Search results

Since three of the biggest things longtime fans have been asking for in 5e have been a Dark Sun book, official psionics rules, and official epic-level rules, it would make sense (given WotC's current attitude towards publishing them) to combine them. You can't really do Dark Sun faithfully...

Cambions and Alu-fiends are the same basic type of creature, with cambions being male and alu-fiends being female. Depending on the source/edition, they're usually considered as half-fiends. They're essentially the products of fiends mating with mortals, where the net result is 1/2 fiend or...

I don't know about 4e or 5e, but in 3e/3.5e, they were in use as a technical, formal name for demons and devils. They were called demons and devils in everyday talk and monster manual entries, but the lore that Tanar'ri and Baatezu were their "real" names they called themselves and were known...

What I find frustrating is when fans seem to care more about technicalities and legalities of obviously non-commercial fan projects. I first registered for ENWorld almost 17 years ago, because I'd written an extensive and thorough conversion of the Dark*Matter setting from Alternity into d20...

. . .and if you insist on a traditional alignment, the allegiances allow that by letting you have 3 of them, and with the law/chaos and good/evil entries both being available as allegiances in addition to groups, countries, religions, codes of honor, etc you could have full backwards...

I don't like Dragonborn because they seemed cooked up for 4e just to underscore how different and "edgy" 4e was from everything that came before, and then existing settings tried to shoehorn them in because they were in the core rules. (Yes, very technically they showed up in 3.5. . .as an...

Eliminating arbitrary racial restrictions on classes was one of the very good design choices in 3rd edition. As Icewind Dale was built on the 2e framework, it holds to 2e's arbitrary limits. Just because a race/class combination is rare, doesn't mean it should be absolutely prohibited by the...

The X-Wing games were awesome. In a lot of ways, those games are what turned me into a big Star Wars fan, X-Wing, and later TIE Fighter, were the things that turned me on to Star Wars beyond just the movies. I remember reading the X-Wing strategy guide, and the large portion of it that was...

The cameo of Therkla in the background spying on Elan was a nice touch.

Hermetic magic, occultism and wicca are not satanism. Not everything supernatural or magical that isn't firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian belief is "satanism", although you are providing a good example of that mindset. . . .and if you thought that statement about the price being your immortal...

The arguments that it promoted occultism involved the following: 1. A total lack of understanding of what the game actually involved. 2. Really bad theology. 3. A culture of the time that often claimed that pretty much all of popular culture was "Satanic", but since people were less familar...

3.x and 5e are alternate offshoots of different styles of AD&D 2e. 5e was taking basic core-rules 2e and deciding to make a streamlined, fast-playing, easy-to-run game that had the same general feel but had a much more modern design, but at the cost of not gaining the flexibility of all the...

Well, two obvious places the rules can go are psionics and epic-level rules. Both of which are well-established parts of D&D, to the point of being pretty integral to official D&D settings (Dark Sun and Eberron are pretty intrinsically psionic, Forgotten Realms is crawling with Epic-level...

I know it still saw at least limited use as late as 2010. When I did my Basic Combat Training in the US Army in early 2010, we used MILES gear for the tactical part of the final field exercise. The equipment was clearly well worn and a little glitchy and past-its-prime, but it was still seeing...

It's rather amazing to think that just 6 people writing letters to Sears and Penneys got them to stop carrying D&D books. I think things are rather different about 40 years later, 6 customer letters couldn't have that kind of effect on merchandise. Also, I remember that paranoia and hostility...

I will say that serious talk about a "last" edition of D&D is encouraging. While 5th is not my favorite edition, it's definitely not my least favorite either. The very idea that WotC could think of an edition as the current one for an indefinite long timeperiod is very progressive and...

People keep thinking in terms of new book sales for competition in the gaming market. The problem is, when you create a new edition, you get a lot of fans of the current edition that just stop buying at all. People acted like 4e's main competition was Pathfinder. . .it was just as much 3.5e...

So, from what people are saying and what I'm reading, maybe the best way to handle more professions in 5e is to expand the list of tool proficiences and be a little more open minded and flexible about what constitutes a toolkit. So, for my Soldier example, a "Soldier's Tools" which would be...

I think it's because the people who got irate about 4e not having a profession skill (among it's MANY other shortcomings, of which that was only a very small one), generally got off the edition treadmill with 4e because we were generally happy with 3.5 and didn't need a new edition. That's what...

Except in 5e, the skill system is so broad that a single skill often covers things that would be 2 or 3 skills in other editions of D&D. If Athletics can cover swimming, climbing and jumping. . .if proficiency with Thieves's Tools can cover picking locks and disarming traps. . .if Arcana can...