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I think the praise is partially nostalgia, and partially that in it's day it was a pretty good system. I will say that while there's a lot I like about it, I don't think it quite holds up, but I do think that it did a really good job of allowing players to emulate the fiction of the movies well...

I've only played 2d20 Conan, which was the first game in that system. We played for about a year from early 2019 until the COVID lockdown in March 2020. I've talked about it before, but I don't remember if I have done so here. I will say that I really liked the metacurrency of Doom and...

At least to me, someone is only "rules lawyering" when they're making bad-faith claims or willful misrepresentations of the rules. Inherent to the term and the reason it's pejorative is that the individual argues ad nauseum with the DM or table until they get what they want. The one that comes...

I would probably allow it to happen once as a reward for clever thinking, but not repeatedly. I would rule that the effect is not what the caster thinks is "food and drink," it's what the game defines as "food and drink." Specifically, the casual definition of food and drink within the game is...

Nope. There isn't that much thought put into them. Last I knew, they were doing Arcane, Divine, and Nature. I kind of stopped caring after they announced they were walking everything interesting back, so I assume they abandoned that? Either way, I didn't put that much thought into it. My...

The last time I recall U/W control being a thing was Return to Ravnica. Which is older than 5e D&D. And I hate to tell ya, but Cryptic Command is not just older than 5e D&D. It's older than 4e D&D. Sure, they put Archmage's Charm and Force of Negation and Counterspell in Modern. But Modern...

I would rather they not be literal Counterspell. The Magic team learned not only that counterspells aren't fun, but blanket counterspells are not fun. A universal answer is a bad design. If they insist that it be part of the game, I would rather they have designs like: 1. Deflection Screen...

Sure, that's definitely true. But if popularity is a function of how well something satisfies the market -- and to be clear it's definitely arguable that WotC hasn't been doing a great job with their APs -- then it's at least a little what people are looking for. There aren't that many people...

No, I'm not saying earlier editions did that exclusively. I know both AD&D 1e and OD&D gave XP for monsters, even if it was annoying to calculate and significantly less than that for treasure. However, I am saying that you would want to rebalance 5e more like that. The behavior the game...

I don't see why it wouldn't. It's going to be a lot of people's first introduction to D&D, just like Gold Box and BG1 and BG2 were. Some number of players are going to look at playing paper D&D or other TTRPGs specifically to replicate or synthesize that experience they had with BG3. They're...

I think the lack of avenues for spending gold definitely detracts from the concept of adventuring for treasure, but D&D has also generally shifted more towards high fantasy over sword & sorcery. Most of the published modules that WotC has released are about saving the world in some way. You...

Eh. It's better. We played with the spell without the "At Higher Levels" clause for a few campaigns, and it still wasn't fun. Now it just shifts the slot attrition to whomever has the counterspell and the action attrition to whomever was casting. Like, that's still not great. You still have...

The point I'm suggesting is that the only way I see player agency being affected in any way is if the players are otherwise being railroaded in some way. If it's: PCs: "Let's go investigate that shipwreck the guy in the tavern mentioned. He said it was north up the coast. We go north!" DM...

I don't see that as necessarily affecting player agency at all. Yes, the players don't really know how dangerous the two options are, and they may be forced to make a decision "in the dark." However, if that's what the characters know, then that's the characters making a decision in the dark...

It's the system's player metacurrency. Conan 2d20 called it Doom and Momentum. If you're looking at the 2d20 SRD, then it's in "2D20 SRD Ch1 Core Rules v1.0.docx". Like a lot of metacurrencies, it's kind of a divisive mechanic.

No. It doesn't balance spellcasting in any edition of D&D, including editions where they kind of expected you to track spell components. Ammunition quantity and availability can balance some weapons. Think of the more powerful weapons in run-and-gun FPS shooters. But the tedium of tracking...

Yes, but when we as hobbyists say, "Call of Cthulhu is cosmic horror" we as hobbyists are deliberately evoking the cosmic horror literary genre. There are elements of the cosmic horror literary genre that the cosmic horror TTRPGs are specifically trying to recreate and include. When we as...

Both of those strike me as not relevant. Appeal to authority by itself is not a convincing counterargument, and nobody is saying that TTRPG genres and literary genres are tightly interacting elements of culture. That doesn't mean Call of Cthulhu saying it's cosmic horror has nothing to do with...

That would have to be based on the idea that genre in TTRPGs is somehow unrelated to and neither associated with nor descended from literary genres. Even if I admit that TTRPG genres have begun developing their own nuances within the genre terms within the space of the hobby, this is still not...