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I thought you were. The book already has more monsters in it than any past D&D Monster Manual. What more would it take to satisfy you? Should they remove all of the art and only have stat blocks and tables? The purpose of art is to inspire encounters, adventures, and dungeons. You’re supposed...

That’s a very poor characterization of the discussion. They were complaining that they felt mislead about what the new monsters would be, making it sound like they felt it was false advertising. I pointed out that they previewed this direction pretty thoroughly. They never said anything to...

They talked about and previewed a lot of the monsters that were variants of previous ones. They made a big point out of saying that a ton of older monsters have variants now. The Cyclopes Oracle, Empyrean Iota, Vampire Familiar, Flaming Skeleton, Goblin Hexer, Haunting Revenant, and more were...

I also made one of those, but it wasn’t a melee warrior with monk abilities. More of a buffer/controller that moved people around the battlefield.

Winter Walker Review: Lore: I made an arctic ranger subclass pretty much thematically identical to this one over 4 years ago, and there's also a good amount of mechanical overlap between the UA subclass and my homebrewed one. Mine was even called the Frost Strider, which is pretty similar to...

I meant that Charisma or Constitution should be the ability score all of this subclass's features that scale on Intelligence. Meh. I'd only see that be a problem for players that severely misread the rules. A very rare possibility. If it hasn't come up for Drake Wardens I won't worry about it...

Huh. I just checked my 2024 PHB and it does seem that they got rid of the "you always have this spell prepared and it doesn't count against the amount of spells you can prepare" wording and simplified it. That's nice. I hated writing that every time I homebrewed a subclass that got extra spells...

Yeah, I think designing a whole subclass around slaying a specific creature type is too niche. Imagine picking a Dragon Slayer Fighter for Curse of Strahd, Storm King's Thunder, or Tomb of Annihilation. Sure, it might come up a few times in the campaign, but you'll definitely feel out of place...

Purple Dragon Knight Review: Lore: As I mentioned earlier, I think linking a whole subclass to a single dragon type is too narrow of an idea. These should just be "Dragon Knights," with "Purple Dragon Knights" being a specific order of them. Or if they want to differentiate them from the...

Yeah, those types of abilities can be brutal. The Warforged Colossus has a powerful laser blast AOE that kills and disintegrates anything reduced to 0 hp by it. It very nearly TPK'ed my party in my last Eberron session.

When I was a new DM and I hadn't gotten the DMG yet, I applied the abilities of the player races to the NPC stat blocks. One of my first games had a half-orc gladiator that had relentless endurance. I think new DMs are smart enough to do that, but I agree having a table to make that explicit and...

It's the word "thug" they're avoiding, because of the historically racist connotations of the word. No one forbid them from using the word "Orc." That's silly, Orcs are still in the game. They just share a stat block with the formerly-called-Thugs.

Not really. I’m aware of the concept, it’s just not commonly used at least in my experience. To me it sounds silly, especially with the new “Boss” version. “Tough boss” sounds silly as a monster name.

Yeah, but not a commonly used one. I’ve never heard someone call anyone “a tough” before, even in media. Hell, “mercenary” could work well, too. Way better than “tough,” IMO.

I was going to bring this up when I do my full review of the Purple Dragon Knight. I couldn’t care less about if it breaks Forgotten Realms lore. I don’t like the setting. What I do care about is broad usability in other settings. When I created my homebrew Dragon Rider subclass (based on the...

That whole table is interesting and there are a few peculiar changes, but I want to say that “Tough” and “Tough Boss” are among the dumbest names possible to replace “thug.” IMO, “ruffian” or “bruiser” would have been much better.

I sure hope the Archivist is returning. IIRC, it was the most popular Artificer subclass. It was my favorite and they turned it into the most boring Wizard subclass (Order of the Scribes).

College of the Moon review Lore: While I know quite a bit about the Forgotten Realms, I admit I’m not familiar with the Moonshaes. If this archetype existed in previous editions, I guess it makes sense to bring it back, but the base archetype just isn’t doing anything for me. We already have a...

I’m pretty sure that was the Candlekeep book, which referred to the frog people (Grippli?) as “savage.”

I am looking forward to the new Eberron book the most. The other books do look interesting, but I don’t like the Forgotten Realms and don’t really need a bunch of Dragon adventures. And Eberron’s one of my favorite settings. Fingers crossed about the new Artificer. The UA had some good things...