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Yes, blacksmith montages are a thing - particularly if you have dwarven fighters. They'll want to craft their signature weapon (in my high-level campaign's case, it was a dwarven thrower). But, specific montage examples aside, the generalization of that idea is that casters, particularly...

I can assure you that there were new players who came to 3e who had been reluctant to play earlier editions. 3e may have a lot of features that were responsive to optimizers, but it also built the game around more regular and systematic mechanics than previous editions with their diverse...

He's obviously trolling. Don't feed the trolls.

If you aren't sure about using this as a DM but your players want to, just suggest this scenario to them and ask if they still want it: Suppose a trio of cultists circle cast a banishment or heat metal on your heaviest hitter of a PC then use distribute to distribute concentration. You still...

Well now, that's a nice sentiment but I'm under no illusion Canada declared war because the US was attacked. I know that Japan also attacked the British Empire in Hong Kong and Malaya and declared war on the UK and Canada the same day Pearl Harbor was attacked. Canadians may be stalwart allies...

And there IT is again. Suppressing the symptom, but not the cause.

I find it weird that it's thought of an oddity considering GenCon had been doing it when I started going to conventions back in 1983. I mean if the Big Daddy of RPG-industry conventions does it, how odd can it be?

Oh, man, if that's the food truck I think it was, you should have tried their teriyaki chicken bowl or Hong Kong barbecue pork bowl. Those were really good. The organizers of Gamehole run a very inclusive convention. There's a local edgelord who's a bit spicy about it, but convention security...

I think if a lot of us had players who exploited the hut like that on the regular, you'd see a lot of banning of the spell. But your players, I think, made the right decision to not exploit it as a bunker as part of their normal repertoire of tactics and did so for the right reason - it's not...

There's another trilogy in a similar vein as the Cornetto Trilogy - and that's the trilogy based on the Barrytown novels by Roddy Doyle. The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van. They all focus on families in North Dublin shenanigans (the novels are all about the same family, though the movies...

I'm not entirely sure that suffering known consequences in a game in which you know the rules going in and willingly participate even constitutes life being "not fair". If the rules are being followed, or the rules as amended by Session 0, that strikes me as being within the bounds of fair...

I just picked up the two Forgotten Realms books for 5e.2024. The alt covers are stunning.

I hope not. Gay characters get killed way too often in too much media.

I don't think things have be raised to broken levels for a player to optimize the fun out of the game, particularly if different PCs tend to play differently. For example, if the scrappy fighter and rogue are enjoying the fight, maybe the wizard should hold off on their highest-level encounter...

That may be true, but I've found that much of this can be done without shifting rulesets as long as you follow some good GMing principles that can be applied to any game with mysteries to investigate (and probably should be). There's a lot of advice to this effect on theAlexandrian.net and not...

I would expect that to depend on exactly what you want the narrative elements to be and how far you're willing to intrude. You want the Boss Monster to last 6 or so rounds - then don't give it hit points. It has 6 "points" and one is expended per round of combat as long as the PCs land a telling...

Good point. The delve might be OK for complicated encounters either because of the NPCs/Monsters involved, because of the setting, or because of other weird conditions and setup. In defense of the delve format's use in 4e, that was kind of 4e's main mojo - focusing on the encounter and how to...

Yes, you could deteriorate down the condition track and that imposed an increasing penalty on attacks, defenses, and skill checks as you moved down the track until you got KOed. You usually got moved down the track for taking damage greater than your damage threshold which was based on your...

I don't have personal experience with it but my understanding is that Tales from the Loop de-emphasizes combat in favor of teens on bikes investigating weird science fiction mysteries.

Legendary Resistance may be a bit of a kludge but most of the solutions I'm seeing aren't really an improvement. Legendary Resistance as it sits now is easy to apply and ablative. As long as the DM is letting players know when it's invoked, they can set their expectations properly and grind down...