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Cyanobacteria.

Personal gripe here: This problem could be solved without making everything a friggin' Pokemon. Due to the very generous death-and-dying rules, PCs are notoriously difficult to kill by accident in 5E*. You could use similar rules to improve the survival rate of animal companions; then they could...

It says "damage rolls," not "one damage roll." I would rule that it works on both primary and secondary targets starting at 5th level. Technically it shouldn't work at all below 5th, since the spell doesn't trigger any damage roll. I'd be inclined to house rule that it boosts damage to the...

Re-quoting for visibility.

What Tito said was unprofessional, yes. Social media tries to convince us we're having a private chat, but it's more like writing an op-ed in a worldwide newspaper. Nor was it particularly constructive -- it didn't shed any new light on anything or tell us something we didn't already know. I...

If one of my players wants dragonborn, and I decide to allow it, then they have the physical features that player wants them to have. Otherwise, ain't no such animal.

On top of that, unless you have a Strength of 10, you're going to have to do addition anyway.

I like the Lovecraft vibe, but his actual writing does nothing for me. Other writers have done much better with his ideas than Lovecraft himself could. (My favorite is by Stephen King. King does a lot of hat tips to Lovecraft, but it's rare for him to embrace the absolute existential despair at...

<Off-topic rant incoming.> I used to have a lot of sympathy for GRRM. "Song of Ice and Fire" currently stands at 1.7 million words. Outside of epic fantasy with its tolerance for giant doorstoppers, a typical novel runs about 100,000 -- ASoIaF is already the length of 17 normal-sized novels...

"May you play with kender." --Ancient Gygaxian curse

Nitpicking here, but Aragorn never took on the Nine. He managed to startle five of them into withdrawing when they weren't expecting resistance; but he himself was surprised they didn't return to resume the assault, implying they held the advantage. (Since the Witch-King had tagged Frodo with a...

Looking back, the one time in D&D's entire history where I generally approve of the folks in charge was the period between Wizards acquiring TSR and Peter Adkison leaving -- the time when 3E was made and the OGL implemented. Even then, I have to equivocate a bit. WotC's early culture under...

It goes back at least to 2E. Nontheistic clerics have been a thing for a very long time.

From a business point of view, I agree that this was a huge missed opportunity. As a fan of both Tolkien and D&D, however, I'm glad it never happened. D&D was designed to create sword and sorcery adventures in the Robert E. Howard vein, and it does that very well. I already dislike the Tolkien...

From what I can tell, TSR was in a fiery screaming dive into bankruptcy when she took over. She pulled it out. If she hadn't, then D&D might have gone the way of a thousand other '80s fads. So "the game might have ceased to exist without her" seems like a pretty compelling case for her being a...

You're thinking of trademark law. Copyright doesn't work that way.

It's not like the 2014 stealth rules were better. WotC seems very stuck on making stealth into a "cloaking field" that is either powered up or deactivated, and you have to take active measures to power it up.

It sounds like it's per turn, not per round. If so, Shield wouldn't interfere with other spells unless you cast it on your own turn (e.g., to stop an opportunity attack).

Tolkien was familiar with Howard's works and "rather enjoyed" them (in contrast to his sharply critical attitude toward much other fantastical fiction of his day).

When LotR was written, it was rare to acknowledge that your story was set in a totally invented world, even if it obviously was. The claim that Middle-Earth is a "prehistory" of the real world is the sort of fig leaf used to excuse such invention. I don't think we need hold Tolkien to any...