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That would also require that there is a regional common tongue or that at least one PC (presumably the one that is "the face") also has the role of translator. But this just further silos social encounters toward a single PC. My biggest problem is that NPCs that the party can't communicate...

I tried to get into a VTT but they all seemed overly complex with UI that seemed deliberately designed to make homebrew difficult. It was so much work trying to figure out how to use them that I considered for while that it might be easier to write my own. They seem designed mostly to provide...

I read this joke as mocking people who take guidelines as rules.

Definitely this could be a problem if you weren't careful as a DM. It is particularly a problem for DMs whose adventure/encounter design focuses entirely on humanoid enemies. Honestly, this could probably be a problem in 1e AD&D as well if you ran your games that way and you loaded NPCs down...

Well, that part of the system I didn't mind. First of all, it is necessary to balance magical item crafting. If all items are available to the player, there has to be a considerable cost to crafting the more desirable ones. And secondly, players in my experience love loot, and when dropping...

This is the only 5e product that I bought because it impressed me so much, and I'd really love a review of how it played.

This I'm not entirely certain about because I only once and for a short period have a player who played a crafter. Aside from some scroll creation, most of my players characters in the campaign I ran the longest didn't invest in item creation feats. But, I consider 3e item creation feats very...

Were the books bought and paid for? Sounds like they weren't. I personally have no problem with using a legal copy of a book to train an AI as the assumption that it's basically no different than a human reader. So long as you only store the book in a non-representative form, I'm OK with...

"Potential" is carrying a lot of weight in my statement, but as a concrete example of design the Tomb of Horrors has a door that can only be opened by a magic ring, and has a magic ring to find before that point, and there is a puzzle which is by far most easily solved if you have a True Seeing...

I'm told that it did, but that seems to be more of a function of high level play (13th level and up) and compensating for the increased gaps between poor saves and expected DC of saving throws. I never had that experience, both because I never ran a campaign that got to 13th level given the...

I always thought that was poor design. "Improved Trip" is a case in point where without it there was seldom a reason to try it and with it there was seldom a reason not to. The gap between utility and non-utility should ideally be smaller. However, the general idea here that feats don't...

In every version of D&D, it's the responsibility of the GM to ensure that the party has the potential to acquire the resources necessary to overcome the challenges he presents. If you don't do that, you are as bad as the Monte Haul GM who gives away many more resources than are necessary to...

My impression is that correct design on all feats should just make you better at something you could already do, not create a feat tax where you could only do the things if you had the feat. This is one of the reasons feat design is so hard. One of the biggest problems 3rd party publishers had...

My impression is that this idea that the encounter guidelines restricted you to 4 encounters with CR equivalent foes exists more in theory than it did in reality. The part of the article that resonates with me the most is "I literally can’t understand how this happened, because the very next...

But is that desirable as an outcome? As I understood the design, it was designed to make only your first few attacks important against peer level foes (and thus perhaps prioritizing maneuvers and stunts against such foes) while providing large numbers attacks against weaker foes so the fighter...

You just did a drive by shooting with a meme and you think I'm the one not participating in good faith? I'm not sure that your posts are substantiative enough to count as participating, but I know they are not meant to provoke any sort of good faith discussion on technique or theory.

Yes, I know what you meant, but that doesn't mean there isn't a narrative or you aren't steering it. For example, rarely do the player characters appear on a blank slate. There are specific opportunities for them to avail themselves of - challenges they can choose to undertake. And in...

I love the idea of PrC's as Monte Cook outlined them, as being representatives of secret orders within his culture and a way of establishing complex cultural ideas and giving players a sense of attachment to the world. The trouble is that PrC's that did that largely did not exist and were...

I've talked about this before at length, since I've been using a house ruled 3.0e since before 3.5 existed, and while some 3.5 spell revisions (Haste and Harm) made it into my rules, it's still largely a fork of 3.0e that is independent of 3.5e and largely tangential. Some of the many many...

Yes, absolutely. It's that specific observation that made me make the change, couple with my experience with 1e AD&D where precisely at the time the impact of failing a save was increasing, the chances you'd make the save were also increasing. I am OK with caster roshambo, where the caster...