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I am not a lawyer and fair use is a weird and wily beastie... but if you're showing a big part of an entire set, and Wizards didn't send it to you as part of a "spoiler" campaign, I'm fairly sure that is a copyright violation, yes. Whether WotC pursues it is up to them. They mostly don't, for a...

I had a number of issues with the 5E implementation of the warlock. So, let's see... 1. "Invocation taxes." You don't get many invocations, and Agonizing Blast/Thirsting Blade are practically mandatory to be effective in combat. If you don't take one of these, your regular damage output plunges...

If by "mage classes" you mean "wizards and sorcerers," I agree. Warlock got some QOL improvements at the cost of losing their most distinctive feature and getting nerfed all to hell.

The headline, as is so often the case, is not backed up by the article. "The documents say Pinkerton operatives were inserted into an Amazon warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that warehouse workers were circumventing sort of the application process for applying to...

According to their statement, they did. He didn't respond.

Quite possibly. But it is not illegal to send somebody to their house to talk to them about it.

The company that uncovered and thwarted an assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln before his inauguration? That spied for the Union during the Civil War? That hired the first female private detective? That's "a gross move?" Either their history is relevant, or it's not. I have a lot of...

So... someone at WotC, with no expertise in this kind of thing (but "M:tG street cred," whatever that means), is going to have to identify the person, find out where they live, get on a plane, fly there, and hope the person is reasonable and doesn't get violent? And apparently they did make...

Because I don't assume that everything Wizards does is automatically bad just because they're Wizards, and I have yet to see a convincing argument for why this specific incident was a big deal. "BUT PINKERTONS" ain't it. Their thuggery in the Gilded Age is no more relevant today than their work...

We in the D&D community have developed a seriously warped idea of what level of change constitutes an "edition." In any other form of publishing, or even any other TTRPG, there would be no question that 2E, 3.5, and 1D&D were new editions. 3.0, 4E, and 5E were not editions, they were total...

The jury is still out. Literally. There's a class-action suit pending right now over the use of artists' work without permission. Note that the suit is not just about the training process; the plaintiffs claim it is possible to get Stable Diffusion-type generators to actually reproduce their...

Ehh, not really. Forum discussions are widely used to train language models; they provide a gargantuan supply of conversational text. If you sit down to study natural language processing, the first exercise generally involves downloading a bunch of Reddit. And how many "independent" forum sites...

You are correct. Per the Silmarillion, dragons appeared during the First Age and played a significant part in the war of the Elves and Morgoth (Glaurung in particular caused a lot of tragedy); but winged dragons were not seen until the very end of War of Wrath, when Morgoth unleashed them in the...

Another way to do it would be to do max damage, then roll on a crit table for a "special effect." That slows things down a lot, though, especially in 5E. There are just too many attacks flying around; nat 20s are fairly routine. I've seen even more implementations of critical hits than fumbles...

I have seen many implementations of crit fumble rules. They all resulted in slapstick combats where fighters came out looking like idiots. (And, as others have noted, multiple attacks make high-level fighters look dumber than low-level ones.) Hard pass from me. As for critical hits, I think a...

I definitely think psions should have innate, always-usable abilities that cost nothing. Telekinesis to let you move unattended objects and strike with them (for a fixed amount of damage). Telepathy to let you sense conscious creatures and communicate with them. Et cetera. These should be...

This makes a lot of sense when you think about it. A slash or thrust using only the arm muscles is extremely weak; a fighter learns to deliver blows with the strength of their whole body -- driving off the legs and pivoting the torso. And you can't pivot left and right simultaneously*. The...

So far, what we have seen looks about on the level of the 1E --> 2E transition IMO. If 1E and 2E were distinct editions, then so is this.

From the attack on Laketown: "The black arrow sped straight from the string, straight for the hollow by the left breast where the foreleg was flung wide." Smaug has a "foreleg" which is situated near his chest. If he were on the ground, this could conceivably refer to a wing being used as a...

Hard disagree on the feat. That bonus action shove is amazing for a caster. Unless you're a cleric with spiritual weapon up, you're not using your bonus action for anything else most turns, and the ability to run away from a melee foe without provoking is huge. It's even better for your allies...