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Warlocks are on the weaker side as classes go. If they're going to have extra RP restrictions, they should come with corresponding RP benefits; "you get to keep using your class abilities like classes stronger than you can do without any hassle" does not count. Only two other classes face such...

My ideal, though implementation is challenging, is "roll for circumstances." In other words: Action resolution is handled through a mix of roleplay and deterministic rules. You either have the skill to open a given lock, or you don't. The dice then tell you what complications you have to deal...

Pretty sure that's not true for any modern military. Human soldiers are expensive. You have to train them, equip them, feed and house them, care for them when they get blown up or shot. Meanwhile, drones can be built cheaply and quickly and in enormous numbers, as Ukraine is demonstrating, and...

WotC didn't make Beyond. They bought it. And games in development count for absolutely nothing. Arena is their one and only big success, set against a backdrop of failure after failure after failure.

Sam Altman is head of a company engaged in a race with half a dozen rivals, where the cost of competing is measured in the hundreds of billions. I assume that every single word out of his mouth is aimed at maximizing the amount of money he can get investors to pump into his company. Some of...

Oh, absolutely. The market responds to the incentives it's given by us, the viewing public*, and all the incentives right now point to "get a franchise, milk it dry, look for another." That's why I sorta-kinda want to embrace the notion of getting up in arms when roles are recast (including...

Part of me agrees with this sentiment. But another part of me is like... I'm tired of how everything is franchises and remakes and reboots and dragging out every beloved old IP until the last drop of blood has been wrung from its mutilated carcass. And recasting roles is overwhelmingly in...

Another executive hire from the tech industry. Sigh.

This is the "horde" spell I designed for a homebrew Necromancer subclass, using Summon Undead as a starting point and modifying heavily. (Not yet high enough level to cast it, but I look forward to testing it when the campaign gets there. I expect there will be a lot of balance tweaking with the...

I think the basic idea has potential, but as @Remathilis points out, there are a lot of pitfalls here. The class is thematically built around an "ultimate form," but most of its actual power is in the spells you have to cast to reach that form. The ultimate form itself is more a consolation...

It may well be lousy. I'll watch it anyway. Some things you have to do.

Only if you have enough hits to actually do that. With that, I agree. If WotC must try to reinvent itself as a video game company, the way to do it is to iterate with small teams on small projects, learn from failure, and try again. I don't think this will work, mind you. I don't believe...

Sure, they wanted to do something else. That's fine. But you keep up the relationship and maybe down the road Larian decides to revisit the franchise. Or maybe they'd be interested in a different D&D setting and story. There are lots of possibilities. And meanwhile, nothing stops you from...

They did find a team that worked. It was called Larian Studios. Then WotC laid off most of the folks who built and maintained that relationship, and that was that. I wish WotC would quit trying to be a software company. They're a terrible software company. They have produced an endless series...

That's an undesirable extreme and I wouldn't want to return to that either. But that's one thing we don't need to be worried about at the moment -- we've had one, count it, one new class since 5E was released eleven years ago. And there is an opposite extreme, where everything gets shoehorned...

As with everything I've seen out of 2024E, my response is a resounding "Meh." It's playable, certainly. It's got some good ideas. But it feels cramped and overcomplicated. No willingness to take risks or challenge the game's assumptions; everything must be slotted into the existing systems, and...

They are? Sure doesn't look like it to me. Last I checked, they were still crawling with 2024E bugs, and 2024E is pretty small beer as edition changes go.

Edit: Posted before I got to the red text. Dropping the subject as requested.

For anyone curious where Heroforge quality is today, here's a photo of a Heroforge mini I got a few weeks ago, along with the 3D render on the HF website. IRL it's much harder to see the mold lines (at least it is for me, though my vision is not what it was, and it wasn't that great to begin...