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I think it doesn't work, and the only reason it looks like it might is because of the unusual conjugation of the verb "cast". To my knowledge, there are no examples in English where a single instance of a verb can simultaneously have multiple tenses, even when the conjugations are identical...

How much did you fail the save by? Unless it was by exactly 1, having a 9 CHA instead of a 10 didn't cost you. Ignoring your specific roll and looking at it in the abstract, even if you'd had a 20 CHA your saving throw would have only been 6 points higher. That means that there was at most only...

I agree that contributes, though I'd emphasize it's one cause among many. I just wanted to point out that the challenge of combat comes from different places at different tables, and those differences inevitably lead to different experiences of the martial/caster divide. Quite possibly! A lot...

I of course agree with you on what the mechanics of to-hit rolls and skills checks are. I don't agree with you, however, that combat and skills necessarily "boil down" to application of those mechanics. Combat in 5e can be about trying to attack and deplete the enemy's HP before they deplete...

I think this is a good example of why the martial/caster debate is so intractable. If armed combat and skill use at one table "boils down" to the ability to roll high enough on a die, but at another table armed combat and skill use "boils down" to something else (e.g. the players' in-combat IC...

Personally, I get additional value out of building NPCs consistent with the PC rules (even if not to the same level of granularity) because I run sandbox and semi-sandbox games where encounters are not designed to be level-appropriate. Accordingly, I need to be able to telegraph the threat posed...

First, I disagree with your claim. Unless your definition of "social specialists" is confined to 13th level characters with expertise (11th level for Rogues), the variance in a d20 roll is too large to "almost never fail" on even DC 20 ("Hard") checks. Second, even assuming your claim is true...

The surest path to success for the players is to change the situation that required a roll so that they automatically succeed instead of having to roll. The character best able to change the situation to produce an automatic success won't necessarily be the character with the highest bonus. If...

I agree. Personally I'd prefer it if there was a wider variety of ways to make a fighter who can contribute meaningfully outside of combat. But it's not important to me whether that wider selection comes in the form of fighter class abilities or simply providing more options for everyone.

I think the See Invisibility analogy is being misapplied. The root issue that makes that spell so controversial is that the Invisibility condition grants disadvantage on incoming attack rolls twice: once for being unseen (heavily obscured) and a second time as an explicit effect of the...

While I entirely agree with you that the ability to taunt foes into initiating violence is genre-appropriate for heroic fiction (fantasy or otherwise), the proposed ability mechanically does far more than that, by specifying the form of that violence. Is it really just "larger than life", for...

Whether any given set of players likes the idea of traps that aren't telegraphed in advance is a style question, so I don't think there can be universally applicable arguments for or against telegraphed traps. That being said, there are ways to incorporate traps into the world where the trap...

TomB is correct. One square mile is 27,878,400 sq ft, not 5,280 sq ft. (You can very this with Google unit converter.)

Differing levels of emphasis on strategy and tactics are definitely an important part of the relevant distinction. As they are general terms with their own history of debate over where one ends and the other begins, however, I'm not confident that they make effective labels for a gaming-specific...

That's the relevant distinction for me too. Regardless of what terminology is used, I see the question as whether: (1) players are expected to accept the premise of a potential combat as presented by the DM and attempt to win it after initiative is rolled; or (2) players are expected to try to...

Despite being holistic rather than step-by-step my procedure can be picked apart in the sense that I don't just end up with a decision on when/if the duke shows up, I also end up with decisions regarding the duke's priorities and resources, as well as the effectiveness of actions the PCs have...

I'd be good with a system with a complete set of tools and clear descriptions of what they can do. 5e definitely could be improved on the later count! (The deliberately ambiguous stealth rules, for example, would have been aided by a thorough discussion of the decision points left to the DM and...

My procedure as a DM for determining how close the evil Duke and his scary knights are to tracking down the PCs goes like this: (First, the duke wouldn't be pursuing the PCs adversarily in the first place except in response to actions the PCs took with the knowledge that it might cause the duke...

Interesting! I think we may just have different conceptions of what it means to be "aware of a threat". From my standpoint, if one is sufficiently aware of a specific threat to be taking particularized precautions against that specific threat, that's enough to qualify as "aware" of that threat...

Of course general awareness that any object might be a mimic doesn't make you immune to surprise (even from mimics!). But taking unusual precautions against a specific object being a mimic shows that the character must be aware of the threat posed by that object. The rules are written that way...