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Chthonic Tieflings in the Realms Until recently, I wasn’t sure how to best describe the cultures associated with the three tiefling legacies from the revised Player’s Handbook. It was fairly easy to identify cultural traits associated with Abyssal and Infernal legacies. At various times, demons...

As the Mods have noted, this conversation has gotten off topic, so I won't be continuing our debate. My prior posts will have to be my last word on matters unrelated to pre-orders.

If all IP is free for anyone to use, my gamer friends won't buy any games from anyone. Not me. Not WotC. Not anyone. There will be no market for games anymore. If every country followed this model, there would be no intellectual property left for counterfeiters to sell. No one anywhere would be...

I must be misunderstanding your argument, because it sounds to me like you're saying corporations are better at making physical products than individuals, but their ability to own intellectual property is somehow an even bigger barrier of entry for newcomers to the market. So your solution is to...

That's why I prefer the 3e Manual of the Planes to any source describing a single cosmological model. It presents the Great Wheel as one of five possible cosmologies (six if you count the sample cosmology in the "Building Your Own Cosmology" section), plus sidebars with guidance for simplifying...

What’s in a Name, Part II In the previous post, I mentioned a few name-related challenges I have yet to resolve as of this posting. Thankfully, I've already resolved several other name-related challenges. For each of the hundred-plus cultures described in my sourcebook, I include a list of...

Having an infinite amount of something doesn't guarantee there will be copies of anything. There are an infinite number of whole numbers, for example, but only one of them is 1. You can keep randomly selecting whole numbers until the end of time, but every time you pick the number 1, it's the...

Sure, Tesla's version of the Ranger is clunky out of the box, but it really comes into it's own when you add in the options from Tesla's Cauldron of Everything.

I think the last sentence in the above quote is the most important one. If the group doesn't mind when one player's character is in need of constant protection (or is evil, or is comedic relief, or is a thief pilfering from everyone's backpacks, etc.), then it's all good. Conversely, if the...

Your ranger wants to deal bonus damage with a weapon attack? Cast a spell. Your paladin wants to deal bonus damage with a weapon attack? Cast a spell. Your druid wants to magically transform into an animal? No spell required.

Interesting questions. For background, I’m the sort of DM who believes randomness should occur during play, not during character creation. I don’t like randomly generated ability scores or hit points, because they can have an outsized impact on the game, making in-game rolls less dramatic in...

If you'd like to debate players who are upset about not starting with a 16 Intelligence, please reply to one of those players instead replying to me and putting words in my mouth. As it so happens, I'm a DM. The implication that I'm motivated by some sort of player entitlement is misplaced...

Random tangent: I once played a changeling who had a deep-seated moral objection to impersonating others. When the party was planning a heist and realized I wasn't going to use my shape changing abilities to impersonate any number of people they were expecting I would impersonate along the way...

Potentially? The fact that I'm not going to play revised D&D if it turns out WotC has made too many rules changes I don't like. I already have a PHB. I'm not going to spend good money on a new one just so I can run a game for my players using rules I don't like as much.

Thanks. That was the historical context I was missing.

Just out of curiosity, when did teleportation become a Fey thing? The designers keep pushing teleportation as something with Fey flavor, and I'm not getting why. Blink dog, I guess? That feels a bit tenuous to me. Historically, Fiends have had a lot more teleportation magic than Fey. I've always...

You seem to be making false assumptions about my motivations. My intent is to call out the game designers for adding new, arbitrary restrictions to existing character builds. You have mentioned several times how you would build an intelligent street urchin character. As I said in my last post...

You claim someone of noble birth "has greater learning" than an urchin, then you quote a description of the urchin background which literally says "you learned to provide for yourself." That description of the urchin calls out learning as an important milestone in the life of an urchin. And the...

This example provides a reasonable argument for assigning skills to backgrounds, but it doesn't convince me we should be assigning ability scores to backgrounds. Remember, whenever an ability check is required to recall any type of knowledge, it's an Intelligence check. "Which criminal gangs...

Just to be clear, in the post you quoted, I said I don't if it's true that sensitivity readers had anything to do with renaming the backgrounds. I was using an earlier post which made that hypothesis as a segue, because I wanted to talk about background names. My main point was that I find the...