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This looks like a promising thought. Albeit, perhaps the five should be: Celestial, Devilish, Demonic, Aberrant, Unaligned. That's not quite there, but something like that might allow more nuance in the meaning of said "alignment". It seems potentially neat to take alignment in the literal...

I've valued alignment over the years for providing a shorthand for creature motivations. The personality traits in backgrounds have been too wordy, while at the same time being too specific, to serve the same purpose for me. Genetic alignment seems problematic. Cultural alignment? I'm really not...

Artificer Armorer 23 Artificer Artillerist 12 Artificer Battle Smith 23 Barbarian Path of the Beast 20 Bard College of Creation 18 Bard College of Eloquence 20 Cleric Order Domain 22 Cleric Peace Domain 20 Cleric Twilight Domain 24 Druid Circle of Spores 2 Druid Circle of Stars 21 Druid Circle...

I'm really not sure what you are disagreeing with. I think there can usefully be some meaning to designer that is differentiable from artist, and that this difference is not a negative one and probably not even on the axis of art as you are using it. It is the addition of some concerns that an...

Now they are at the bottom of the tower, while you are at the top :) This is an important point. If the only way to win is kill everything, and your foes are likewise all-in, all-the-time (i.e. they all want to kill you, without any fears or doubts), then combat is a lot less varied.

The groups I have been DMing always seem to have a lot of options and variety, beyond spell casters. What level are you playing at, and are you using a grid?

Yes. Mindful of the OP's topic, I wanted to bring focus in to the kind of artist I am thinking most about - working designers. There is a useful distinction between designer and artist, which is not one of merit, skill or inspiration, but more of motivation and expectation, and of specific...

There's a vague area to manage around invisibility versus cloaked. An invisible creature might be located by the noise it makes, but SFAIK there isn't a specified penalty to observers for doing so. Per RAW, the perception check to locate them could be unmodified. That would lead to the cloak...

That feels more like a "Yes, and...". First to review a few limits. In no particular order, I am thinking of - medium or format - a working designer rarely gets to choose this, and each medium offers its own limits subject - a working designer occasionally gets to choose this, but not always...

Artists always work within limits. The only question is whether the artist chose those limits, or they were chosen for them.

One cannot help but agree that the parts of the future that have already happened are easy to predict. ;)

Your insights on that were new to me, and I really feel you are right even though it makes it harder to correctly parse scenarios.

To say that misapprehends my meaning, ironically enough. What I am saying is that what the rule is, is a matter that is determined - at least in part - by local norms. It's not that the rule is ruled upon differently, it is that the rule in truth has different meaning at the other table. As to...

Yes, I wouldn't advise the OP to run it as written. More as source material - great maps, many interesting NPCs, several useful set pieces. It underpinned an enjoyable two years of gaming for my group of six PCs, so we got excellent value on the purchase. We ran from the book start (imprisoned)...

That for me is the mystery in @Iry's RAI. Were I interpreting along similar lines, I would conclude that creatures can hide in dim light. That forces an exacting - and I think unsatisfying - reading of skulker and mask of the wild. In turn requiring to-hide and hidden to be separate things...

Also the word "clearly". For me, a situation where observers have disadvantage on their sight-based perception checks is plausibly a situation where the subjects of their observation are seen unclearly. QED. Which this thread robustly shows can mean different things to different groups. I...

Rather than rewrite, or live with, you just let players step off the railroad and encounter the material in whatever order flows from there. You focus on the means and motives of the many groups depicted, put in motion by the Underdark-shattering actions of Lloth.

OOTA is overloaded with interesting NPCs and it is worth establishing connections between some of them and the players. The dire times depicted should inevitably result in emotional partings and losses. In my campaign, which ran about 70 sessions and topped out at level 15, I took advantage of...

That's about where I land. The wording contains wriggle room. For me the pre-errata text was - ironically - clearer!

I want to draw a distinction between what you might find descriptively plausible, and what is logically possible. It is logically possible to arrange things so that the set of locations an entity can transition from a non-hidden to hidden state in, is smaller than the set of locations that...