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Mind control magic on a massive scale. I'm thinking of a ritual which makes everyone acknowledge a particular person as King or Queen of some region (size of region determined by various factors). It doesn't force obedience--you can still commit crimes--but the thought of trying to harm...

Please don't volunteer Jeremy Crawford (or anyone else) for this job. It is not our place as fans to go hunting for champions within WotC. If someone steps up, we can and should support that person; but we do not know enough about WotC's internal politics to identify a suitable champion, and we...

What that suggests to me is that the pro-OGL faction cared more about locking in its gains than about protecting a handful of names. That would be consistent with the idea that the pro-OGL faction is driven by people lower in the hierarchy. They do not normally have the opportunity to shape...

How would you implement these cross-system conversions? To take an example, pretend the various editions of D&D are games published under the ORC. Say you have a 10th-level fighter in 4E D&D, with various exploits: Cleave, Tide of Iron, Steel Serpent Strike, etc. How would your app go about...

It's a fan content policy, not "Introduction to U.S. Copyright Law." It's laying out the rules you need to follow in order to have your stuff considered "fan content" by WotC. That's the context for everything there. It is not, and does not claim to be, an enumeration of your legal rights. If...

CC-BY-SA makes no provision for holding back product identity as the OGL does. If any smidgen of CC-BY-SA content gets into your work, the whole thing must be released under the same license. I can't imagine many 3PPs being willing to use CC-BY-SA.

The OP's concern (stated in a later post): "Sometimes the party needs a short rest but it doesn’t make since story-wise to sit around for an hour. And it would put a hard cap on short rests before needing to take a long rest." The first issue is one I at least have definitely encountered. In a...

I agree with this part. Originally, the slow release schedule of 5E was making a virtue of necessity. The D&D staff was cut to the bone over the course of 4E, and they simply didn't have enough people to crank out material at the pace of previous editions. This part I don't agree with at all...

We've been using essentially this house rule for years, except we use a fixed 2/day instead of prof bonus. Works great to resolve the balance issues between short rest and long rest classes, without disrupting other parts of the game. It also reduces the importance of having a healer, since it's...

My main objection to WotC's fan policy is that it is groaning under the weight of all the "How do you do, fellow kids?" As for the details of the policy... as everyone else has pointed out, it's a policy, not a contract. And even aside from that, it would take a lot for me to get mad about the...

I've experienced DM burnout many a time, but it never hits me the way you describe. For me, at least, it comes as a slow draining away of enthusiasm and commitment. I agree with the other posters that this sounds like being fed up with a specific player's crap, rather than burnout in the usual...

Resurrect the dedicated spontaneous casters from late 3E: The warmage, the dread necromancer, the beguiler. Give me a caster class that is built entirely around a particular magical theme, rather than being an "everything caster" with a few nods to a specialty. Failing that, at least bring back...

Nobody said long-term contracts aren't binding. You are using "in effect" to put words in somebody's mouth (I think @pemerton's, but I'm not positive). There is always disagreement among experts on any topic. But that doesn't mean it's safe to just wave off expert opinion. When experts are...

I'm in the "other" camp. The fundamental issue here is the incentives created by the "no negative hit points" rule -- since damage that takes you below zero is negated (unless it's enough for an insta-kill), you effectively gain hit points by going to zero and then being healed. Healing word is...

Any time I see suggestions that someone is playing 4D chess, I assume that isn't the case unless there is compelling evidence to the contrary. I'll assume that your focus is specifically on Friday's announcement and that you aren't claiming their entire strategy over the last month has been...

Always? He certainly does not. I don't think I've ever gotten such a response from @pemerton. Which might have to do with the fact that I start from the proposition that he has a law degree, and I do not, and therefore when I see him say something that contradicts my understanding of how the law...

Not sure I'd go quite that far. From the playtest, they appear to be standardizing subclasses so you get features at the same level across all classes, which would make them incompatible with Tasha's. There will likely be some sort of conversion rule to let you shoehorn 5E subclasses in, so it...

That is highly unlikely. D&D is not the giant moneymaker that Magic is, but it's bringing in a very respectable income stream, enough that they were willing to drop $146 million to buy D&D Beyond. They are not going to shut it down unless it completely tanks. It's the rest of Hasbro, the...

When the ORC is completed and released, I will happily join an effort to persuade Wizards to put the SRDs under it. Who knows, they might even do it! (I don't think it's likely, but if you'd asked me this time yesterday, I'd have said there wasn't a chance in hell of the current situation...

That is true. But any attempt to create an OGL 1.0b would bring its own set of legal questions; it would not have been tested in court as the CC presumably has; it would still be under WotC's control; and it would not tie the SRD to a huge external group of stakeholders with an interest in...