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No need to drag psychology, Jungian or otherwise, into it. Call it mental fatigue, cognitive fatigue, or decision fatigue, there's plenty of empirical evidence that our brains don't work so good after they've been in heavy use for a while. And some researchers have made suggestions towards the...

While I share your mystification, I'm also autistic. There is so much about how other people think and act that mystifies me. Enough that I've got a big old list of "That's just how some people be" situations that I've given up trying to understand and just work to account for on a practical level.

Lots of people just hate reading instructions. It's why the video game manual has been phased out in favor of the mandatory in-game tutorial. I've never understood it myself, I'm a habitual manual reader. But I can recognize that it's a common enough phenomena that it has to be accounted for.

Yeah, it's a tricky balance to strike. If you've ever read an 80s Marvel comic, where the characters mentally narrate their powers every single time they use them? That was an editorial directive. "Every issue is some kid's first issue", so the X-Men had to always recap what their powers were so...

At least in my mind, it's a matter of sight lines. If the BBEG uses Misty Step first then moves, the Fighter can see where they teleported to and which way they went after that. If the BBEG moves, then Misty Steps, it opens up new potential destinations and can create more uncertainty on which...

Ah yes, the Oath of What I Wanted To Do Anyway. I'm well familiar with that from the age old days of Vampire: the Masquerade and its Paths. But okay, I'll play along and say the DM doesn't just flat ban any custom cheeseball Oaths. The two things about Oaths are that they give you blessings in...

One of the oldest form of magic is putting restrictions on yourself in exchange for blessings. Swearing to refrain from certain actions, or to uphold a stricter code of conduct, is common across all cultures. Fasts and dietary restrictions for the common folk, oaths for the priesthood to...

Rather than "petty", I can imagine a scenario where a BBEG believes that death is not the end and crippling the party of heroes is an important short term goal. Maybe the heroes lured off the BBEG's minions with a diversion, and the BBEG expects them to return shortly to finish off the weakened...

Okay, playing this NPC as a caster who is smart but doesn't possess metagame knowledge or is necessarily a tactical genius. They're on their last legs, but so am I, and I can only reliably take down one of them. It doesn't matter which one, the others will be enough to finish me. So with the...

Depends. Are we talking out straight up removing an entire axis of character customization? Or are we assuming that all those traits are being pushed into free form pool of "inherent abilities" that everyone gets to pick a custom assortment from? Honestly, I don't like either of those. Removing...

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You have to disengage almost entirely from modern life to do no business with any company that's engaged in any questionable practice. Maybe some people have the good fortune to be able to cultivate a lifestyle that is 100% homegrown or ethically...

Like calling frontliners "tanks", theorycrafting and DPR are imports from video games that mesh imperfectly with a TTRPG. When you're talking about fighting a raid boss in an MMORPG, theorycrafting an optimal build and rotation for maximum DPS is a legitimate goal. I mean, it's not a precise...

It's not a binary. Creators who completely disregard profits end up out of business and able to create nothing. That's the reality of living in a capitalist system. If you want creators to be able to create with no business interest at all, go fight for a Universal Basic Income. Maybe when we're...

It would require a full re-evaluation of the role and power budget of subclasses. Like, when mocking up character ideas, I often run into the fact that Paladins and Rogues just don't have a lot of range in their subclasses. The core features are too strong and the subclass doesn't have enough to...

The UA8 Monk is a little different because a lot of it depends on an active defense; using their reaction on Deflect Attack. This makes them very good in a 1v1, even against a boss, where they're not likely to get hit more than once or twice a round and can mitigate a lot of the damage...

"Anti-caster" is a very narrow purpose, and one that depends heavily on the DM running a specific sort of encounter frequently. And given the choice between "frontline meatshield" and "mobile skirmisher", I'll happily leave the latter to Rogues and maybe Rangers. A new flavor of frontliner is a...

Speaking of such things, with the change to the Heavy weapon trait I kind of want to play a halfling Barbarian. Halfling Nimbleness means you laugh at any defensive line that isn't goblins or kobolds. So why not grab a greataxe, Rage away, and fearlessly dive into the middle of the enemy formation.

There's always going to be a clash when we apply the term "tank" to a TTRPG character. It was popularized as MMORPG terminology by Everquest and later World of Warcraft, and in that framework a tank's job is as much about managing aggro and enemy placement as it is simple damage mitigation. So...

That's definitely a silver dragon. They're big on keeping the dragons on-model for their type, and that dragon has the back fin that goes up and over the head. That's a signature silver dragon trait.

I mean, it makes sense from a design perspective. If a good guy has a piece of the Rod, and you turn up and say you need it to save the multiverse from Vecna, they'll just... hand it over. Not a lot of adventure to that, is there. So instead all the pieces are in the hands of villains or cached...