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He wouldn't have agreed with what he himself wrote? I mean, sure, his vision of Middle-Earth evolved over his lifetime, but by the point he was answering questions about it in his letters, the legendarium was extensively developed. There's no reason to suppose his conception of Numenor changed...

There are three groups of D&D players: 1) Those who prefer digital assets and are willing to pay for them. 2) Those who prefer physical books and are willing to pay for them. 3) Those who would rather use a crappy pirated PDF than pay for either. People in group 3 were never going to provide...

"Can craft an item from a Fast Crafting table, which lasts until you finish another Long Rest." What the hell is this crap? Fast Crafting tables? If I wanted to play a CRPG, I'd be playing a friggin' CRPG. I was looking forward to 5.24, but I sure hope this is not representative of how the new...

So, in essence what you are doing here is giving Strahd the option to replace a player-inflicted debuff with a custom debuff tailored to his statblock. I like this. I like it a lot. It accomplishes the goal of LR (limiting the ability of single-target debuffs to devastate a solo monster), but...

I believe human creative thought consists mostly of the following: a) Spotting connections between seemingly unrelated things. b) Discerning previously undetected patterns. c) Testing these connections and patterns to determine which are valid and useful, and which are spurious or dead ends. d)...

For most people, probably not. We have reached a steady state with COVID, where there's little prospect of things changing in the foreseeable future, so any precautions folks are not willing to keep up indefinitely are apt to go by the wayside. That said: It is still significantly more...

Something thematically in between dogs and deer. Maybe a goat?

I agree with voles or mice for the hobbits, and foxes for the wizards. Deer for the Elves. Badgers for the Dwarves. Men in general are dog breeds -- pugs or bulldogs in Bree, greyhounds in Rohan, Rottweilers or something in Gondor. Aragorn and the Dunedain are cats. (Yes, this is inconsistent...

The ideal solution would be that every debuff effect comes with two versions, a "regular" one and a "boss" one. The boss version applied to a solo legendary monster should have similar impact on the fight as the regular version applied to one of 3-5 normal monsters. Unfortunately, this requires...

That is not a solution to the problem "class design is severely constrained by multiclassing." It's an example of the problem. Furthermore, it misses the larger picture. The existence of a handful of overpowered MC builds is one part of that picture. The other part is the vast sea of MC builds...

What does this have to do with what I posted? I'm not talking about what NPCs do, and I already agreed that the DM can shut such things down. This whole tangent started when somebody asked what if, in a world where slavery exists, the PCs decide to become slavers? My response was: The same...

I didn't say it wasn't possible to stop PCs from doing awful things. The DM and the players can stop them easily. But if the DM and the players choose not to, there's no way to create a setting which will do it instead. ...I mean, I guess you could have a setting in which some immensely...

The same thing that happens when the PCs invent slavery in a setting that doesn't have it. You cannot create a setting which makes it impossible for the PCs to do awful stuff.

I am aiming to wrap up my campaign and hand off the DM hat in the next 3-5 months. I do not currently plan on pushing an update in this campaign. If the players are gung-ho to rebuild their PCs with the new rules, I'm certainly open to making the switch, but my guess is they won't want to bother...

I quite like the Greyhawk deities. As @AdmundfortGeographer observed, they look like a mess if you dump them all in the same bucket, but that's because you're doing the equivalent of dumping the Norse, Egyptian, Greek, and Celtic gods in the same bucket. There isn't a "Greyhawk pantheon," there...

My approach with "cool moves" that go outside the established rules is to require some sort of check, and impose a significant consequence on failure. If you try to do a crazy vault into the air, I might have you roll Athletics. Succeed, and you get where you wanted to be, within reason. Fail...

I would put an asterisk in each save box, and immediately under the stats I would put a line: "*Affected by Magic Resistance, immunities." You still have to look up those features to see what they do, but the reminder is the most important thing for me. It's way too easy to forget to apply...

Thoughts: 1. Sphinxes as celestials...? Interesting. So, in essence, Egypt rather than Greece is now the primary mythological inspiration for sphinxes. I approve. Not that I don't like Greek mythology, but D&D's mythic roots are overwhelmingly Greek and Norse*. Diluting that influence and...

If I ever found a staff of power or staff of the magi, I would deliberately plan to do this in the campaign finale if I could possibly arrange it.

There's a gnome (well, half-gnome, but mechanically a gnome) in the campaign I'm running now. She's fairly insane, obsessed with building a magical engine powered by souls that may or may not destroy the world.