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Yeah, I was taking @darjr at his word that it was, and giving Mearls the benefit of the doubt that the math was correct. That’s why I find the situation confusing though. Like, did he somehow have the wrong math when he first claimed to have made fireball stronger on purpose? How did that happen?

Of course people make mistakes all the time. I’m saying I don’t understand the nature of the mistake he’s saying he made. If I bake a cake, and immediately after baking it, I say, “notice how moist it is? That’s because I added an extra egg above what the recipie called for,” and then 10 years...

I do remember him saying, back when 5e was still in playtesting, that he specifically wanted big, splashy damage spells to be the most effective, because they feel the most fun to use, and that his intent was to design the math such that the character optimizers would be able to pull out their...

But, I mean, this isn’t just an “I made a math error” kind of mistake. This is claiming you did a thing, and then 10 years later being like “actually I did some math and apparently I didn’t do the thing I said.” Like, brother, are you saying you lied about it 10 years ago? I don’t know, maybe...

Huh… weird. I don’t understand how it’s even possible for him to have been wrong about that, since IIRC the original claim was that they had a formula for how much damage a spell of a given level should do, and then for a few iconic damage spells they wanted to feel extra powerful, they went a...

That’s surprising, I’m pretty sure it was him who originally made the claim that it was.

I mean, they obviously know which of the three groups they’re all going to be in, and that they need to be split up into those three groups by the end of episode four. If that’s too much pre-planning for your tastes, I don’t know what to tell you. There’s really no other way they could have done...

I seriously wasn’t comparing the campaign to Game of Thrones in any significant way, I was just saying I expected the Schemers’ episodes to take place in Dol’Makjar and involve lots of politicking, like how in Game of Thrones the episodes focused on King’s Landing involved lots of politicking… I...

Not to get too political, but a lot of us are very literally having our human rights taken away right now. If you’re not feeling the doom and gloom, you’re one of the lucky few. Me, I naively made the decision around this time last year to wait until after tax season to get my legal name...

Ah, ok, this context helps clarify your question a lot! Given these definitions, I have a rather strong preference for what you’d call a despairing world. I can certainly understand wanting your D&D to be more of an escape from the despair of our real world and therefore favoring a hopeful...

I think both pure hopeful and pure despairing are too limited. Analyzing human interaction using game theory (also a limited lens, but sometimes a useful one) reveals that whether selfish or selfless strategies in classic scenarios like the prisoner’s dilemma are more effective is highly...

Pike’s Peak is a hell of a hike. I did it with my dad when I was 13; took us two days, and the last leg was insane. We were stopping to catch our breath like every few yards because of the altitude. And we live in Colorado, so we’re more acclimatized to high altitude than most.

Oh, I meant re-flavoring skills as a thing you can do now as a way to make casters feel more magical without messing with their balance. If you’re planning to take away spell slots, yeah, you’d need a much more significant redesign.

One thing I really liked about the D&D Next Playtest version of the warlock was that instead of spell slots that just worked weird, it had unique abilities (IIRC they were called “minor boons” or something) that they could cast a small number of times between short tests, “lesser boons” that...

This would be my preferred alternative. Infuse magic into the mundane actions of spellcasters. Maybe when your wizard with Stealth proficiency sneaks around, he’s not just hiding but using his petty magic to place a veil of shadows around himself, or to make his clothes change color to...

I mean, “go away, you bother me” and “why are you talking to me, speck” don’t usually translate to, “I am about to kill you.” That’s what I mean about the escalation being very fast. Which is fine, that teaches us something interesting and valuable about the character, that he can and will kill...

I thought he just said that Primus wasn’t performing any spellcasting components but not necessarily that he wasn’t the one casting. But I could also be the one misremembering. I do remember that the implication seemed to be that it wasn’t from Primus, and my assumption was actually that he had...

Was that confirmed in the Cooldown?

Well, I mean, she did listen. And she walked away from that interaction alive, and thanks to a lucky saving throw, unharmed. Which I think you and I are at least in agreement was awesome! I was even fine with him saying “if you keep talking to me, I’ll kill you where you stand.” That was a very...

All well and good, except that this was said super-powerful NPC’s very first scene, and it went from 0 to 100 immediately, which left the players no opportunity to learn this was not a character to be messed with. I understand “mess around, find out” but there was no mess around phase here. It...