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Makes sense to me. Both Demon and Devil "cultures" are sort of glued together by fear.

A run a simulation for both over 40 rounds. Not because either would survive 40 rounds, but to get a good average damage per round, including crits. Assumptions: Everything hits Balor could reliably hit 4 targets per round with the fire aura (might be conservative) Pit Fiend didn't bother with...

Would be a lot simpler to just write an RSS parser and output the Unearthed Arcana updates and links to a page or sidebar or something. You could create an automated dynamic page of links and article names that way.

Heart Attack

Turn Undead is powerful, so I don't mind letting suspense build for a round until they figure out which ones are bad enough dudes to not run away.

My only word of advice is to prepare for stuff to get hard-countered by magic fairly quickly. Even a 1st level with the Alarm spell can encircle a camp with alarms in about an hour. Later, they'll be sleeping in an invisible hut. Provision tracking, like rations and torches, is easily negated...

Sneak up to the horse, sure. But I willing to bet the player is going to intend to stay in the trees to see what kind of details he can make out of the horses on the road. That sounds like a perfectly fine reason for stealth to work, although depending on how far the horses are from the tree...

The character can stealth, and still not catch the goblins by surprise. If he's successful at his stealth check, and he notices the goblins because their stealth didn't beat his passive perception, he can certainly initiate combat and get advantage to his first attack because they didn't know...

Click the link and select "Unearthed Arcana" from the "Narrow By" drop down. It defaults to the newest, and the most recent one has been up since 1/16.

Which is why I said it depends on if the DM thinks there is enough cover for it. Still, the description of the encounter does state that "the woods press close to the trail here, with a steep embankment and dense thickets on either side." To me that seems like it's at least worth asking the DM...

Perhaps the group chose to travel slower knowing that their scout was out ahead. Also, rangers are particularly useful here because they would be able to scout ahead at a normal pace.

The only thing predetermined is that the goblins will not be surprised. They can still very well fail to detect a character sneaking up alongside the road (provided the DM thinks there's enough cover for it), but even if that person notices the goblins and attempts to attack from stealth (say...

Since the horses are in the middle of the road, and the goblins are specifically crouched in the bushes watching the area for someone to approach, it's not possible for the player to stealth out into the open like that without the use of something like Invisibility. Basically, their stealth...

My guess is it was intended specifically to make the first(?) combat easier. Straight up fight without having to deal with stealth or surprise or anything weird like that. **edit** I just re-read the encounter and see that's not the case. Looks like it's stacked to make it possible for the...

"Specific Beats General." Rulings don't really get more specific that being explicitly set in the adventure's encounter. Usually an adventure will explain why something like is happening*1*, but as a DM you'll need to get used to filling in a lot of blanks even in the best of circumstances...

I used to be really big on "top down" world-building, but sometime in the last decade I've totally moved away from it. I've found it's just straight up more fun to tell people only the bare minimum needed for the area they are in, and slowly expand out as the group travels. Take the Lord of...

I assume it's meant to imply that the armor is simply magically enchanted in a way that it doesn't take formal training to make full use of it. The description for Mithril Armor is closer to what you're going for, since it mention being a "light, flexible metal" that makes it easier to stealth...

It seems to me that a "low-magic" campaign would have even the greyist of 'beards in the thick of melee -- much like Gandolf. They may not be doing the same melee damage as the non-casters, but they could certainly find creative uses for combat utility (help actions, positioning, etc) that...

I do, in regards to long rests and short rests. I use the "Gritty Realism" rules by default (for encounter balance), but if a session has an actual dungeon crawl planned or a lot of encounters for some reason, I state up front that we're using the default rules for the time being.