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Winding this tangent down, I promise. But... In theory you're right, but in my experience what often happened during important skill challenges was that every PC tried as hard as possible to finagle some way to use the skills that keyed to their good stats, even if it strained credulity. My...

Yeah, intuitively this type of system sounds to me like it will require a bit more "work" on the part of the DM to keep things flowing correctly. Initiative can be clunky, but it's also fairly divorced from any key DM adjudications and can even be handled by a player if needed. Not the case...

In addition to allowing for overkill (which I agree can actually be desirable to emulate the chaos of battle), it seems like it can open up to all sorts of interesting tactics. Like... DM: The wolf is going to run up to Neville and bite him. Neville: I dash away. Party: We shoot at the...

Thanks! Yeah, I know where you're coming from. I ran maybe three or four 4e campaigns and a few more one shots as well. There were some neat aspects to it, and some stuff that ultimately I realized I really didn't like. You've actually kind of hit upon both, simultaneously. I'm not sure...

That makes a lot of sense! I often keep the current D&D lore/flavor of Kobolds revering and idolizing dragons, and generally being perfectly happy to be subservient to them. And I let a little of that spill onto the Dragonborn. And, more recently, onto an actual dragon that is a tentative...

Seems cool, except for the part where you roll a check for individual monsters at multiple break points. That could easily add dozens of rolls to a decently sized fight. Doesn't it bog things down a bit?

I'm very much on the fence as far as it granting skills, Tony... I think you may be right that it is too powerful. Tools/languages I'm more flexible about. Also, in my 3.X homebrews, I do away with the predefined skill list entirely and have players make up their own skills, then when using a...

I've given bonus/penalty languages/tool proficiencies from Int in the past, and seriously consider giving bonus/penalty skills entirely. It really annoys me that 5e carried over 4e's mistreatment of Int, and then exacerbated it by having even fewer classes that use it. This is another...

Oh, sure, they'll definitely slit your throat in your sleep if doing so would benefit them. I mean, one of the kobold groups had kidnapped an alchemist and were making good headway as raiders, with fairly sophisticated tools and tactics. But, insidious or not, purely based on appearance they...

Re-reading this again after seeing you criticize cyclic initiative in another post. I think it’s a really fascinating idea. I’m going to try to give it a shot some time soon I think. I also like that it gives a small nudge to Int, which is so massively undervalued.

Awesome stuff. I think your Champion metric is pretty clearly useful for this sort of encounter calibration. Did the 9th level make a significant difference? If you dropped them to 7th or 8th but let them keep the +1 weapons, do their survival chances plummet or just drop a few points...

Yep, in nearly every game I run, the party ends up with NPC allies from the small monstrous humanoids sooner or later. Sometimes it’s just a lone goblin or kobold, but often times it ends up eventually being turned into an in-depth alliance, such as a current group’s Dragonborn Paladin that has...

Interesting thought. Good idea, in principle, but… let me tell you a weird, seemingly unrelated story. A former friend of mine played Diablo 3 intensely when it first released. He was among the first crop of people to beat it on the hardest difficulty, and played seriously on hardcore mode...

It's anecdotal, but interesting. I haven’t really paid much attention to XP budgets so far in my time running 5e. But, considering it now, I think my experiences probably match up. I think even my low-level intro adventure in my Example A above exceeded the supposed adventuring budget by a...

Yeah, this is an important question to answer. I suspect if you ask 5 DMs this question, though, you will get 6 answers. Certainly, if you ask me 5 times, I might give you a different answer each time. I hope you don't mind a few long-winded examples: Example A For the most part, I actually...

Good points! I think I am using the wrong term when I say "novice" though. Perhaps better would be... casual? I'm thinking of my sister and her husband, who have actually been playing for 20+ years same as me. But they have three kids, and they play infrequently (more the last couple years...

Fair enough! Perhaps I should have read your posts on the matter more closely. So is the consensus that, for novice DMs running games for novice players, "Deadly" encounters are still woefully non-threatening and never/rarely result in character deaths? On first blush I just find myself...

Makes sense. I sometimes lament high passive perception scores, which probably contributes to finding merit in the idea of a lower base number. Edit: I don't actually lament them that much in actual play. In fact, the only game I'm in where it's truly egregious is a game where I am not the DM...

It's a fascinating idea, as usual. A few minor thoughts. Your current metric assumes as an outcome "50% of at least one survivor." If that's the outcome assumption you stick with, you should put that in huge bold letters. I suspect that this outcome is significantly more extreme, and assumes...

This doesn't have much to do with what you said per se, but it got me thinking... It kinda bugs me that active scrutiny results in worse results than general alertness about 50% of the time. I wonder if I should change passive perception to be 8+perception, kind of like spell DCs. Then active...