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And we're done with Death House! The grand finale was filled with drama. The party decided they wanted to bee-line for the end of the adventure, so they left a bunch of rooms unexplored (including, sadly, the bulk of the treasure) in order to reach the second basement. After some tense mucking...

No part of your quote specifies that you must play at the same table as another wizard. Where do you get that?

I was interested in trying some oddball race/class combos, and started working on a guide for spellcasters interested in suboptimal casting stats. What I discovered is that there are a TON of spells that require neither a saving throw nor attack modifier. I'm categorizing spells alphabetically...

Well that or he might be twelve, which is another possibility.

?!? This is completely out of left field, and it super weird, since # of XP points and # of milestones are the same thing on different scales, like fahrenheit and celcius.

This is the fallacy, I think. Leveling is not (just) about about combat. You're also better at exploring and social interaction as you level. Part of the challenge, I think, though is that the vast majority of game mechanics are based on combat, that it feels ostensibly about combat.

Saw a paladin roll on the item in this adventure, keeping it from a druid. I was flabbergasted.

Sure; the important thing is you're not a paladin "of" a deity unless you want to be. You can also be a paladin of Menzoberanzan or of the Drow, or of tracking down and killing the six-fingered man who killed your father.

Yeah, it really bugs me that Paladins can't take TWF and rangers can't take Protection. When I DM I wave that restriction; fighting style is a fighting style is a fighting style.

As a free action I allow my PCs to know the following about the creatures they face, without a skill check: The size of the monster The color of the monster The aroma, if any, the monster exudes The relative level of hirsuteness of the monster Whether that monster is speaking to them in a...

It's like the jokes keep writing themselves. Clearly you don't live in a place with an HOA. I PUT A LEIN ON YOUR HOUSE BECAUSE YOU HUNG YOUR CLOTHES OUT TO DRY MUA HA HA HAHA. At what percentage of the population do people warrant being treated decently by the people around them? 3/5? I'm...

The biggest problem with abilities like disarming strike is it increases the challenge of the DM to suddenly have to improvise how a monster would attack while disarmed. It's a small thing, but DMing is stressful enough. That said, oh the wailing and gnashing of teeth when PCs realize that...

GAH I totally forgot him. That's perfect. I was toying with the idea of the PCs being approached / falling upon a grieving widow bearing a letter: ...but maybe that's a bit over-the-top.

FWIW, I have five PCs. Yes, and the party was saved by the raging barbarian who stood in the bottleneck and passed five con saves in a row. That barbarian was the domino that if he had failed one save, would have toppled the party. Were I to run the adventure again, I would have the four...

Skill challenges took a bit of finesse to get right. They had a few problems: The lack of action economy let one highly-skilled character run the whole thing Ending on three failures was both statistically a poor decision and incentivized min-maxing, not RP choices Insufficient detail /...

It's a cool concept. Remember though, that Paladins in 5E aren't necessarily pledged to a deity. They're pledged to something, but their power doesn't come from a divine origin like it did in previous edition. A drow paladin would be likely one pledged to defend the priestesses or temple. Oath...

Here's another way to say the same thing: It's a free country and you're allowed to feel that way if you'd like, but I expect you to be very lonely as a result.

Phew, session three was a nail-biter. Two combats, both of which two of the five PCs spent the majority of the time on ice. The party started off heading from the Grick room to the Ghoul corridor, and got pinned by the ghouls. This encounter is terribly designed; it's set in a bottleneck such...

Hate on 4E's skill challenges all you want, I think having some kind of in-game structure to model non-combat challenges really incentivized their creation. In their absence, authors don't really have anything other than combat to throw their RP budget at, and this is the result. Personally, I...

This is the type of empathy the world needs more of. I mean, just look at the words: me, me, my self-determined, you incorrectly, me, you are in the wrong, your fault, not mine. I could try and reason against this, but there's certainly no arguing against such textbook egocentrism.