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Your example sounds more like the flavor text on a Magic Card. And much like that it necessitates being completely separate from the mechanics. This creates a big disconnect between the two. I would much rather see them mixed together. It creates a sense that the fluff describes the...

The problem with this is that Fireball is an absolutely quintessential D&D spell, and if it doesn't behave as one expects a D&D Fireball to behave then it going to cause a huge disconnect, and as should be more than a little obvious by now, that's going to be hugely off-putting to a goodly...

Except who said anything about artificially monitoring and micro-managing the game for spotlight balance. Player choice and luck of the dice have so much more to do with who gets the spotlight than anything else, but no one ever talks about that. Those are things that you can't really manage...

I hear people say this sometimes, but it's never really been my experience. I always wonder about these people playing wizards that have devoted all their resources to doing all the stuff that the people in their party can already do so they can jump in and steal the spotlight from other...

Double post

This is only an issue of you're balancing around the encounter, insisting that everyone do something cool each and every encounter, rather than balancing around the adventure and accepting that some encounters will be dominated by just one or two players, and that is okay, everyone will get...

Probably fighting whole tribes, which seems plenty D&D to me.

If Fireball can't wipe out huge swathes of low Hit Die monsters/NPCs, or potentially devastate beefier opposition, except by resorting to mechanical tricks like minions to create the illusion that it still has teeth then it should go back to the drawing board.

I think this is the real problem right here, the fighter is too hyper-focused on combat. It shouldn't be that the fighter has to shine so much brighter in combat because he sucks at everything else, it should be that he's good at the sorts of things a fighting-man, a warrior, a knight, a...

That is a gross simplification. Just as a simple writing style doesn't mean the author is a poor writer, neither does a more complex writing style that challenges the reader somehow have to mean the author is an ineffective communicator.

Or, heck if they really like the narrative of their character, but not the mechanics of their class I have zero issue engineering a situation to fix that, or doing a little retconning so they can enjoy themselves properly. This is supposed to be a fun activity after all.

I personally would consider these more advice than rules, or more to the point, tools in the DM's toolbox. I've never believed in making people roll until they fail, I've always considered that 'doing it wrong' but there are various situations and reasons more or less rolls might be called for...

The obvious solution to me would be that custom built themes and the like get less build points than pre-built ones. Though this might leave a few people that are just trying to make something roleplay oriented that doesn't come prepackaged feel a little out in the cold.

I'd love to do some playtesting, I just don't know if we'll have time. We just started the Kingmaker AP and everyone seems to be engaged and having fun so our standard gaming time is unlikely to be sacrificed to playtesting 5e no matter how much I would like to give it a whirl. I'll still see...

While I'm not personally a fan of Gygaxian prose, I do agree with your overall sentiment. I more relaxed and personal authorial voice would be welcome. With a sort of big tent ideology that welcomes a range of aesthetic choice, I'd love to see examples of the various classes in the text pulled...

Why wouldn't I? Obviously large, obscure words and difficult, complex sentence structures that require a postgraduate degree to decipher are a sign of intellect, consequently rendering the expressed opinions and ideas of greater validity. Now with your handy dandy text analyzation engine I need...

Thanks, I will now judge the validity of all posts and posters based on their scores. High score wins.

I was thinking about usability the other day when I was running the Kingmaker AP for my Pathfinder game. The APs are fun reading, but I was looking for specific information I knew was buried in the text and I thought how nice it would be to have a sidebar along side the long form prose to let...

If a player wanted to play a new character I'd just let them, why would you force someone to play something that enjoying as much anymore. Okay, you fighter retires or goes off and does something else or just generally slips into the background of the world and your Dragonborn (I do hate that...

I hate, hate, hate retraining rules. If I'm not happy playing my character as is, why should I have to suffer through an extended period of playing like that while I slowly make incremental changes. If I'm not having fun I'll say to the DM, "Hey DM, old buddy, I'm not really enjoying this...