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Huh. Well, I'm not intrinsically opposed to hired from outside the TTRPG sphere. Goodness knows I've posted before about how hard it is to find artistic skill and business skill in the same person, and that you need both for success. But I do hope she's someone who can learn enough about what...

True Neutral is the fantasy version of the realpolitik of a third world nation at the height of the Cold War. As a small player caught between feuding superpowers who would love nothing more than to turn you into a subservient puppet state or the battlefield for their latest proxy war, your best...

Yeah, I'd put it that D&D supports a different flavor of horror. It's a sort that's more of the Conan lineage. One where the horror is that a twisted eldritch creature has crawled out of a dark corner of the cosmos and it wants to eat your face, and you don't know if your puny sword and weak...

Context matters. It's not that "eating people" is beyond the pale, it's that the stereotype of the "cannibal jungle pygmy" has an unpleasant history. The goal is to take an honest look at the tropes that D&D has inherited and be able to say "Okay, these ones are fine to keep, but these ones are...

Which is why you never trust leaks. Very often they're full of inaccurate or outdated information. I've seen this with video games, plans change all the time. They run out of time, they run out of money, the lead dev gets a hot new idea six months before launch and re-writes half the story...

How open or not DDB should be is a tricky conversation because the metaphors quickly drift off target. Is being selective "picking winners", or is it offering an "official seal of approval" that indicates a curated list of high quality items? Because in this era of slop and shovelware, there's a...

Simplicity can be a virtue, sometimes. The group in my current campaign hit 7th level recently. For most of us, leveling up took less than five minutes. The only one who took longer was the Cleric having to pick out their 4th level spells, and it was only a little while longer. And for most of...

There's two design problems with a class built around being able to re-select your role based on your daily power choices. One is that if it's as good at the role as a class that's committed to it, it's hands down the best class in the game, but if it's not as good at at the role, then it's a...

Blue Mages don't work very well in a D&D context for, ironically, a thing that some people have complained about. Which is that a lot of monster abilities are just spells from the PHB, not unique bespoke powers. Which kind of ruins the point. (Also it'd be an even worse "The MM is my PHB" class...

The survey is open.

Right, but that's a very niche taste. Which sure, there's room for narrowly niche options in the game. But as pointed out, getting buy in from the entire group can sometimes be hard when it impacts everyone.

In a scripted format, you'd get the silly results when the situation is low stakes, a negative result when failure is recoverable, and a beneficial result when you're in a pinch. No Fireballs out of nowhere when you're showing off in the tavern, very few moment where your magic fails you when...

It's been years since I saw the article, and I doubt I could find it again. But it was something to the effect of a test where they first asked subjects how they preferred their steak, then did a taste test with the same people to see what they actually preferred. And rare steaks scored...

Also, honestly? IME a lot of players don't want every encounter to a hard fought life or death struggle. They want a majority of fights to be one-sided in their favor so they get to feel powerful and show off their cool tricks, building up to a big climactic boss fight that's challenging and...

There was a recent thread talking about Wild Magic, and it make me really think about how highly "random" abilities work best in a scripted format where there's nothing random about them and it's all decided by the author for maximum narrative impact. Meanwhile having genuinely random features...

You know the joke about old eras of gaming books that were more for reading than for playing? I can't help but feel that the 3e Binder fell under that heading. On a read, it was incredibly cool and flavorful. Lots of people have memories of reading it and being impressed. But there's...

Any serious DPS calculation will measure damage output over a period of several minutes, if not an entire boss fight, and average it down to a per-second number. If all your cooldowns refresh in a 2 minute cycle, then you measure over at least 2 minutes. Heck, the raid community for the current...

Also people are usually looking at DPR in a solo simulation, when actual play is a team sport. If people really wanted to optimize they'd be coordinating with the rest of the group to create a party full of powerful synergies between PCs. The power of debuffs and group buffs is that they're...

Under the current wording, and going by a hair splitting RAW reading, that might be allowed. But I would consider it entirely against the RAI, and fully expect the wording to be cleaned up for the final release.

Not counting cantrips, I would approach as a tiered pyramid. At the top, you've got to have a single target and an AoE spell. Those two are the bare minimum. Then the next tier down is having backup alternatives. A couple with a different damage type in case of Resistance or Immunity, maybe a...