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Which historic reality? Egypt had 1+M (est) ~3,000bce and up to 3M prior to Alexander & roman conquests (after which the population went up). The Persian empire of 500BCE had 20M+ (est). Carthage had an empire of 4M (est) in the 200s BCE. The Roman Empire had an estimated 60+ Million in the...

That or you can make the case that it will make more money or can plausibly avoid a material loss. I spent a lot of time on risk mitigation projects. Which is something WotC should have done to avoid those canceled accounts. Off topic

Yep. several times. A couple at a Fortune 100, the last one wrapped up last month. One particular process I shepherded from paper, to MSAccess (budget denied for 12+ months), to MSAccess + MS SQL (web developer budget denied, db budget approved) to IIS+MSQL ("why is this risk-management...

I meant 2024, which is where the problem is.

WotC owned DDB for 2+ years at the time 5e 2024 (edit) was released and had plenty of opportunity prior to the purchase to perform due diligence on the code base. They no longer get passes on past design decisions as they have had time to do refactoring. They either intentionally intended to...

You may not take it seriously, but the 10th level party that cast Thunderwave on a lion near to a water hole at night and wound up with a herd of gazelle plowing into the party and nearly resulting in a TPK takes it REAL seriously. Turns out 60ft darkvision on a cloudy night doesn't provide a...

I try to make sure the vibe is coherent,but don't get too nitty gritty. It's mainly ensuring predators have ranges large enough to make sense and be sure that the prevalence of prey animals aligns with predator populations. E.g. if a lion eats one gazelle per week, the herds need to be...

Phil - a subterranean being of some kind. The suspicion is that Phil has adapted to the pressure of living beneath dirt and stone and would die its main body emerged to the surface. It appears to feed on energy, specificlally electricity and heat (in the form of lightning and lava) No more...

The damage scaling is a design choice, not a bug. You can look at everything from kobolds to trolls to dragons and see how the spell level lethality has dropped. 5e Kobolds typically nerd to be hit by multiple magic missiles while in 1e it was one kobold, one missile. Once upon a time, tier 2...

My bard (and I think the entire party) wears Clothes of Mending. Pricey for clothes (unless you are a dwarf or elf, where its just good sense) but It's the obvious option while adventuring. I have a Cloak of Many Fashions I use to embellish the outfit on arrival in town. Or to make the...

Mine is a softcover and pretty old. I think I got it as a kickstarter but thats because I buy a lot of 3rd party stuff on kickstarter. I also have MMS Silk Road. It is well done but less transformative for me, probably because I had my own simplified merchant system prior to SR being published.

That's not fantasy, its reality. Unless the assailants get mobbed or someone untrained gets lucky fighting back, two armed killers will carve or shoot a bloody swath through any community of non-combatants at any point in time. My point is that threat exists everywhere. So why is this place...

At least a couple thousand up to many thousands. The ratio of civil guard and/or standing military to population is incredibly low. In most cases the guard are the troops of the local potentate, and spreading them around in penny-packets hinders their ability to deal with military threats or...

If you want to call 66 people a village, go for it. What doesn't make sense is that 1 adult in 6 is a guard. Those 5 guards should cover a territory with thousands people.

Magical Medieval Society Western Europe - this is the book I thumb through all the time for ideas. The power structures and kingdom builder helps me think big picture, city builder is medium scale and the manor level is small scale. And the layers of manoral officials remind me that every...

Agree with @Whizbang Dustyboots . 33 people isn't a village, it's just a couple of farm houses. There's no guard captain, just Big Ed who tells people to settle down. It just doesn't make sense for 15% of the manpower to be dedicated to full time guards. In contrast, Virgil Earp was the only...

I agree with @Staffan that the same encounters over a wider area would change the pacing and make it feel less of house-to-house combat. To use the Water temple as an example, have it be a series of outposts along a river. You have a couple of elites supported by a squad or two of mooks. The...

As someone who has spent like 2 dozen sessions in a row, slogging through four elemental temples, the under level and is now taking out the elemental gates, I have some opinions. First off, the self-segregating "frenemy" members of each cult who are not really allies combined with...

In college I ran a campaign for 12 players. Rounds took a while even though I used a lot things to accelerate GM actions (i.e. had an XLS that pre-rolled a ton of d20s and I just went down the list for NPC rolls) Other things to keep players engaged Would call out whose action it was, whose...

And depending on edition and exact spell, it isn't always clear which spells can be recognized by a target. I mean what does a character experience when making a Wis or Int or Cha save? Existential dread? Terror? Pain? The smell of burnt toast?