Search results

Indeed. It's like Eberron. Eberron was brand new in 3e, and precisely tailored to fit the edition like a glove. But it was so precisely tailored that as new editions have rolled out, with new mechanics and new features, Eberron is torn between having to revise large parts of the setting and...

I wouldn't say every 5e build will work, but it's very hard to mess up a single class character. It's only when you dabble in the dark arts of multiclassing, or making very specific combinations of non-core races with certain classes, that you run into problems.

I would imagine the former. Not only does it allow for planning level appropriate encounters, but it fits the established function of the Rod of Seven Parts. Each piece points at the next connecting one, not all of them at once.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. There will always be a big fish. The Network Effect demands it. You can plead with the big fish to be a good neighbor and not bully the smaller fish. You can advocate for a different fish to usurp the spot of big fish due to its superior fitness. But...

There's a lot of cultural coding in those two pictures. If the picture on the right is the armor of the foreign invaders who don't respect the local religions and have a bad habit of looting and pillaging, and the picture on the left is the local masked vigilante sect who take out corrupt nobles...

Nearly every D&D setting is some variety of post-post-apocalyptic. That is to say, there was previously a high magic civilization that cranked out magic items and build massive structures. That civilization was destroyed in some spectacular fashion, but it seeded the countryside with lost relics...

Most D&D evil gods are the Church of Satan as imagined by a fundamentalist Christian. Most real world unnice gods were gods of dangerous or unpleasant aspects of the world that had to be properly placated so they'd leave you alone. They weren't out to corrupt people or tear down civilization...

I feel like the argument in favor of racial ASI fails either way you cut it. If racial ASI are mechanically powerful features that help define the character, they're incredibly limiting to what classes a PC of a given race can effectively play and should be removed to give players more freedom...

Those guns are cheap and widely available thanks to industrial mass production. Meanwhile, traditionally most D&D settings try to paint their pseudo-medieval world as one where magic items and enchantments only exist as artisanally crafted unique works. Eberron is the only one where...

On the one hand, I agree that it annoys the optimizer corner of my brain. But on the other hand, objectively something like water breathing or a single elemental Resistance is only one step above a ribbon feature. They're really not that important, nor are they a major part of anything's power...

Thematically it's good, but it's always bugged me that Psi Warrior gets a "Resistance to psychic damage" class feature and most of the innately psionic races like Gith and Kalashtar also get it as a trait. I know it's not a big deal, but that sort of overlapping redundancy is like an itch I...

Yeah, that sounds about right. Between D&D and MMORPGs, I've come to the opinion that a successful player race has to check off at least one box from the list of badass, cute, or sexy. Players want easy visual hooks, and those are the top three in terms of popularity. Sexy purple humans with...

Pretty much. Grouping those races by power source is deceptive. What they're really based on are is genies (genasi), celestials (aasimar), and fiends (tieflings). In other words, derivatives of well established monster types. In that way they're no different than dragonborn. If you want a...

You can make a dragonborn who's big and strong, certainly. But they don't come with Powerful Build or any other traits that denote innate physical might. Instead it's all about "being draconic" with elemental resistance and a breath weapon.

When they were discussing the addition of goliaths, they said they aim for two species covering a niche. So orcs and goliaths are the two "big and strong" species with the Powerful Build trait. That way players have a choice when going for a particular theme. The unstated corollary, then, is...

With the 2014 core books on the way out, they're apparently now outside the "don't talk badly about your own product" statute of limitations. In one of these interview videos, Crawford talked pretty bluntly about how they were working with limited time and money on those books and the DMG...

Probably not any time soon. Even if you put aside the copy protection issue, they do not want to be selling two different versions of the 5e PHB and confusing new players. They've told stories of how bad it was when 4e had the PHB2 confusing people.

That just encourages psionics to be relegated to a specialized sub-set of the rules. If there's going to be psionics, make it psionics for everyone. Don't encourage the idea that only the specific psionic races deal in psionic classes.

If we're balancing things by cutting down the Wizard and not raising up the martials, one of the first things to target is the free spell picks on level up. Martials don't receive free magic items when they level up. So why do Wizards get what's effectively two spell scrolls of their choice...

All spells are magical, but not all magic is spells. In a magical world, it only makes sense that many creatures would develop a way to use magic passively and innately for their own benefit. It's just like how lifeforms on Earth will evolve to exploit any energy source available, be it solar or...