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The difference between designing combat to be engaging vs. designing it to be over quickly.

Yeah, that’s what I meant about them changing the XP thresholds from a floor to a ceiling. It makes it look like they shifted the difficulty benchmarks over a category, making Medium the new Easy, Hard the new Moderate, and Deadly the new Hard. But in reality, they just changed the way they were...

I think the higher number of weaker encounters may have been a product of the goal to make encounters short. Which was a direct response to criticism of 4e combat taking way too long (a critique I do agree with, at least in early 5e. They eventually fixed the monster HP bloat problem, but by...

Huh? Four kobolds, 25 XP each, with a x2 multiplier for 3-5 monsters is a total of 200 XP. Four level 2 characters have an XP threshold of 400 for a Medium encounter (100 XP per PC, times 4), which means you can go up to 399 and still be within the bounds of an Easy encounter. Four kobolds is...

Yes! Someone gets it!!

Well yes, but actually no. The 2024 encounter building guidelines specifically advise against encounters with more than two monsters per PC, and says that if you do use that many monsters, to use monsters that have low enough HP relative to the PCs’ damage output that they can be one-shotted...

I like to treat the Feywild as very much like Pangea in the Neolithic Dark Era for Werewolf the Forsaken (shoutout to my nWoDCofD homies!) - a transitory plane that bridges the gap between the Material plane and the various Outer planes, where the features of the Material plane are reflected and...

Notably, 5.24’s encounter building guidelines aren’t all that different from 5.14’s. The biggest change is the removal of the XP multiplier based on number of monsters encountered. I believe there’s been some backend work done to enable the removal of this multiplier, tweaking the relationship...

Yep, cause 4e was designed excellently. Just presented in a way that turned a lot of players off.

Ehh, you might think so, but the people that hated 4e are a much smaller portion of 5e’s audience than people who never even played 4e. It therefore doesn’t really hold up to assume that those new players specifically appreciate the design choices that were made in reaction to 4e’s reception...

Yep, which is probably fine if it happens once in a while, but if that’s how most days of adventure go at your table, you’ll probably want to switch to one-day short rests and one-week long rests.

If you’re doing one-encounter days in a city setting you can just crank the difficulty of that one encounter way up. Alternatively, you can switch to a one day short rest, one week long rest model so your “adventuring day” happens over the course of a week of one-encounter days.

Fitting, since they share a root with seemly/unseemly

Leomund’s Tiny Hut is definitely a problem, if your players have access to it and use it for resting in dungeons. I’ve only actually been in one game where this happened, and I wasn’t the DM, but it’s something I would probably discuss with my players if they started using it. I’d probably...

I’d say it’s less Blue and Orange Morality, more Blue and Orange legal code.

Why are random encounters a crutch? They’re a tool the DM is fully intended to have at their disposal. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using that tool.

RE: Backup characters, Brennan has hinted that resurrection magic probably doesn’t work in this setting, and some of the lore that got revealed in the second episode helps further support that notion. He’s also been clear that he’s leaving that up to the dice. In an interview he made a joke...

Thanks! Yeah, that’s the idea. In my mind, fey should really be categorized as lawful in D&D alignment terms, but end up getting viewed as chaotic because their laws seem chaotic and random from our perspective.