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So, before reading the outcome, my reasoning: If the specialty plate is being made to order (i.e., a driver sends in an image plus money and the state prints a plate with that image), then it's pretty clearly a First Amendment issue and the Sons are in the... well, not "the right," but the case...

In my favorite Christmas movie, a down-on-his-luck inventor brings home a magical new pet for his son, who learns important lessons about life, love, and proper feeding times. And we discover the amazing story of a dad who risked everything to give his family a Christmas they would never forget.

In chess, the ability for pawns to move two squares on the first move was a kludge introduced to speed up games. En passent was added as a kludge on top of the kludge, to preserve some elements of the older style of play. In 5E, two-weapon fighting comes to mind. The use of a bonus action, the...

My overall opinion is "Meh." There are a number of nice little improvements, but nothing that knocks my socks off. Meanwhile, the complexity dial has been cranked up a couple more notches, and it was already higher than I liked. Some "fixes" ended up breaking the mechanic in question even...

Okay, fair point. I should have said a spear, as long you can make it without jamming up at every corner. The main point was that swords are designed for fighting humans, not monsters, and the longer blades are specialized for particular forms of human-fighting. There's a reason nobody hunted...

Because the fighter gets to make twice (or three times, or four times) as many attacks. And has more hit points. And better AC. And so on, and on, and on. If all combats were settled by each player making one single d20 roll... then yeah, the fighter would and should get a much higher bonus...

The obvious weapon for a dungeon crawler is a pike. It combines long reach and thrusting action (because you'll often have limited space preventing you from taking a swing); a pike is perfect for holding back a monster in a narrow tunnel. Your sidearm would be a short sword, something to use at...

The fact that they're not allowed to move closer to you means you have effectively set up a wall cutting off half the battlefield (one which you and your allies can ignore). By combining that with actual walls or other terrain obstacles, you will often be able to block them into a confined space.

When an effect calls for a save every round, it specifies when the save takes place -- for instance, "when a creature comes within 10 feet of you for the first time in a turn or starts its turn there." Perhaps they meant to put in such a clause for Necrotic Shroud but forgot. As written...

I suppose at higher levels, a 1-round debuff can be worth more than the ongoing stream of chip damage. And now that I'm thinking about it, it could be a solid tanking move. Dart into the middle of a group of enemies, hit them with Frightened, then move back so that you're between them and the...

Edit: Never mind, I misunderstood -- necrotic resistance is a general aasimar trait, not anything related to Necrotic Shroud.

Yeah, it seems super weak compared to Heavenly Wings and Inner Radiance. Even the damage type is inferior; going by the 2014 Monster Manual, radiant damage is about 5% more effective than necrotic*. I'm really struggling to think of a case where I'd pick Necrotic Shroud. A 10-foot radius is...

That's some very risky logic. It opens the door for all kinds of ploys to get around restrictions against using spells in combat. I think it's much better to just change Friends so there's no save at all against an invalid target. Or simply leave it be.

I had not considered the "chaining" of Beguiling Twist. But that would be an issue with BT being able to trigger from itself. I mean, what happens if the party wizard opens combat with Fear? That's a strong opener anyway, and a Fey Wanderer could really amplify it. Anyway, like I said, I'd love...

By RAW, this does indeed work. Whether a fix is required, and -- if so -- what that fix should be, is an interesting question. Beguiling Twist is a 7th-level ranger subclass ability, so you're already heavily invested in a class with solid at-will attacks; this trick is competing with just...

I've spent the last couple weeks working on a project that uses an LLM to extract and classify data. It's been a fascinating process. "Prompt engineering" sounds pretentious as hell, but it's a real skill -- particularly when you need the bot to provide output in a form that can be parsed by a...

A smart dragon has a lot of advantages it can exploit against a city, without needing any bespoke protection. An attack on a cloudy night, for instance -- the dragon soars high and unseen, picks a target, strafes it, and is gone before the archers can get in range. Panic and confusion would also...

I disagree -- the rules should be able to handle that situation, because it's a tactic many parties will try. If you're tasked with saving a town from a monster, it's quite reasonable to ask the townsfolk for help. And while the townsfolk can't be expected to charge suicidally into melee, a...

6 hours plus 16 hours is 22, not 24. If you went to sleep at midnight last night, you can go to sleep at 10 PM tonight. It makes a fair amount of sense to me. The system will always have weird edge cases because it's trying to bucket the immense complexity of fatigue, sleep, and recovery into...