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The story behind the Slaad I like is that it was an attempt by Mechanis to attack limbo. They created a biological organism to spread order in chaos. The Slaad where the result.

Good point. Distinguishing Lawful from Lawful Stupid and Neutral at the same time is tricky. And same for Chaotic from Chaotic Stupid and Neutral.

The NG would consider the law and obeying it to have some value, and would consider directly opposing the law to be a possible problem. The people enforcing the law are also trying to do good, and them attacking your friend is understandable. The CG would consider the law unimportant noise...

Your best friend has murdered an innocent person. They did it for what they thought was a good reason. Lawful Good: you turn your best friend in. The rules/system and its integrity are more important than your friend's freedom. He broke the law, he should deal with it. Systems and Rules are...

Your BM is missing words about how to make your Beast attack prior to level 11.

Give every PC a power source as part of character creation, or in T1. This is why the PC is capable of gaining levels and reaching demigod levels of power in a single campaign. This is true of every PC - Wizards, Warlocks, Sorcerers, Fighters, Rangers, etc. The character may not know what the...

In my Prelude to Armageddon world, the civilizations are split into along the Chaos/Law axis. Lawful civilizations are those of the road and wall. They value rules and organizations over individual connection, on a society level; the Crown is more important than the Queen who wears it. Lawful...

No, 4e doesn't produce a balanced game. I played 4e extensively. Suppose we start with per-essentials. A level 30 PC in 4e has 18 feats, 3 encounter powers, 3 daily powers, 1 paragon path, 1 epic destiny, 1 race, 1 theme, 1 class, 1 subclass, and about 10 items of consequence. By the rules...

Huh? Who hurt you? Characters have plenty of cool things. Feats, class levels, etc. Sure they do, if the DM throws deadly encounters at the party and/or plays enemies like a tactical rpg. But encounter difficulty in 5e is really easy to scale. PCs that are 2x as powerful or 0.5x as...

Sure. 4e by level 30 I can provide a 20x ratio of damage output between naive and optimized characters, near complete immunity to damage by any published monster, almost perfect shutdown of almost every monster visible in an encounter, and other stuff. Pre-essentials 4e prescribes how magic...

If the issue of "martial PCs who lack magic weapons have problems damaging foes immune or resistant to non-magic weapons" is a primary concern, then I'm not worried about 5e martial:caster problems. That problem looks trivial to solve. So no, I'm not addressing it? It is like people...

I hate to tell you, there aren't any RPGs out there that aren't non-ultra-simple-mechanics roleplaying games that satisfy your requirements. Zero, non, zilch. You can buy the "here are stumps of wood as chairs" version of the RPG, or you can buy ones with fancy chairs that require the end-user...

That is the wrong conclusion. I can make a fighter that makes an unoptimized wizard unfairy weak. The tools DMs have iis for the general problem. A structural imbalance in optimization is within their scope. And perfect balance is hard and not worth the cost. So you need to provide those...

Naw, just realize that in 5e D&D, the DM has a suite of tools delegated to them. They are world plots, boons and magic items. And if you can't fix any spotlight imbalance problems using those tools, you aren't creative enough.

4e attempted to make the Martial types and the Spellcaster types balanced. To that end, Martial types gained many cool things they could do to impact the game narrative beyond "I swing a sword and deal HP damage", and resource management to limit their tool use. On the other hand, Spellcaster...

Sure; and a Hero without a Power Source has a HD and can use a sword and other weapons. They are unable to gain levels. It emulates being a Zero reasonably well. In game, they may succeed at some deed that gives them a power source - a potential to gain levels - but until then they are no...

Hero A Hero is elevated above the common mortal by some means. This is called the Hero's power source. Each Hero starts with a Power Source at level 1, and for each level in this class they must level up a power source as well. Some power sources have max levels. Heroes can gain additional...

Sure. How hard is it to guess the low saves of a creature from even a cursory description or a tiny bit of knowledge? A 30 foot tall giant isn't likely to have a super dex save. A golem or programmed automaton is probably going to not have a high intelligence. Etc. Even barring common...

The problem with "the most powerful" here is that the existence of power spells that use saving throws doesn't harm wizards. It just adds to their options. "There are high level wizard spells that are extremely powerful that use saving throws" is true, but that statement makes wizards...

That is why, fiction wise, I've been playing with explicit power sources as mechanical hooks. Mechanically, a power source starts out as something like a feat or an attuned magic item (a small to medium sized thing attached to a character), but you can use it to justify gaining levels in a...