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Yeah, in the same way as if I have a +1 weapon, I'm more powerful than the rest of my party if the rest of my party doesn't have it. Of course, the D&D solution here is to make sure magic items are fairly plentiful and easy to hand out. NPC buddies should also be fairly plentiful and easy to...

If I adhere to the rule of "don't roll dice when it doesn't matter," I am not even running that last round of combat. There's no risk, there's no uncertainty, there's no tension, this is just procedural. No one cares about the last straggler. The feeling's already there. If the combat system...

Watered-down "dragons" don't fulfill the fantasy, either. I keep coming back to magic items because the fantasy is very similar - the companion is a (reasonably) reliable part of my kit that just makes be better than I would be without it. I don't have to be a weaker Fighter to have a...

Not really what I'm talking about. Those spells serve their purpose, but they are not the same fantasy as "I am friends with a dragon who fights alongside me and my party."

I really wish the advice on having monster friends adventure alongside the party was better (or, y'know, extant). Riding dragons and griffons and dinosaurs, befriending unicorns, fighting alongside celestials, dealing with fiends, even recruiting guards and knights and veterans and spies...you...

This is another thing that could be dumb or not depending on how much work they put in. Some? A lot? None? I'm rooting for them to pull it off. There's a high degree of tolerance of foolishness in D&D, it's definitely in-genre, but the thin veneer of a half-decent rationale is pretty load-bearing.

FWIW, Makenzie De Armas does a pretty good job fielding the question overall, and talks well about the subclass-specific feedback, but doesn't really dispel the "dragon is purple lol" accusations. "We wanted to explore what that purple dragon could be!" is evidence for this concept disrespecting...

It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing, but I imagine the multiverse angle goes something like this: D&D has a multiverse and that multiverse is part of its brand identity these days. It hasn't always been important, but folks now have decided to highlight the multiverse angle for all of D&D...

Somewhat, yeah. The noble and valorous order of leaders and knight allying with these aloof dragons who learn about planar balance is not an obvious pairing, and the UA didn't offer any reason for it, which leads to wild mass guessing like "lol, they just shoehorned the game's purple dragons...

FWIW, I'm open to the idea of this organization aligning with amethyst dragons and having it make sense in and be kind of interesting in context. Like, amethyst dragons are Neutral and are aloof and kind of arrogantly "above it all" - they don't necessarily care about this nation or its people...

I wonder if this idea has so much internal momentum that they're refusing to course-correct because of a sunk cost. Pre-survey: "Riding amethyst dragons is a clear win and folks are going to love this new vision of the PDK. We might have some tweaks, but this is obviously better. Order the...

Good pets are really hard to do in a TTRPG. Lots of difficult design bridges to cross, all at once, and really hard to do many of them elegantly. The pets that already exist in 5e (familiars, artificer pets, beast master pets, certain conjuration spells, etc) are already really problematic in...

Yeah, it's not a great analogy. :) Judging something based on how dumb or awesome its archetype might be is pretty shallow analysis. I could say it's (objectively?) awesome to ride dragons. It's also awesome to lead an army of allies into a desperate combat and inspire them to fight on in the...

My position on the subclass's thematic design is that a "battlefield commander" style fighter is the heroic fantasy of a Purple Dragon Knight, and that if you're going to make a set of mechanics with the label "Purple Dragon Knight," it should fulfill that heroic fantasy. If it was a...

Good! The space of "knightly fighter who is a good battlefield commander and healer" is a pretty key D&D archetype that FR's Purple Dragon Knights have filled through multiple edition changes, and the 2014 model wasn't great. Looking forward to seeing it, and nervous that they're gonna do it...

Mike's post resonated with me; I think we come from similar traditions. :) FWIW, I'm excited about the "fifth generation" he's referring to here. Especially the focus on what he called "UX/UI," but what I might more broadly call user-focused design. I like the migration away from character...

I think assuming more than 6 levels for a typical D&D campaign is wildly optimistic, though some might make it to the 7-12 range (especially if they start at 3 or something). It boils down to table time. Time spent actually playing the game. Some assumptions: The typical game is 2-4 hours...

Okay, let's dig in. Arcana Cleric My estimation of the SCAG subclass was that it was fine, but a little underwhelming. The revision is overall good, with one fairly glaring exception. An interesting choice here in the revision is to focus the subclass less around "otherworldly creatures" -...