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I always thought it should have been geese. Ducks know they are delicious and flee, meanwhile geese know they can break a human's arm and will happily demonstrate.

I like multiclasses that make sense on all sides: character, thematic & utility. Especially when 8 levels after you made your subclass decision, it feels constraining. And at times the GM may need to allow multiclassing if they want a full array of class-features from a smaller party. The...

Probably too close to 3E's templates, which have been considered verboten. 3e was much more modular than 5e around foes as you could upgrade them with templates, more HD or classes. But 3e was way more information dense than 5e, which drives me nuts. Its Web2.0 desiga book. book. 3E was...

Earthdawn has that mechanic. In that game you don't get XP, you get Legend. Tell your tale to one of the Great Libraries and your Legend grows. You turn Legend into karma and skills, and such. Dying is capable of having after effects in ED as well. A special item might become enchanted, a...

Combat roles was one of the really good concepts from 4e that should have carried into 5e. It provides a tactical direction to a GM. When they saw an encounter with a Defender, a Striker, a Controller and three Minions, it was pretty clear how they should run the fight. To your point, a...

I saw the high speed tier 4, but think in our case it was the adventure path. We were doing were good for a level each. The fights were rough but the issue is the plot makes them literally one right after the other. It was far from the 5MWD but typically after lunch we were falling back a...

I am partial to the fey because it doesn't evoke quite the same "end of the world" threat that demons and devils seem to, and yet fey can still traumatize a geographic region. So the PCs could nuke sprites and pixies and such, but that may bring fey knights. Courts of the Shadowfey has some...

Expect party creep. Familiars, steeds, homunculus, awakened trees, rocks True Polymorphed into elementals, etc. So give the baddies a couple extra CR of "class feature minions" on top of the xp budget but there's no XP reward for the PCs any more than from Summon Monster. And killing those...

My personal experience is that zero war gamers are mellow. They are the most meticulous and uptight types I have ever met. Statistics says they must exist, but my mind boggles at the notion of a war gamer saying "just move 12 inches, 13 inches, whatever. No biggie. We're just here to have...

Oh, DMs can get attached to NPCs. Especially dead ones. Those are the best. Us Yellowbeards are never more dangerous than when we're dead Dead bosses can get resurrected, turned to ghosts or other undead, get sent back from the Abyss as a half-demon, or might have started as corpses* or...

Alchemical Monk would have been better...

They gave the monsters a giant pile of hit points and yeah, people looked for non-hit point ways to win. They discouraged using damaging spells and then added auto-successes that work not only against control spells but all save-based events. So yeah, people spam the lowest level...

Well, yeah, I'd buy it. You give me the weak 5E casters, stronger 3E melees with great cleave & ToB power levels, 3E DMG NPC & magic item rules, 3E MM monster upgrading rules, and a skill system that's less fiddly than 3E but more fiddly than 5E and I'd be happy as a clam. I'd even say pull...

Fire shield on the barbarian (no concentration and it does more damage the more often they get hit) mirror image on the melees, esp3cially when fighting things with paralysis or attribute drain comprehend languages on the sneaky rogue who can get to where they can hear but not understand see...

It sounds like I was kind of unique in that my 1990 high school gaming group was 2 girls, 4 boys (none dating) and my college games were frequently about the same 1/3rd women. Its probably stayed about that same ratio even now 3 decades later. VtM hit big in my area when the Ad&d 2e was...

5e moved the Positive/Negative farther away to outer-outer planes and sometimes refers to them as Positive Energy and Negative Energy planes. Which is actually more apt, imo, given they are sometimes described as lacking a proper terrain...or terra. So as "material" planes, the feywild seems...

I feel the feywild is the positive material plane, where everything is ramped up to 11. The summers are more full of life. The winters are full of howling storms. The Seelie are that which grows, the Unseelie are that which hungers. The Shadowfell is the negative material, where everything is...

Another variant of attrition is losing Legendaries. So a 200hp baddie is dropped to 150hp and loses 1 Legendary Action & Resistance. Lose another at 100hp and then again at 50hp. This changes the "boring" part of bag o' hitpoints. Normal baddie are unchanged until they pass out. This one...

My thinking is they expect too little from DMs. They constrain the number of foes because they think it makes games unplayable, while they ignore the slog of BagOHitPoint monsters. And when you add lair/legendary actions, its like adding more NPCs as its more DM actions, except you usually...

That is 1e wizards all over, needing days to refresh their spells over a couple of days. If that's your yum, plenty of OSRs and heartbreakers. But the game left that behind in the last century and that genie is never going back in that bottle.