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Science isn't a power source, it's a method for understanding things. You can make an argument for like "mad scientist super tech" but that's just artificers barely rethemed. Magical thinking is only not scientific thinking because it doesn't work. As soon as sympathy manifests real effects...

It definitely is impressionistic, but I think the most useful way to understand that is to look for how it breaks. What causes players concerned with "realism" to find pieces of the fiction dissonant or to reject them? You're not going to get to a universal principle that way, but I think you...

I'd argue it's largely because there's a lot of mechanical interactions you might have with monsters that aren't trying to kill each other? Silver dragons give quests, blink dogs will help you navigate a hostile portion of the ethereal, flumphs will let you rest and heal in their burrows, all...

I've just finished preparing my family's traditional Christmas breakfast food, which for reasons I've never actually understood is an oven apple pancake. It has only just now occurred to me, 6 sliced apples in, that my roommate is leaving for breakfast with his mother and I have made enough to...

It's an interesting take! I think I'd go a little less D&D specific and maybe make a more general Sin-Eater. Harvesting or accepting the karmic/cosmic evil of others is a pretty reasonable power source, and you can play on different ways of approaching the concept, just slightly broader than...

Oh, I'm less familiar with 6 year old Pedantic. Pretty sure he was still figuring out how to hyperfocus on reading.

Yeah. We're talking about D&D, you don't enter the room if you're not cool with sanctified fantastic violence, that's basic price of admission stuff that's so fundamental to the activity you can't do it without that.

I certainly wouldn't want to hang out with 20 year old me. He was kind of a dick, and it's really only by having been him that I understand how confused, angry and scared he was.

Generally I think specificity is better for classes. If we have to live in a subclass world, differentiation like Warlocks have where you're some flavor of X specific thing is more consistently compelling.

I think that's actually 2 different problems, which highlight a lot of the ongoing archetypal problems with the classes in general. The Fighter and Rogue suffer from being too generic to actually be a profession or vocation. All soldiers, swashbucklers, knights and even paladins are fighters...

I'm finally sitting down with The Red Knight, by Miles Cameron, which is the genre pseudonym for Christian Cameron. I was not particularly sold by the descriptions of the series, and found myself here after reading the author's bibliography in reverse publication order. His Against All Gods...

I can absolutely empathize with that. Reading is an abnegative, borderline dissociative experience for me. I use to routinely have a problem where I'd accidentally put the book down, and then have a jarring moment where the narrative suddenly stopped and it would take me a second to sort out...

I'm on track to hit 200, but I'm likely to run out of books I want to read before I get there. It's a significant part of my entertainment/media diet; if a book makes it longer than a couple days, I must not like it very much, or I'm reading some other book simultaneously and this one has been...

Ah, I misunderstood the prompt. You're starting and sticking at 20th level. That makes more sense.

If that's the goal, I'd probably go further. Pick a level to fix the PCs at to get the base character level differentiation you want, then tie progression entirely to magic items/quest boons. Maybe pick a small range, and provide "training" as a potential reward that can get characters from say...

To be fair, I would be totally cool if we went the other way and shifted some hoary mechanics to match more modern fiction. Druids that shapeshift a lot more and cast a lot less spells would be fine.

That's such a solvable problem, and more an issue of feat design than anything else. Creating a simple set of feats by role for monsters/NPCs would have dealt with most of it. Plus we live in a modern age of digital tools. CR and magic item scaling are issues in their own right, but that's a...

Differing NPC and PC rules. The difference should be a matter of encounter adventure design, not mechanical interaction.

Careful. That's the first step on the dark path that leads to extrapolating setting norms from specific magical effects.

This is the primary strength of magic (or other unreal phlebotinum powered effects). It yields to definition into specific techniques in a way that's significantly more complicated for mundane effects. You can spell out the rules and requirements and they aren't beholden to any tests beyond...