Search results

It's polite to actually quote the rules in question rather than making people go dig them up. Having gone and dug them up, here they are: If a minion takes damage from an attack or as the result of a failed saving throw, it dies. If it takes damage from any other source, it dies if the damage...

Yeah, that's where I'm at, too. Likewise "Gremlins."

This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Bounded accuracy was designed for combat, not skills. Expertise exists because bounded accuracy, using the same scale as combat, would ruin the skill system. In combat, power scales along multiple axes: Attack bonus, AC, hit points, number of attacks, damage...

None of that is a reason to leave "Does the target know its mind was affected by magic?" ambiguous. That's an essential detail for mind-affecting magic, without which the DM cannot reasonably assess how any given target would respond. It should IMO be stated clearly in every single enchantment...

I was going to point out that being a lich requires annihilating souls on a regular basis, and it's pretty hard to do that and be non-evil. Then it occurred to me that in the Great Wheel cosmology, the souls of evildoers endure horrific torment in the Lower Planes, in the process strengthening...

In a dice-based system, you can't represent probabilities smaller than the grain of the dice. In a d20 system, for instance, there is no way to model a failure chance lower than 5%. You have to round up to 5% or down to 0%. In a percentile system, you can get down to 1%. Anything below that...

What I want most out of a skill system is less use of dice and more "just do it." If you are an accomplished thief, there should be no question about whether you can pick an ordinary lock. You just do it. If you're a healer, you shouldn't ever fail to splint a simple clean fracture. The dice...

How do the monsters know the PCs have magical healing on hand, before they see it used? After they see an opponent get back up, the first question should be, "Can we quickly focus down the healer?" If not, then double-tapping is the fallback. But until that first healing spell goes off, having...

Double-tapping is grossly inefficient. Remember that you need three failed death saves to kill, and a single attack can't inflict more than two. So double-tapping everything is costing you two extra attacks per opponent, or three at range. That's a great way to lose a battle you could have won...

Because they are attempting to play in character, and almost any rational PC would prefer to just conjure up the MacGuffin rather than go through a lot of needless pain and risk. Whether or not this constitutes "circumventing the adventure" depends on the DM. When planning adventures, I assume...

I played wizards back then as well. They weren't glass, they were tissue paper. Once I had the idea to buy a couple of war dogs, and my role in a typical fight was to say to "Sic 'em, boys!" and then run the dogs while my actual character hid and occasionally threw daggers. As far as learning...

I believe that starting at levels above 1 should be normal and encouraged -- I can't remember the last time I kicked off a game at 1st. As a DM, I hate dealing with PCs who are practically made of glass, and I'm not much happier playing one. That said, when you get to really high levels, I...

High-level play is rare, partly because it is much more difficult to DM, and partly because most campaigns wrap up or fizzle out long before they get that far. In 30+ years, the highest I have ever gotten in a normal campaign is mid-teens. I have played a few ultra-high-level games, but they...

I encountered the same thing. I tried to be economical in my use of resources and push on hard, until I discovered that the game expects you to take a lot of long rests and you miss out on story if you don't. Now I take a long rest pretty much any time something important happens. For instance...

Yup. BG3 taught me this lesson painfully last night. (Okay, it wasn't actually a BBEG, but it was an opponent in a BBEG fight. I used a high-level spell slot on magic missile, since I wanted to be sure of taking it down, and my wizard was an evoker with an amulet that gave him an extra missile...

Thanks for the replies, all -- both comic and serious! (Which is not to say people should stop replying.) Here's what I've come up with for my campaign. It's likely way more than the players will ever know, but knowing it will help me tremendously in describing mind flayers, their feeding, and...

Interestingly, if you apply both of Crawford's rulings here, they solve this problem. Ruling #1: Each missile counts as a single instance of damage. Ruling #2: You roll a single die and use that damage for each of the missiles. Since the damage is the same for each missile, it doesn't matter...

Using mind flayers in my campaign, and that plus BG3 got me thinking about something that's bugged me for years (and is now highly relevant to me, since I will need to describe the corpses of mind flayer victims): What is the actual physical process by which a mind flayer extracts a humanoid...

I overrule RAW when I believe the result of applying it would be nonsensical. I try to be very sparing with this. In the situation described, I might rule as Mercer did, but only if I had been applying a general rule that the monster's size made it immune to any kind of damage or effect from the...

For those like me whose eyes just glaze over listening to video interviews, here is a more or less legible transcript. I created it by copy-pasting the raw transcript from the YouTube video into GPT4 a chunk at a time, and telling GPT to fix transcription errors and add breaks and punctuation. I...