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I can't really disagree with your subjective experience of playing Dark Sun, and I agree with you that the original boxed set is the best way the setting has ever been presented. However, I absolutely want to see 5e try to duplicate the feel. 5e so far under-serves low fantasy, sword and...

Even if they do make that the 5e background fluff of Dark Sun--which I agree is not terribly appealing--the setup is flexible enough that the setting themes could still largely work. In Dark Sun, it isn't really important WHY arcane magic defiles, just that it does. The defiling downside of...

That's a good point. The cleric jank in this edition is somewhat reduced. /facepalm... of course that's why :LOL: Fixing the jank wasn't popular enough. ---- Yeah, maybe monks could have something like the eldritch invocations list but for martial arts stuff, and get a choice from it...

I voted based on thematics rather than implementation--Bard and Cleric. I agree with the thread's other critics of bards, so no need to elaborate. Cleric, though, is really weird and really specific, but built into D&D's traditions deeply enough that its indiosyncratic jank gets overlooked...

I can see that being cool. But imo, for some of those classes, it's backwards. In the Venn diagram that contains transmuter and artificer, transmuter is the bigger circle--maybe to the point that most artificers are a species of transmuter (but see below, they should probably all be called...

Hard agree. And I feel like that insight is particularly relatable to a lot of D&D DMs, especially of the type who are invested enough to post on forums or maybe write blogs. There's a snippet of an old Blog of Holding Post that feels beautifully on the nose to me regarding this subject...

This is the main point that I'm pushing you on. It's easy to imagine a lot of deviations from the standard medieval fantasy in which wizarding is not the domain of elitists and the power-mad. Your interpretation makes sense and is reasonable, but many others are as well. Perhaps the time is...

Wait... what? Please elaborate. I'm not confident I followed the entirety of this paragraph, but responding to the last point, there are lots of ways an impoverished peasant could do a wizard apprenticeship (provided he/she isn't an unfree peasant). Not least is via the historical way that...

That's a cool idea! This isn't quite what you suggested, but maybe they could treat school specialists as shared multiple-class subclasses in the vein of the strixhaven UA, and then have a list of specialist spells that work like cleric domain spells but go up to 9th--with most or all of the...

I see that you responded entirely seriously. Well, let me put a little bit of distance between myself and the tongue in cheek defense of wizardly status quos which you quoted. In truth, no umbrage was taken by me. The reason I initially quoted you was for this bit: which I generally agree with...

Fighter - Someone who doesn't use magic (season with about 50% more option complexity, and let's not forget about the ladies y'all) Magic User - Someone who uses magic (but melt off the narrowly 'wizard' fluff/mechanics, such that the name change is accurate) No divine/arcane distinction...

I'm not even close to finishing everything that's in Appendix N yet... there's just so much fiction to read. But I agree with you in principle, people should get to write what they want to write and enjoy what they want to enjoy without being pilloried--though it would be best if they didn't do...

D&D isn't really European fantasy, it borrows broadly and has lots of weird conventions built in; its earliest iterations incorporate creatures of myth from all over, and the sword and sorcery, science fantasy, and wild west frontier influences are a lot more American than mythic European. Its a...

Also, regarding the samurai sub-tangent from which the shaman sub-sub-tangent branched--more Wikipedia: In Japanese, they are usually referred to as bushi (武士, [bɯ.ɕi]), meaning 'warrior', or buke (武家), meaning 'military family'. According to translator William Scott Wilson: "In Chinese, the...

I was about to disagree with you by citing some shamanism definitions and the Wikipedia article, which treat the term shaman as a broad category, i.e. "Shamanism is a religion which is based on the belief that the world is controlled by good and evil spirits, and that these spirits can be...

Nice. It seems verisimilitudinous can maybe be correct, but thanks for the pointer. Verisimilar is a lot more elegant. The tricky thing about "slave" is that its a loaded word which refers to entirely too many different institutions. Norse thralls are not Athenian slaves, are not Spartan...

It's not perfect, but if you make reasonable assumptions and work out the numbers, Dark Sun is somewhat plausible and quite verisimilitudinous.

I played through the game and its expansions (but not Deadfire) and very much enjoyed them. The classes, spells, resolution mechanics, and itemization were all things that made sense to me. But I never really grokked the ability scores; to me they feel inconsequential except at the extremes...

Yeah, I was a bit puzzled by that too. Tidally locked means it's the same temperature and time of day (well our construct of time of day, anyway) all the time. But that temperature and time of day still varies depending on what part of the astronomical body you're on. There'd be a side of the...

Responding to the Obsidian GDC vid in the OP, I think they really whiffed some things in Pillars of Eternity (admittedly, the designer is upfront about this). What's worst, I think, is that those more heavily abstracted abilities feel disjointed from human characteristics, i.e. Strength in 5e is...