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Yeah, I'd think you want extensible swarm rules as well as minions (or maybe even instead of minions!) - that way you have fewer stat blocks to run as DM, and you can butter up the players by describing how the PCs are carving their way through hosts of foes.

4e's "clock" for adventuring day attrition is healing surges; once you're out of those (or almost out) that's the end of your adventuring day.

@pemerton refers to editions, so in my reply I simply responded using the same terminology. (As I understand it, @pemerton was also referring to how the mechanics of 2e tend to encourage trad play because they are unforgiving compared to 5e when it comes player character survivability and the...

@pemerton I would say @AbdulAlhazred is pretty on point as regards published adventures for 5e. They run pretty trad, in the sense that who the characters are isn't very important for the scenario. For instance, I'm running Rise of Tiamat and unless I add content that's curated to pertain to the...

There's also a pretty big difference in feel from your magic-user having a single spell slot for an entire adventuring day at 1st level versus your wizard having two such slots, the ability to recover one of those slots once during the day, and a handful of spells castable at will, along with a...

I'd be inclined to say that it would have to do with two things: (1) What gameplay preference/aesthetic they're able to enjoy by playing in the capacity of GM that they're not enjoying when playing in the capacity as a player (or that they're not enjoying when they run some other game that they...

I've been reading that thread with some interest on and off in between grinding through email for work. (Music festival season is busy season.) Riffing a bit on some of @pemerton's subsequent posts in this thread, for those who aren't familiar with the term, neo-trad is described in reasonable...

My guiding principle is that I as GM am a facilitator of an enjoyable and fun gameplay experience (by the standards of hobby gaming) for myself and for the other players, according to my aesthetics of play and their aesthetics of play. Everyone is responsible for this to some lesser or greater...

Solidly entertaining. I'd have given it a 7.5, but it's good enough to squeak in at 8 if I have to round to a whole number (which I do).

At least it's not Alf in Pog form.

@TwoSix No, I don't think any of the posts critical of @Celebrim's positions are over the top. Celebrim comes across as trying to assert their personal beliefs - not even necessarily personal gameplay experiences! - as something approaching settled fact. (That may not be what they intend, but...

From Sigil and Beyond: "A fool, especially one who got himself into the mess when he should have known better." (I still have all my old Planescape stuff.)

Better yet, Fruitopia!

I dunno, out of all of those complaints about 5e the only thing I concur is a genuine flaw in the implementation as such is how 5e handles non-proficient saving throws; to my mind, it causes it to be both out of line with every other single edition of D&D, when you take 4e's "NADs" into account...

Fighters (when they're a distinct martial profession/class/category) are, to my mind, masters of arms and armour, and of combat tactics and techniques. Ideally, player character fighters ought to have features that mechanically instantiate this concept or theme. As such, I'm of the mind that...

So, apropos of resource management, I've recently started into playing Horizon Zero Dawn, and it does feature extensive foraging and crafting - and yes, tracking individual arrows. An interesting thing about HZD is the only thing you have to keep track of (at least by the point in the game I've...

I don't know about Chainmail, but I know there are wargames where you roll what amounts to a saving throw against your own defensive rating to avoid taking hits - e.g. naval combat defences in World in Flames, for instance; in that game, as with old-school AC, a lower defence rating is better...

How about having what amounts to two different poisons: poison that does extra damage when you fail a saving throw (if you want it to be a consistent threat across levels, make the damage a fraction of your maximum hit points instead of a fixed damage expression), or half as much on a...

I'm inclined to say that if you're only having fun for half an hour of a three-hour TTRPG session, something has gone very wrong? Not for nothing, I think, are TTRPGs part of the "hobby game" niche. Hobbies generally can include model assembly, gardening, cross-stitch, and so on, none of which...

I much prefer italics for that sort of thing, myself (although I've been known to overuse that, too). But italics aren't possible on Facebook (and I'm not sure about Twitter), so capitialising letters it is! I suppose at least he's not using CamelCase, which I've seen more than one rant devolve...