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I wonder why we're not looking at the Necromancer Wizard, too. Feels like a big omission from this list.... Reanimator Overall, I'm into the idea of a Frankenstein Artificer. Jolt to Life is a cool vibe, but in practice seems very niche. Most of the time, your party members are not going to...

Extraordinarily useful!

I'm really excited to see what happens with Dragon Delves, since I've been a big fan of the anthologies in general, and they're bringing back at least one author I'm very excited to see. The anthologies are so much more useful to me than the bigger adventures. Also psyched to see what they do...

I just want to be more precise about what we're talking about when we say that martials are "weak." Weak is a sloppy term. It's subjective and vibes-based. So I want to know: What is the actual experience a player is having in the moment? What are they missing out on? Then, we can explore why...

The Godsbreath adventure was one of the best ones in the anthology because it had a great sense of place and a wonderful horror tone. I'm excited to see what the author does with it in this context! This is just a wonderful idea for a Godsbreath adventure. Song is already such a key component...

But like...what does magic actually do better than a weapon? In fact, even talking about magic vs. weapons implies that it's really about damage, but that isn't really much of an issue in 5e as I understand. Fighters do good damage. And it's an easy fix, too - just up the damage. But, this...

I'm also a little vague on exactly how martials are meant to be underpowered. Like, is it because they don't do as much damage? Is it because they can't teleport and fly and grant wishes? And is it a problem at 1st level or is it just a problem at like 15th? Is it because they don't have as many...

This is great!

4e's rules weren't perfect, but they might be one of the best in the history of the game. You can make a Stealth check at the end of any movement you do, if you are in concealment, cover, or outside of sight. A "distracted" target is also valid outside of combat. You get a penalty if you move...

Human creative labor has intrinsic value to me and I will spend money in accordance with that value.

The Godsbreath adventure in JttRC is one of its best, so I'm excited to see Erin return for another round! It is SUCH a good little horror story in SUCH a cool location (southern gothic is a flavor that D&D has not mixed much with to my knowledge before!). Immediately weighting the book more...

I don't see "the scope needs to be big" as a battle, I just see it as kind of a constraint on what D&D-as-tragedy can look like. D&D's got big scope, and I'm OK with the scope of this tragedy being big (while still being related to the characters' own flaws). And I'm very much interested in...

Part of what this means to me is that the tragic arc needs to still be an arc of D&D-scale power. It's not that Juliet drinks poison, it's that Juliet makes a pact with Nerull and rises as a mindless zombie for her former love to slay or something. Mere murder is insufficient! It also means...

Seems legit! So far, pretty standard. A little situational, maybe, but with 9 attacks, getting a crit is only a matter of time, really, hahaha. Relies a bit on an external force, but extremely common tactic. Same - relies a bit on some help or some foolish monsters, but yeah. Legit...

Every .5 e had its own griping and grousing, too. 4e fans don't all agree on if Essentials was a good idea or not. Lots of people think parts of 2014 are better than parts of 2024 (and lots of people don't think 2024 went far enough!). Not everybody thought Skills & Powers was a good addition...

If you sign up to play an adventure game, you expect to go on adventure. If you sign up to play a horror-themed D&D game, you expect the night in the old abandoned house to be spooky. If you sign up to play a D&D game about dragon-slaying and dungeon-crawling, you expect there to be dungeons...

A D&D edition change is usually much more seismic than a "periodic rules update," or else we wouldn't have had the 3e/4e edition wars, and we wouldn't still have some very vocal 4e fans complaining about what they see as a kind of design backsliding in 5e. We wouldn't have the OSR trying to...

To drill down a bit: the big thing PS did was it made monsters into characters first. Those monsters included, for instance, fiends. Any D&D player can tell you that fiends are always evil, but in PS, being "evil" didn't mean they weren't nuanced characters first. It maybe told you what team...

System-wise, 5e did it best, understanding alignment as a rule for roleplaying. It's a little anemic, but that's nothing new. I was kind of enamored of 5e's Flaw/Bond/Trait/Ideal system as adding texture to it, though that was also a little underbaked. Though my honest answer is a little bit of...

People are doing that, though. The OSR is a wildly inventive space. Pathfinder's still chugging along last I heard. I bet if they OGL'd or CC'd the 4e rules, folks would jump on that immediately (heck, I might be one of 'em, there's a lot of interesting stuff to do with that fork of the game)...