Search results

Is ranged area damage something that Fighters struggle with that needs to be addressed? I thought Fighters were pretty OK when it came to combat performance relative to mages, right? Cuz the thing I'm hearing is that the martial/caster divide is more about the high-level wahoo stuff that...

This design's premise is that, at least at high levels, we are going to embrace magic. That D&D is a game about magical characters doing magical things with magic, and that if you want a grittier game with lower stakes and more grounded kinds of fantasy, you're going to want to fit that in about...

Yeah, this is the idea! There needs to be some kind of excuse for why others can't wield it, but that's not much of a hurdle. This is ~kind of~ the intent behind some very old D&D design (why fighters get so many weapon/armor proficiencies is, in part, because the "best" magic items are things...

Nah, this kind of Fighter never casts spells. But, their capabilities are not limited by what a "normal person" could do, because they have the skill and superhuman ability to wield items that can shape the multiverse. Because the difference between a Fighter and a Wizard isn't about combat...

This isn't a dealbreaker, it's just a requirement of the design. Like, we have spells that only work for people who know how to use them. Maybe the sword that cuts through dimensions also only works for people who know how to use it. Weapon masteries are already a step in this direction (if a...

Angel Summoner / BMX Bandit. The power to swing a sword REAL GOOD will never really be equal to the power of being able to literally make your wish come true once a day. Training doesn't let you transcend dimensions. I always wonder what would've happened if magic items followed the same arc...

Sure. Fly speed of 10 feet, so pretty slow regardless. Stealth rules being the ambiguous mess they are, this is somewhat up to DM judgement, but I wouldn't give any extra advantage that being invisible and being a cloud don't already confer. I could probably be talked into Advantage if the...

I'm pretty critical of "damage-on-a-miss," but I kind of like this as a narrative. Yes, correct. The greatsword does not miss. A character with a weapon mastery is a very skilled user of that weapon. Like, top-tier, even at 1st level. And the greatsword is a big sheet of sharp metal. I am 100%...

Yeah, I'm on board with this. I especially like how you framed the transition from tool to target, since I think that gets at how this keeps happening. Because in D&D, combat encounter design is not really the goal, and yet....there's quantification there....and many designers are going to...

The first hiccup here is that being a hobgoblin with a longsword matters to the DM, too, in as much as the DM is pretending to be a hobgoblin with a longsword and not merely facilitating a mathematically determined outcome between two buckets of numbers. That consistency isn't JUST important for...

One of the points I'm advocating for is that it is substance. Not just presentation and preference. That being worth doing means it is doing some work in the play of the game. It is pretense, but so are many things of substance in the game. Monster stats themselves are a pretense. It takes...

One of the things that seems to be a little...slid over...in conversations like this is how "reifying" game elements helps in game play. Like, treating a hobgoblin statblock in a baldly mechanical way is like pointing out that Romeo never really drinks poison and doesn't really die on stage and...

Hmm...let's see... If the team is using rules similar to the 2014 rules (and it seems that they are), they're averaging Defensive CR and Offensive CR (which is another thing the "average"-focused analysis can't take into account). This lines up with the "average" analysis noting that the...

"Playing D&D" is probably going to be a pretty small slice of what this project is meant to cover. Movies. Video games. Novels. Probably some adventures or setting material, too, no doubt, but those are only a part of this. Remember when Eberron was tapped as the setting for the D&D MMO? This...

A book on how to create new things for the game that serves as a kind of "director's commentary." I want monster building, class building, subclass building, I want a design advice and dpr charts, I want the game-makers to show me how to bend this system over my knee and make it what I want. I...

This is the way. I like that this makes the poison VERY potent, and encourages the party to stick to ranged attacks, knowing that an unlucky die roll could quickly result in a dead melee fighter. The other way would be to have it as a rider on a tentacle attack, but not require the initial...

It's easy to have expectations of CR that the CR presented in the game can't possibly meet. True "Difficulty" or "Challenge" is such a squirrelly target in a TTRPG. The mechanic of CR in 5e really just compares 2 things: HP vs. Damage. For each side. That's all CR is really made to do: this...

I've used the monster creation rules extensively in combination with Xanathar's encounter-building rules to tune encounters very tightly to create an atmosphere of difficult and impending failure for fights in my Dark Souls-inspired setting, without creating a hopeless scenario or risking much...

One of the things rather ill-explained in the 2014 rules is that CR is mostly made up of two numbers: HP, and DPR. AC and attack bonus/DC can modify this (a creature harder to hit has more longevity; a creature who hits better will drain the characters quicker), but those two numbers mostly...

I do think it's not an easy road to walk, because publishing something that's just going to annoy a loud section of the fanbase (which is kind of inevitable here) is never, like, a great idea. So they need something else to sell it, too, some way to say that even if you don't like the psion, you...