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That judgment call seems more than reasonable to me. Illusions are the trickiest area of D&D magic for DMs to rule on; I find it's helpful to look at the overall mechanical consequence and whether it's reasonable for a spell of the given level. Two turns of inaction for a powerful foe is a very...

If I were going to use XP, I would not hand out XP for beating monsters. Instead, I'd use it as a substitute for incentives that motivate real people more than PCs. My first cut at such a system would be to say, "You get 1 XP for each gold piece that you spend gratifying your character's...

I'm just sad Bernard Cribbins can't reprise Wilf. He's one of my favorite companions, even though he was only a proper companion for a couple episodes. Edit: Apparently he might be in one of these episodes! He was seen on set last May, a couple of months before his passing.

How much more are you, the customer, willing to pay for the extra development time and infrastructure required to harden the system to this level?

You don't have to nuke the campaign, you can just throw a Molotov cocktail or two. The PCs fail their mission, lose the treasure, whatever. If you always put the stakes up to maximum, then you can't afford to ever let the PCs fail. Players who want to take advantage of that can do so in quite a...

Not today, it won't. What it will be is an object lesson in what is required to produce even crappy formulaic TV.

If they produce any shows with AI during the strike, they won't need a boycott to make them crash and burn. Whatever you may think about the prospects of LLMs in the future, they are certainly nowhere near replacing human screenwriters today. Nor is that going to change in the next few months...

As far as I can tell, the only evidence put forward for a denser Mesozoic atmosphere is that the scientists proposing it believed Quetzalcoatlus was too heavy to fly otherwise. Which is a very thin reed on which to rest such a massive claim.

This, all of it. The other day I was getting ready to offer a novel manuscript to an agent, and I needed a title. The working title I'd been using wasn't good enough; I had an idea for a real title, but I wasn't totally happy with that either. "Hold on," thinks I. "I've got a synopsis of the...

Necromancers absolutely need a summon with a "horde" statblock. It doesn't feel like a necromancer unless you have a swarm of disposable minions, but nothing says we have to track them individually. The other thing is that there needs to be a way for the necromancer to use the bodies of fallen...

You know, looking at the Order of the Stick prequels, it occurs to me that there's a decent model there for the sorcerer/wizard divide: Planning doesn't matter. Strategy doesn't matter. Only two things matter: Force in as great a concentration as you can manage, and style. And in a pinch, style...

As a matter of game design, you're not wrong. And the same logic could be applied to other classes. Ranger comes to mind. But the D&D class list is a matter of tradition, not game design. You can inveigh against that, but it ain't going to change. Sorcerer has been around since 3E, it's going...

I will certainly see it -- mainly to give JMS a boost with the reboot. I do feel like the great strength of B5 was its long-form storytelling, though. The movies couldn't capture what made it great.

I think bonus spells tied to subclass should be the norm for any caster. It adds so much distinctiveness and variation. When everyone pulls from the same list, everyone ends up converging on the best picks for their style of play. Of course, it would help if the spells were at least kinda...

If you get hit for 70 points of damage, which is hardly unheard-of at that level, you're facing a DC 35 concentration save. If you raised your Con to 20, and got proficiency in Con saves, and advantage, and +5 from magic items or something... you still need a 19 to make it. 80% of the time, you...

If I were redesigning the sorcerer from scratch, I would base it on the 5E warlock design (the original one, not the new one which is a hot mess IMO). You get a set of innate, at-will abilities -- beefed-up cantrips, basically -- plus a couple of high-end spell slots, and an ability that lets...

You certainly have a point... but now wizards and sorcerers have the same spell list, the same number of spells, both having "spell modification" as their signature feature. Why do we even have two separate classes? I feel like 1D&D is trying to make each class better, but they have a very...

Fixing Modify Spell is easy. Get rid of it. Spell modification is the sorcerer's signature ability.

The school system is a wizard's approach to magic. It's analytical, mechanistic, scholarly; no other class should care about it at all. They would have their own ways of organizing spells, which might or might not be reflected in the rules, but certainly should not be subordinated to the wizard...

He digitized images in somewhat crappy resolution and poor lighting and put them out. It's not as clear-cut a violation as if they were 600-DPI scans in perfect color, but it's a lot more than just a "review."