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One way to thread this particular needle is to give all warlords medium or light armor and make heavy armor something that particular subclasses get. I think the overall warlord class has a bit of an issue with identity (in that fighters and bards are both very good narrative substitutes), but...

One of the things to understand about this setting is that it's not trying to recreate a Ghibli movie exactly. It has little interest in presenting deep crunch to dramatically change D&D's core loop. It wants to be Ghibli-flavored D&D, and it leans into that. This is not a disappointing...

I think the biggest obstacle to this is less the superiority dice design and more the fundamental friction with non-magical healing. If you add magic to a warlord, you get a bard. If you keep it non-magical, healing wounds is going to be a problem. We'll hit another "Hit Points are purely...

Yellow. There are some pretty deeply janky subclass options and some core class ideas that are very half-baked. Needs more time in the oven. Bones are fine, though.

Yeah, the issue with the Dark Sun stuff isn't the existence of evil things that the PC's need to thwart. It's the "suffering bait" that is part of the setting and that is deeply unfun for a significant swath of the player base. Even being a former slave who leads a revolt means playing with...

OK, let's dig in. For the record, I'm a "new class skeptic," and a "psion skeptic," just as I was for the artificer, but skepticism doesn't mean reactionary opposition (my current opinion on the artificer is that it's "fine," so the psion could fare as well). Main comparison points are bard...

Eh, there's enough AMAZING games out there that don't get the audience they deserve that I'm skeptical of this statement (Everyone play 1000xRESIST), but I do think that you need to be good first, to have a chance to appeal to the casuals. I don't think casual players are really put off much by...

Clair Obscur isn't substantially different from other games in its genre in regards to the story being kind of on rails. There's some relationship mechanics that impact certain scenes, and some big decisions to make near the end that affect the ending you get, so there's a bit of wiggle room and...

I think part of what the article is saying is that a lot of publishers believe that the audience for a "tactical RPG" in limited. That in order to have mass appeal, you need to be a different kind of game. And given Capitalism's whole thing, mass appeal is ultimately what publishers NEED to...

Gods taking away a cleric's powers is kind of the same as paladins losing their powers if they shift alignment. In gameplay, it's basically the DM giving a diegetic reprimand to how a player is playing their character. It's bad for the game design, bad for the play experience, bad for the social...

The thing that a lot of D&D fandom isn't really ready for right now is that the definition many have of "cleric" (Divine caster powered by the gods) should actually apply to a lot of different classes. A lot of folks are pointing out that elemental priest = druid. Along those lines, why do we...

No official explanation AFAIK, but here's my crystal ball... Clerics have too many subclasses. When the design decision was made to base cleric subclasses on domains, this was kind of going to be inevitable, but the expectation is that every God of X has an X domain cleric somewhere out there...

Yeah, judging from this artwork... ...the first one is different; I believe that's the suit of armor that the Armorer artificer uses, along with an Armorer artificer. All the rest of the people in that image are depictions of artificers, and I'd bet that is, too. The third picture has two of...

Man, I love how the pictos system encourages you to play the game to get character advancement options, much like the materia system from FF7 or the equipment-ability system from FF9. D&D's advancement is really stuck in a sort of "character build" approach where all your abilities are just...

I'd allow it, yeah. Though it's weird to me that Frightened requires line of sight, since you can very much be scared of things that you can't see. "You hear the murderer scraping on the door to your closet, almost as if he's testing, daring you to scream."

Depends on what's important to you about them, but if I was going to do it assuming (a) no new rules and (b) focus on Vibes over Strict Accuracy, here's what I might do... Cloud is a Fighter. Use a Greatsword. His most iconic ability, Omnislash, is just a LOT of attacks, so Action Surge ->...

I can definitely see that, and I don't hate the lower price point. I do think there's another edge to that sword, but as long as WotC knows how this cuts, I think it's good. I'd hate to see a flood of $30 character options that mostly appeal to people who read and collect D&D rather than play...

"Somehow, the splatbook survived." I'd pay $50 for Forge of the Artificer + an anthology of 20 shortish adventures set in Eberron. Boats of player options are what we had in 2e/3e/4e, and I think it is an edition ouroboros, content for content's sake that eats its own tail in the end. I like...

I'm cautiously a fan of the new art direction. It's not so dramatic as to be a fundamental reimagining, it's just a little stylistic touch. I think that warforged could stand next to an OG warforged and be the same species just fine.

The choices they made for the phantom don't actually broaden the use of that class feature, and it comes at the expense of the storytelling and design qualities that make it interesting. That is a bad trade-off here. It's OK to have things key off of slightly odd or unique recharge rates like...