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I think options 2 & 3 are the best. Remember that players already look up ability scores/modifiers on a table. It's just that your group is familiar enough with the process to be able to do it from memory. If you make a simple enough table, they will be able to do the same thing once they learn...

I do! I have now taken the survey 8 times and catalogued every spell I was asked about. (I didn't answer any questions except #1 on surveys 2-8 because I wanted to avoid biasing their... convenience sample) The survey asks about every spell in the PHB, all 361 of them. Each survey taker...

Intelligence tests are supposed to be consistent over time, and usually are (on average), but there are all kinds of things that can bias them (which the test writers perpetually struggle to mitigate) and some intelligence tests are better measures of G than others. I'm not sure. That may be...

The Flynn effect doesn't prove that general intelligence is crap. There are reasonable and interesting explanations for it. One, for example, is that human nutrition has improved substantially in the countries that have experienced it. Just as peoples' height has grown substantially in a lot of...

This is the reaction that the title of the thread gave me as well, i.e. "don't tell me what to do." Having now read 15 pages of the thread, it seems like a lot of contentious conversation is just driven by that: posters who feel like they make a good faith effort to be kind to fellow players...

I concur that it would be undesirable for fighters to work that way--though balance-wise I think it could, in principle, be made functional. For casters, however, there is a long tradition of catastrophic spell failure in fiction and in roleplaying--Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Dungeon Crawl...

well... speed, parsimony, simplicity, and dark and deadly magic. I'm not sold on making this change, it's an idea from another thread that looked elegant to me. There are indeed a lot of moving parts, big and small, that would need to be changed for it to work--thank you for pointing out a few...

Yeah, there's a rock paper scissors element to this house rule. If you have the right spell or feature for the right enemy, then the effect goes through easily--but if not, too bad. It has a kinda witcher-y element to it, where identifying enemy weaknesses is important. That probably...

Awesome, thanks for that. Those consequences all feel like good things to me, especially if players did their score targeting meta-game within the setting fiction. Also, looking at it laid out that way, “True” NADs (and saving throws too) have a really anemic progression, even for proficient...

Hi all, Over in the necroed thread about saving throws, posters past and present (post #8, sorta post #28) suggested a system to replace saving throws that is similar to the defenses in 4e: Instead of a spell (or other effect) giving its target the chance to make a saving throw, the...

So, I've been giving suggestions based on the original demi-levels post thus far (which I think works fine). But if one were to use feats, it'd probably be a good idea to break them down from 5e's paradigm quite a lot. Fortunately, such things already exist. The D&D next playtest has a much...

The monk scaling is probably the more important of the two. Also, since sorcery points and metamagic are kind of similar to your enhancement slot mechanic, you might consider combining the two features for sorcerers somehow, i.e. new metamagic to upcast and some sorcery points to do it with...

@clearstream I like your revised character progression, but I feel like @Charlaquin is correct here. This isn't really an E6 system. Its an E11 system with powered-down progression after level 6. Does that matter? No, not at all. I'd just call it something else; "low power, high fantasy 5e"...

Point taken. Those are great counter-examples. I would respond that it's not that scientists cannot also be mystics, it's that, if how you know what you know about the world is deeply informed by mysticism, you aren't quite doing science. And, of course, if you asked them, hermetic alchemists...

Point conceded, very similar. But even if Hermetic alchemy is has the big "T" Truth, that doesn't make it scientific. The Wikipedia article on Hermeticism has this nugget: "Throughout its history, Hermeticism was closely associated with the idea of a primeval, divine wisdom, revealed only to...

Oh yes, I'm well aware. I never much liked his approach to class design prior to the GLOG's Lair of the Lamb version, though (which is excellent). There were always far too many different fiddly wizard classes. (which I'm led to believe the GLOGosphere has only increased) Yeah, of course. I...

There's a slight misunderstanding here. I don't mean that the pinch of fine sand, rose petals, or cricket are pseudo-scientific, they're "past empirical observations", i.e. received wisdom. What I meant is that, in addition to learning the particulars of all those spell components in, say...

Yes, that's a fun take on wizards. I like particularly like the Goblinpunch version of it, which doubles down on the strangeness of Vancian casting: "Memorizing a spell is not like memorizing a series of noises and hand motions. It's like inviting a spell into your brain by creating a suitable...

Good god. I hope not. This is probably one of the reasons I like Dark Sun so much. It has one dragon--and his coolness is not diluted by obsessive cosmological spreadsheet filling.

I'm leery to go further with this tangent, but am going to push back a little more. Please view this response as being in the spirit of friendly discussion. The Genocide in the background of Dark Sun is evil, but that doesn't inherently make its perpetrators fascist. Other extremist ideologies...