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I once ran a year-long 3e campaign without rolling a single die. All rolls were opposed, with monsters and NPCs taking 10 and dealing average damage. Whenever an NPC v. NPC conflict needed to be resolved by dice, I'd let the players temporarily run the NPCs on one side of the conflict. Aside...

Take out the cameras, and that pretty much describes every employer I've ever had

My apologies. I didn't see the D&D 5E tag on this thread, so I was mistakenly assuming a broader discussion of in-setting character advancement in different game systems was on the table. I'll save that for a general thread.

If you want learnable abilities to make sense in setting, you probably shouldn't be playing a D&D-style, class-and-level-based system. Outside of a few contrived narratives, the type of character advancement present in D&D and related games makes very little sense in any setting.

Because the PCs have chosen the path that let's them master 20 levels of class features over the course of a hundred or so encounters? Meanwhile, the NPCs of the setting have each devoted years of training to mastering one or two tricks that can't be learned by simply experiencing a few...

Humanoids vs. Monsters Slowly but surely, I'm editing the 600+ pages of my Forgotten Realms travel guide. I'm gradually conducting line edits, filling in gaps in the text, and tracking down an occasional illustration to add. At the same time, I'm also digesting the content of the 2025 Monster...

It might also be worth asking this on cartographersguild.com

Sure. And I would have liked the rules a lot better if they had consistently said that. Instead, we have a game that relies on exception-based design presenting the reader with extremely precise, key-word-laced rules for hiding that one could arguably interpret as an exception to the default...

Someone should have told this to the designer who wrote the rules for hiding, because the line, "When you try to hide, you use the Hide action," completely misrepresents the core game loop. Your description of how hiding works is clearer and more insightful and than anything present in the core...

For what it's worth, my house rules use passive Stealth, passive Perception, and environmental considerations to determine encounter distance. So you're not alone in using passive Stealth.

"-core" is the new "-punk" And now that I've typed that, I think I want a cottagepunk RPG

I agree with your statement in general. The challenge posed by poorly worded Stealth rules, in particular, (as @James Gasik pointed out in post 531) is that the RAI could realistically be one of two things: stealth is an easy-to-use, ninja-like Elder Scrolls "stealth mode" tactic; or stealth is...

I was curious to hear if anyone could find a general rule above and beyond "roll a binary skill check." If you want a specific scenario, I suppose we could say my PC is walking behind an opaque curtain, and every other creature in the room is on the other side of the curtain. If "make a binary...

For the sake of argument, let's pretend the wording of the rules was better and we all agreed what the Invisibility condition is, how it gets used, and how it interacts with every spell in the book. Cool. Let's say I don't take the Hide action and I'm not Invisible. I walk through a room full...

Huh. Sure enough, there are fishing rules in Frostmaiden. Good call. (Rough summary: Each hour, DC 15 Survival to hook a fish, contested Athletics to pull it out of the water.) Edit: Ninja'd by ezo

"This is the third barbarian murder since January. I guess you could say this year, murder..." removes sunglasses "...is all the rage."

The debate about what ability score psions should use is an interesting aside, but it's actually a moot point. As the OP observed, psions already exist in the 2025 Monster Manual. Both examples are Int-based spellcasters who cast spells with no spell components. The question being raised in the...

If you enjoy writing, you can always just write for the sake of writing. If you're having fun, it doesn't really matter how many copies you sell. Heck, I don't even share most of what I write with anyone, and I still enjoy writing it. (Your mileage may vary.)

That's certainly a fair point. I don't really have an existing audience to leverage, so I'll probably sell somewhere around three copies. But I want to make sure I sell all three of those copies, not just one or two!

I'm wondering if anyone can offer some insight into the best time to release a 3pp product. Specifically, I've been writing a Forgotten Realms product for the DMsGuild in my spare time over the past few years. Life permitting, I could probably release it this summer, if not earlier. However...