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Again, no one is advocating for never engaging with the rules. It's a strawman you've brought up twice now. The point I'm making is just that it makes sense that some players would want those rules to fade into the background. That some players' goal when playing D&D is not to engage with the...

And when you're watching a play, you can see the makeup, and the cardboard doesn't resemble the castle walls, and cast members move through the audience, and there's artificial lighting. And when you're reading a book, you are holding a physical object, and reading a language you memorized, and...

This is true for RPGs, too. Well, more precisely, it's true for why some people play RPG's. My guess is, it's true for a rather large portion of D&D's audience, even if most of them can't exactly articulate it like this. Who is proposing to get rid of rules entirely? The suggestion is merely...

Stowing a shield takes an action. Dropping a shield (or anything else in your hands) doesn't take an action, according to RAI and Jeremy's twitter, though I think RAW is silent about it. And this is why I don't bother talking about exactly what's in your hands. :) What's in your hands...

Practially speaking, in 5e at least, action economy is the big limiter. RAW, a character could already drop a shield wielded in one hand, attack with their two-handed weapon, and then use their free item interaction to pick up their shield again. I'm just not bothering to make someone account...

Anything having to do with needing to track what you're holding in your hands. I am not going to get persnickety about what you're wielding. It's not fun and I refuse to "well, actually..." someone who just wanted to make an attack or cast a spell.

That makes sense. People watching a movie don't want to be reminded they're watching a movie. People reading a book don't want to be reminded they're reading a book. Performers on stage don't want the audience to see that it's just a stage. If you're telling scary stories around a campfire, no...

This is part of the divergence. "Here's an amazing combat toy." "Well, that's not really what I'm looking for." "What are you talking about, you can use it for more than just combat if you want, and most of the important rules are about combat anyway!" The fluff was never just fluff. It was...

This is a pretty nice example of the divergence I'm talking about. 4e monsters were great as elements of combat on a minis grid. 4e monsters were not so great as, say, world-building props. 2e's monsters are probably the best example of that. What is a D&D monster for? Well, ultimately, for...

I'd suggest that the designers' view of what was busted was different, perhaps in major ways, from the players' view of what was busted. Like, 4e codified the Fighter as a Defender and gave it a mark mechanic. I can imagine that this was fixing a 3e problem, a problem that late 3e also tried to...

It's interesting to me that the most generic class - Fighter - is also one of the most popular. Kind of wonder if there's meaning in that correlation. But yes, Fighters don't have much of an identity as a class. A lot of different identities can roll up to the Fighter class, but if we were to...

I think there's some nuance in this. One of 4e's problems was definitely that it changed the rules and the setting...and then still called itself D&D. One of the loud complaints (that I don't personally agree with, but saw a lot of) is that this game wasn't the D&D that people wanted and...

There is no such thing as a necessary class. There are useful classes for various things. The Ranger is a useful class. There's an argument for including it. "Niche" is not a reason for a class.

I'd actually go the opposite route. When an aasimar or tiefling disguises themselves and passes as human, it's the "normal world." The assumption is that this character isn't treated as anything more remarkable than an elf or a dwarf. "This is a human" is something that people assume...

Part of what I like about the lore I favor for aasimar is that they are mostly human. They come from human families, they have normal human upbringings, and most of them, probably, in the right outfit, could mostly pass for human. In fact, making a "human disguise" is probably an important skill...

My favorite lore for aasimar is the big question of "What do you do when the world expects you to be perfect?" It goes like this: Mortals were never meant to go to the outer planes. They're beings of flesh, bone, blood, substance, elements. The outer planes aren't good places for things of...

The Henriad would like a word.

I kind of love the janky weirdness of Greyhawk's names. Wee Jass, Flanaess, Nyr Dyv, Baklunish, Oerik, Aerdy... They ain't easy on the spellcheck or the pronunciation, I think, but they're pretty memorable in their own way.

Here's their blurb from Saltmarsh:

Sometimes putting racists in your magical elf escapist fantasy is not the way. It's something a lot of folks deal with in real life, and isn't always fun times to put that in your game. Y'know, like how if you lost a parents as a kid it might be kind of not fun to face an enemy called the...