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I just drew up a Blade Bard this week. Toss in a single level of Hexblade and your main spellcasting attribute becomes your main melee attribute, too. Better than a Valor bard in that your main weapon serves as a spellcasting focus, so you can fight with a shield and not have to take Warcaster...

Bards can be so versatile - valor, swords, lore, whispers, glamour - you can really nail down most of your party needs with just that class. Would be very cool if they were all in the same band! Sort of the D&D adventures of Tenacious D!

As DM with a group like this make sure you ... 1) ...are up on the rules. 2) ...have a copy of the player character sheets so you can check their legality. Don't be afraid to point out any errors to them. When it comes to arguing with the DM, I will allow someone to plead their opinion but...

That's a good question. Given that the May release is a sourcebook I guess, if past trends hold, another release, probably the new AP, would be out around GenCon.

Have you played much high level 5e? Yeah, battles go fast. And your average opponent has something called Legendary Resistance. That means as a spellcaster you spend a turn or two trying to burn those away before you bring out the Meteor Swarm, which may still be saved against or...

By that point a caster has earned the right to be somewhat awesome and are still limited (1/day) and their spells subject in many cases to saves or other negation not all that difficult for creatures in their CR realm.

Yep. This is why it's not done much. I had a Death Knight attack a downed opponent in a game over the weekend ... 3rd of three attacks, previous 2 dropping the PC, rolled a d6 in the clear to indicate that an 'even' result would mean the last attack would be against the fallen PC (who had...

If you do what PCs do and focus fire, not very hard.

The pervasive influence of Chaos has weakened his sanity, leading him to entrap victims using a flashy song-and-dance routine... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPrbccEdI5o

Barsoom!

This is a difficult proposition. The issue with 5th is that you get a wealth of class abilities per day unless you bake in a ton of encounters or boost a smaller number of encounters to a deadly level. A DM starting to tinker with this system to enable a game where you have fewer, non-deadly...

Some degree of table talk is fine but when it becomes overly critical or patronizing it's time for it to stop. Let the player have their turn, please. I've seen all kinds of strange PC builds and none stand out as all that bad. I'm more turned off by players who don't bother to learn their...

Well, not really. The "I want magic item price lists" folks actually want an official, power-rated categorization system that aligns game-power of magic items with a gp cost. The DMG and XGtE already provide guidelines for magic item purchasing, vending and creation, though not in the vein...

D&D owes more than a little of it's oeuvre to the pulps of the early 20th century - Burroughs, Howard, Lovecraft, etc. This was a period when Catastrophism, where the world was shaped by occasional, world-shaking, Biblical-style floods and earthquakes, was still a popular theory for geologic...

Ah, but D&D hails from an era before you could save a game. Instead you used a quarter and got a handful of 'lives' before your game was over. The old Resurrection-costs-a-point-of-Con mechanic is a reflection of this ethos.

5e has very few save-or-outright-die events from what I've seen thus far. Besides Power Word Kill, the worst I've seen is something like "take a ton of damage and if reduced to zero hp the character is dead/turned to dust/becomes a chia pet".

Table culture has to be taken into account. However as a DM one thing I want in my table culture is that my players respect the prep and challenges I put in front of them. Over the years I've found that the more you fudge bad consequences the more your players sense your reticence to do so and...

Perhaps in a no-option save-or-die I'd allow something like this. Trouble is, in lots of situations the player has had other options they could of taken but opted not to and is now in a very bad spot due to these earlier decisions. I'm a believer in consequences for taking big risks without...