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Matt specifically asked the new casters to carry some of the flavor-text load by describing their spellcasting when possible. I think it works quite nicely.

It does seem kind of weirdly limbo-esque to me. I'd keep playing with the notion. I think the math nerds would want some clear scale for the decision making. Make it direct and obvious that the risk/reward balance is at stake - failing at a near-certain success is more disastrous than a...

Everything's faster in the age of the internet. It used to take weeks or months for people to lose interest in a news story, for example.

The mere fact that two droids, directionless, were randomly brought to the son of the movie's villain living in squalor, before leading him into the desert to be stumbled upon by the one person who could take them to save the princess - that's the power of [-]the Plot[/-] The Force at work. We...

But that applies to the entire franchise. The Force pulls everyone where they need to be. What author am I remembering that pointed out you could replace the word "Force" with "Plot" and explain everything?

In addition, most of the problems above can be explained in universe as "the Force didit." I always wanted to find out that Anakin made Padme fall for him, as part of his inevitable turn.

She suffered a setback, and she had to use ingenuity to overcome it. Mary Sues don't suffer setbacks - everything goes as planned. Even in the rest of Star Wars, the heroes tend to win in the end - Empire being the famous exception. To use an earlier example, Luke didn't fail to rescue...

Her goals in TLJ were to (a) convince Luke to teach her to be a Jedi - failed; (b) convince Kylo Ren to turn to the light - failed. She "sailed" through the movie because, except for the fight sequence which was really more part of Kylo' character arc, she wasn't ever in physical danger. In...

I really feel that, by your definition, Rey falls well into the "competent" territory and falls short of the Mary Sue label by a good margin. Just because she succeeded at using a couple of force powers during a crisis doesn't means she's never failed at anything and always been in control of...

So? Luke's DM started the campaign at 1st level, and Rey's DM let them start at 3rd. Plus, Luke was a 1st edition character, probably "keeping what he rolled". Rey got to use point-buy and has access to skill points, not to mention that human-optional feat. Finn and Poe are clearly 3rd level...

I can see it, but I can't see it. If you wanted to combine the two ideas you'd do so by throwing out the game map of both settings and creating a new one that draws elements from both. You'd be better off starting with Eberron's planar model, or Monte's Infinite Staircase (but with boats...

I feel like it more reflects a need to partially balance the new cast against the old one - make the young heroes feel more like the "newbies" by contrasting them with the older leaders. But you could have a point - there's a lot of YA-type fiction guiding movies lately, and therefore more...

Sort of like the One Ring, but not a property of the items themselves. Every time an agent of the Darklord gets close, something just goes wrong.

My party put an NPC wizard on the throne of Barovia when they left. I described to the players afterwards how the Dark Powers slowly corrupted the young wizard into a tyrant, oppressing the kingdom with magic. And how one day young lad, who had grown up hearing tales of the True Ruler, who...

Why not get the new player together with another player, and have them come up with a reason why the second is bringing a tween along? There's less of an "other players' reactions" problem there.

I read the "flesh to stone" discussion below, and it got me to wonder: Couldn't you make a really fun encounter for your players out of a high-level wizard (or spellcasting creature) with a poor spell selection? He's much higher level than the party, but his effective CR is lowered to the...

By the way - I really enjoyed your forward to the volume. You should do more writing for WotC.

What about the frozen plane of (I think) Moil from the Return to the Tomb of Horrors? I don't remember many details off hand.

Thread randomly reminds me of a book in which the characters are players in a prototype download-your-brain-style-VR-RPG. During the introduction someone asks if the computer couldn't just take away their free will and make them do something. The programmer replies, well, it could in theory...

In my run of the module, I had the brides earth glide through the floor (I think I got this from V:TM) and, with surprise, reach up through the ground and (grapple checks successful - thanks advantage!) drag some of the PCs into the earth. This made the brides seem really scary for their actual...