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Yeah, levels 1 and 2 each only take half an adventuring day to gain enough XP to level up. By design, because they’re supposed to be tutorial levels. Should be about 3 combats each if they’re designed according to the encounter balance guidelines, and most levels after that last for about two...

Dude, combat has been hit point based attrition since Chainmail

Not if you’re playing efficiently. One of the design goals back during the D&D Next playtest was for combats to take about 10 minutes on average. And, in my playtest group’s experience, that goal was met successfully. Granted, those combats were each against like, a half dozen kobolds at most...

Yeah, because they didn’t want to do that many encounters. But that is what the system was built around. Well, your group is far more optimized than most.

To be fair, the sudden and enormous influx of new players 5e brought to the game would have made it impossible to know what “the vast majority” would prefer, since most of them weren’t playing yet. 5e was originally playtested using keep on the borderlands, and the majority of the people...

I mean, that’s subjective, but “I don’t like the way this system is designed to work” is a very different complaint than “this system doesn’t work as designed.” People decided they thought long adventuring days with many combats sounded boring, refused to run the game that way, and then...

Again, I think a lot of these people actively worked to find ways to read the advice that would support the way they already wanted to interpret it. And also apparently didn’t try running it as it was recommended, cause if they did they’d have seen it worked well.

Sounds like a lot of fun!

I mean, if you’re doing those things, you don’t really need combat to be balanced. Combat is balanced around adventures where combat is happening regularly. If it isn’t happening regularly, obviously you would need to make up for that in the way you design the few combat encounters you do have...

Actually 4e introduced it and 5e repurposed it. It means 6-8 combats with one or two short rests in between. Which the DMG explains. It doesn’t explain that combats are expected to take about 3 rounds, and it probably should, but all the rest of these assumptions were explicitly stated. A lot...

And for those people, the 2014 DMG offered the (admittedly poorly named) “gritty realism” variant resting rules. Short rests take 24 hours, long rests take a week. Now your “adventuring day” is spread out over a week, and you can have your one or two combats a day and still have the game balance...

How do you handle it?

Oh, yeah, some people understood the assignment, but I think a lot more didn’t, and moreover they refused to accept it when it was explained to them.

I know, I just don’t like that. I don’t want silver weapons to be approximately 10% more effective against shapeshifters than normal weapons, I want them to be pretty much required to kill lycanthropes. I could take or leave the extra crit damage, but lycanthropes should regenerate every turn...

Oh, they did. It’s just that no one read the DMG. And when people quoted the DMG saying “look, it says right here you should have 6-8 combats per adventuring day,” no one believed it. They argued it was just a recommendation of how much a party can handle, not how much they need to be facing...

Wow, 20 rounds of combat between long rests, with combats assumed to last about 3 rounds means they were expecting approximately 6 or 7 combats between long rests. Which is what the 2014 DMG recommended. Which is what a lot of us have been saying for the past 10 years.

I’d consider vocal recognition to constitute personal data. I don’t even trust Siri. I accept that I’m the weird one here, but I don’t like giving the robots permission to listen to me and remember what I look or sound like.

I’d even be fine with silver being a magical weapon type instead of a vestigial holdover 3e’s special materials rules, and ditto for adamantine. That said, I would still have kept the regeneration. Hell, you could give werewolves regen and not include the clause about it being turned off by...

Yeah, the knockdown thing on wolves is very weird, and in 5e it’s kinda superfluous with pack tactics anyway. They’re endurance hunters, they don’t tackle their prey to the ground to maul it, the chase it down giving the occasional heel nip until it’s too worn out to keep running and collapses.

That makes sense to me. This first episode was definitely a piece of entertainment media that demands your full attention, and I completely understand people not wanting that out of an actual play. Yeah, I suspect that this episode was an outlier in terms of the usage of game mechanics. Brennan...