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I've occasionally had campaign arcs (in multiple editions) where relatively low level monsters get juiced up and go berserk. They have a better chance to hit, do more damage but I don't change anything else. Kind of a nice change of pace and an interesting challenge but nothing I need on an...

From previous posts you like narrative conceits driving play for more than I do. If I want enemies that they can kill left and right I can still do that in 5e, they just aren't going to be minions. As far as Bard killing Smaug that was a narrative contrivance. Tolkien needed some way to kill...

If I paid for HBO I wouldn't want to watch The Sopranos either. It's just a question of preference. I don't want to be buddies with someone who tries to suck my blood while I sleep, a slaver who would be more than happy to subjugate me and everyone else, a supposed ally that is secretly evil and...

I know I'm probably an outlier here but while I enjoyed BG 3, I don't feel any particular draw to play it again. I don't care for the whole "edgy evil is dramatic, good is boring" tone that seems to underly pretty much every character.

I remember the devs acknowledging a while back that development time was far shorter than what they had wanted, that powers were meant to be used for wizards, not the other classes. I assume skill challenges fell into the same category, I think the Essentials rules were closer to what they...

The first and every time I relayed the experience I was clear that the minions were not ogres. But no, I don't remember the specific monsters from a game I played 16ish years ago.

I'm not sure there is a great approach. Personally I use mobs, but it's mobs of zombies not ogres. I just don't care for the minion approach if it means that the stats of the monster change depending on who is attacking.

I don't think the rules break in 5e as badly as they did in 3e. The rules in 4e worked just fine if you liked the rules, the issue there was that combat took forever and a day. I've run games up to highest levels in 4e and 5e, I did minor tweaks for 5, but I do minor tweaks here and there anyway.

I played 4e for years. I ran LFR games, ran a home campaign. I DMed and played games up into epic tier. I am telling you what I, and my fellow players and DMs experienced over the life of the edition. Maybe you should potentially accept that some people have a different opinion based on...

I just reread the section and quoted the text of the rules. They're quite clear. There have to be X successes before Y failures and every character has to contribute. The most the DM is allowed to do if running as written is to add a +/-2 or allow a skill they hadn't thought of.

If by "interpretation" you mean, doing what the text of the rules said to do, I agree. The other argument I see is that you don't use the rules provided. There is text about using skills the DM hadn't considered or other benefits not connected to the skill challenge and, of course, not...

I'm just repeating what I was told and how it was used at tables I played at. If someone had a power that did X, that if anyone could do X then X as a power was pointless.

I'm saying I don't want things like minions that are designed to fulfill a narrative trope while ignoring the rest of the design of the game. Either fully lean into narrative game or better support the sim side like every other version of the game. As far as skill challenges they were very...

Whether or not you like them hit points are consistent. Unless its a minion of course. The design goal was to have enemies the characters could easily take out. The implementation meant that I could take them out by slapping them with a rubber chicken.

I agree that something has to give. Like either tske a completely different approach to the entire game or get rid of minions.

I don't have the books at the moment but I remember it being presented as "This is the way." Obviously the WOTC police aren't going to bust down your door if you ignore the rules. But if consistently ignoring the rules is the answer for rules I don't like (and I don't recall anything...

I don't remember the exact details and as I've said repeatedly it probably wasn't ogre minions. But we had set up a situation were most of the villagers young and old could throw rocks from a safe position. But why let people with actual play experiences alter your summary judgment?

I want more consistency of the world than that. Obviously the DM could have taken a completely narrative approach to the commoners. But that goes back to the main issue, that those ogres were not anything "real" in the fiction. It does nothing to fix my dragonborn's 1d6+5 damage from a breath...

We played different games then, 4e absolutely locked you in. Powers were very specific and detailed to the point where I was told more than once "You can't do that, there's a power that allows it" or "I don't care if that should convince the NPC it still only counts as one success in this skill...

I agree up to this point. For 3e they did try to answer everything and in my opinion just added extra overhead that lead to endless page flipping. With 4e they changed the nature of the game to lock it down even more to the extent that for many people it felt like an entirely different game...