ever again. Quintice bitten, hexice shy. Or would that be "Fice bitten, sice shy"? Hmm... Could not possibly care less, other than for reasons that would just be me rehashing old arguments that aren't worth dredging up. Ah, pardon...

... Fine. Six to eight is there explicitly. Five I granted as a concession, to be generous. My apologies, for trying to give more grace than the text actually does. For God's sake, it's not even hard math. Champion, in 5.0, gets one extra crit every 20 attack rolls on average. For the first...

I wish that that method worked better. It worked extremely well in 4e--not perfect, especially if you used the rules to dynamically scale a monster to a new level--but extremely well in general. I mean, the long and short of it is that these GMs presumed PCs functionally took almost no damage...

Where does it say that? Because alllllll throughout D&D Next, that was explicitly the opposite of true. That magic items were explicitly NOT an expected part of the design, and were specifically always supposed to be 110% optional. The incessant celebrations of the magic item haters were one...

From actually checking the math. Three "deadly+" encounters simply cannot produce enough bonus damage output for a Champion to ever, even remotely, keep up with a Paladin--to say nothing of the Wizard, who will be eating well with all the enemies that must be present, or the singular enemies...

Saurman is a Maia, yes. He is, explicitly, Gandalf's lesser in important ways. Gandalf--Olorin--was the greatest, the wisest, of the Maia assigned to become Istari; he was originally the one chosen to lead the Istari, but Olorin declined, out of self-doubt. (His humility and compassion are the...

... Did you read the very thing you just quoted? Because you're literally talking about what I'm referencing here. It literally says, "six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day."

If I may ask: What game is left, if we cut out the focus on combat? Because, especially if we remove most of the unique/utility spells, there's...not much left in D&D other than combat.

I am curious what you think that intention should be. I was under the impression that the lack of intentional design in 5e was something you prized, and the presence of intentional design in 4e was something you greatly disliked about it. Is that not the case? Edit: Meant to respond to this as...

All of these campaigns are from multiple years ago. I no longer have any of the materials for them. Sorry. Really? Are you really going to stickle over this? I had hoped the meaning would be obvious, but...okay. Fine. We did not reach level 4. We were already level 4 and more, but gained no...

Say it ain't so. Yes, I'm well aware you pride yourself on being a "Killer GM" who actively tries to crush the spirits of your players, being actively and openly cruel to them. I have little interest in discussing that.

I'm pretty sure all of them were 5, any that weren't would have been 4. I've never had a 5e group with 6 or more PCs. In my experience, the encounter-building rules for 5e are...well. I could voice my full opinion, but it wouldn't be nice. At all. So I'll just say that my experience thereof has...

Did it actually say that in those books? Because I was given to understand that it never actually said that. It implied it; one could easily infer it; but it was never, ever, actually said. And not actually saying it is a huge oversight. Not saying things is precisely what causes huge issues...

I like alignment...when it is used judiciously: with great care, deployed only when it is truly warranted. In this paradigm, 99.9% of non-adventurer humanoid-equivalent beings are Unaligned. They aren't True Neutral, they have no alignment. Because True Neutral involves a commitment to...

I think my words may have made it unclear. Nearly all 5e games I've played have started at level 1. With the exception of Hussar's group, literally 100% of those games have failed to reach level 4. I have never seen a 5e game that (a) started out at level 1 and (b) actually reached level 4. I...

Level 1 or 2 for most, level 3 for one. Other than with Hussar's group, I have never seen a 5e game that started out at level 1 and actually reached level 4--ever. TPKs, gross GM misbehavior, group just losing interest and jumping ship, or other similar issues have always killed it before level...

"Hobby friends" would be a good descriptor of the two groups this happened to where all the players were people I knew beforehand. Strangers for the rest. So...yeah. Let's just say I have seen a consistent pattern (broken only by Hussar!) of GMs who did not handle this sort of thing well, at...