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It was one of those “critically successful, commercially failed” situations. People who were buying the set generally liked it. But not enough people were buying it. Probably didn’t help that UB faeries dominated standard and extended and even had a meaningful presence in Legacy for a few years...

Verisimilitude… reduces immersion…? That’s a first. I don’t agree that an adventuring party full of outlandish characters within an otherwise more grounded world is in any way surreal. The rest of the setting provides the normal to keep the PCs’ weirdness “at arm’s length.”

That’s because it’s the former that follows from the latter. It’s not that they’re an oddballs because they’re adventurers, it’s that they’re adventurers because they’re oddballs. What else is the Gith who finds himself stranded in a town full of humans and one token dwarf blacksmith going to do...

That is the origin of that granularity, yes, though by happy accident the granularity still has valuable utility to the modern combat and progression system. One of the clever things they did under the hood with 5e and for some reason never explicitly stated, is that monster XP is essentially a...

Well, yeah. That’s basically what “milestones” are. Less granular XP awards.

It really depends on what fantasy fiction you’re reading. There’s no shortage either of fantasy fiction featuring extremely diverse casts of characters or of fantasy fiction with very human-centric points of view. Though, I think the fantasy fiction that is most closely associated with D&D and...

Only $7.50 for a turkey BLT? That’s what I’d pay at the cafe at work after my 50% employee discount. Though, it would come with fries (not chili and cheese).

Oh, for sure. It’s not like it’s totally impossible to predict when the next level might come without XP to give you a clue. I just think XP communicates it more clearly, and with numbers, which as we all know, people really like to make go up.

I used to feel this way too. If it helps, I justified it to myself by saying, they’re adventurers. They’re already a rare bunch just by the nature of being the type of people willing to brave the dangers of the dungeon for fame and glory, or risk their lives for the sake of others. So, what’s...

I try to run games that I would enjoy playing in, so my answer doesn’t really change from DM perspective vs player perspective. I like XP for combat, non-combat challenges, and completing story/quest goals, which one might describe as “milestones.” I am also not opposed to XP for discoveries...

In 3e I don’t think I ever “legitimately” got a character past level 3. In 4e I got a character from 1 to 11, though if I remember correctly we did skip a level or maybe 2 because summer was ending and half the party was moving away to college, and the DM wanted to make sure we got to the...

That seems very vague and unreliable as a “progress bar,” and also highly dependent on a structure where the party goes on discrete quests. I don’t think it would work at all for more freeform, sandboxy, location-based, or especially open-table play. I would notice by the end of session 1 that...

The value of XP is that it provides players (and the DM) with a visible progress bar, showing them how close they are to leveling up. This is both viscerally psychologically satisfying, and a good barometer for the pacing of the action. If you have a target number of sessions in mind, and the...

I voted for 2700 XP because I use XP. It’s weird to me that this apparently is an unpopular opinion now, but I think XP serves a very valuable role in the system that people are much too willing to throw away. If I’m planning my sessions well and my players are making good time, that much XP...

Yet everyone thought I was crazy for calling this obviously predatory move like I saw it from the beginning.

Yes, it’s very obvious that they meant for it to let you move up to your speed as a reaction. It’s not confusing or hard to fix, it’s just a troubling sign for the quality of WotC’s editing that a mistake like this made it to… well, “print” isn’t the right word, but to publication for sale.

And here we have the problem with digital-only products. If this was a physical book, you could pick it up in a store and skim it to see if it was of interest. Or even buy it, read it, and return it if you didn’t like it. Or at least try to resell it if your LGS didn’t allow returns. But as-is...

This has never really been the case. It’s written to sound like plain English, but there’s a very specific and intentional way that the rules are written that does have technical meaning. One of the things that always bothers me about 3rd party material is that it almost never sounds like 5e...

Right, but this feature doesn’t allow you to use the Ready action, it allows you to use the Dash action, which does not have any effect when it isn’t your turn. That’s why the Ready action has to specify that one of your options is to move up to your speed. If Dash made you actually move, that...

He might have been misremembering the range, because he knew it was a shorter range than a shortbow, but he seemed to think shortbows had 30/120 range. Though, he may have been assuming shortbows couldn’t have that much more range than his weapon. I wouldn’t think of his weapon as an actual...