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There's some ambivalence here for me. Adaptation, evolution, and growth are inevitable and generally positive things. On board in principle. But, these are frequently employed as excuses to do things that aren't so much better as they are just different. D&D attracts creative people who want...

The appeal for the players is that it might be fun to play some tragically flawed heroes who have some personality trait that will eventually cause them to flop out dramatically. To set up those dominoes in play and watch them fall. To give the DM enough rope to hang the party with, and then...

This makes me think of horror genre again. If the PC's just choose not to spend the night in the haunted house, we wouldn't be telling a story about a haunted house. So what makes the PC's go into the haunted house? To do the obviously bad thing?

I keep thinking about the similarity in horror and tragedy. Like, even from a mechanical perspective (like with Sanity or Dread's jenga tower or...) - the idea is that to achieve a near-term goal, you sacrifice long-term stability. Walter White is willing to sacrifice his relationships to feel...

A potential nuance to this convo: If tragedy isn't something we can really inflict on a PC, how might we do a campaign with the theme of "tragedy" that maybe treats the PC's as a sort of chorus - the observers and audience to the great tragedies of others? The PC's should be pretty central...

I'm OK drawing with a fairly broad brush, so I'd say anything from classic Greek tragedy to Shakespearean tragedy to modern tragedies like Breaking Bad, Scarface, Brokeback Mountain, No Country for Old Men, etc. (even arguably things like Dark Souls)

So, let's talk genre in D&D. One of the harder genres to splice into the heroic fantasy of standard D&D is tragedy. To evoke the pathos of someone doing their best to do good and utterly, completely failing. How do you evoke this? What in D&D seems to get the most in the way of it? Can you...

Here's my take: Lore is mechanics. Combat stats should not be the whole of a monster's mechanics. There's no such thing as a setting-neutral creature.

Convenience is King, and Project Sigil never gave off an air of convenience. It always seemed like whale-bait at best to me - maybe a place for dedicated hobbyists to do some neat stuff, but never something your average D&D player would spend hours in. Seems like WotC is learning that lesson now.

There's a bit of fundamental confusion about D&D that is something of a result of its popularity. Is it a game primarily about fighting monsters cinematically? If so, and combat is tedious, it needs some more game-system juice. Things like the escalation die, or big, dramatic things that swing...

Sigil.

Can't wait to see what an LLM entirely trained on House of Leaves spits out...

"we give ourselves aneurisms" isn't exactly a fair understanding of what people who don't like this are doing, is it? "Don't talk about it here on the D&D discussion site, tell them directly instead" is a pretty weird thing to tell someone on this D&D discussion site. Sorry, was I telling...

IMXP, AI solves the problem of not attracting enough investor attention, since a lot of investors are aggressively in favor of it (mostly because of the supposed labor cost savings). Long term, I don't think that's a good strategy for D&D, because the value of a D&D product for me is...

WotC asked for feedback. It's not INTERNET RAGE to give them that feedback. This is literally a question WotC has provoked, intentionally, to see if something works. Telling them it doesn't work like that is valid, useful, and, indeed, part of what we should be doing as a community. If...

I think this would be a fine fiction, especially when you hit Tier 4 and are legit a hero of legend anyway.

That's exactly the thing this design is meant to address! Legendary swords of valor as guaranteed class power!

(snilk)

Items in fantasy fiction are often part of a character. Hell, it's trite enough that kid's shows featuring powerful characters will often have an episode that is explicitly "I'm heroic because of how I use my powers, I'm special because of who I am, and my magic rainbow wand or sword of destiny...

It's just not a good design, and not a great piece of art. Cartoony, not very threatening, kind of mindless. Even the weapons read as kind of...bland. It's OK, and I like that it's shown doing its thing, and I dig the beheading, and being chaotic and hard to read is kind of on brand for a...