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Very much this. Too many players get sucked into the viewpoint of their character and lose sight of the fact that before they're an actor in the story they're an author of it too. And you have to stage manage your characters for a good game and a good story. Back in 3e I had a Warlock PC who...

I use it when I decide that the character does something that I, the player, know to be non-optimal or unwise, but that suits the limited information or personal biases of the character. But I also exercise player override when such a decision would be overly disruptive to the group or derailing...

Or alternatively, it shows that despite all the hate they get, digital-only releases fill a product niche for things too small to be economical for a physical release. Due to how, as you said, the cost of physical releases doesn't scale linearly with their size. I'm more worried about the...

Ah, the days when you could make a bunch of thinly veiled anime references and they'd go over the heads of 95% of your players. It was a different world.

Pretty much. And you have to admit, if your goal is to create a small group of lifelong fans, the 2e design style worked. Not every time, but often enough there's obvious merit. But we've also seen the TSR era sales data. The "small" in "small group of fans" can't be understated. Which means it...

I mean... you're not wrong, but if you take a step back you can totally see where Crawford was coming from. The 2e ethos of setting differentiation was subtraction. Start with the PHB and slice away a bunch of standard races and classes that aren't available in this setting. Then add in a mix...

I'm not sure we have very up to date official demographics. The most current official source I could find was from 2020. That listed the age brackets as 15-19 at 12%, 20-29 at 42%, 30-39 at 32%, and 40+ at 13%. So yes, there's a very obvious bump in the bell curve, and teenagers are roughly...

And if you look up screenshots from The Avengers episode, the X-Men version was absolutely directly inspired by it. Well, that and Claremont's recurring BDSM riffs.

Fans on DM's Guild are producing more specialized content. Niche products with limited audiences because they're narrowly focused material or deliberate throwbacks to older styles. The sort of thing that WotC can't justify making with a high production budget, but are happy to let other people...

FYI, the survey is up. Be fair, honest, and focus on how you feel about the options not what your think they should do instead.

Why not both? /meme Seriously, they're updating most of Xanathar's, which would mostly fill a new book. Especially when you pad it with the overflow Wizard subclasses and the handful of new ones. If we're talking about a Ravenloft book with about the same amount of player options as the last...

I was having the same suspicion, now that a Ravenloft something seems likely. Which yes, does somewhat negatively impact my willingness to buy this digital supplement. But $15 these days ...it isn't a lot of money. If I go out for a bowl of pho I'm paying more than that. So if people say the...

After hearing what's in the main books, I put off buying them unless and until there's the prospect of an actual Forgotten Realms campaign. But like you, I'm intrigued by the idea of player facing vampire stuff. (Yes, I was in a Vampire LARP in college, why do you ask?) So I'm definitely paying...

Ooh, that gets messy. Sages whisper in dark corners of the eldritch mathematics of... "integer overflow". Oathsworn Paladins are best avoided by everyone. They're entirely uncompromising.

Or if not the printer, then there's probably insurance of some sort. That's the sort of hedge that large companies can afford to do, and may in fact be derelict if they don't.

If anything, something more suited for the system. As someone who loves Eberron, it's deepest flaw has proven to be just how closely tailored to 3e it was. Making it work in further editions has involved all sorts of rough edges and special legacy rules. While whatever setting Baker does might...

They're sort of boxed in, aren't they? It can't stay Control Undead, because that's not what it does anymore. It can't be Create Undead or Summon Undead, because those spells already exist and they can't have a naming collision. It would cause great confusion and hilarious multiclassing...

That's a fair take, and where I was before I saw the Greenwood clip. Now, I'm less entirely confident. But I suppose we'll see before too long, won't we? They have to announce the 2026 release slate soon.

I was discussing potential future books on reddit, and someone threw this video short my way. It has a clip of Ed Greenwood in July having a slip of the tongue and mentioning a Ravenloft book coming soon. Which was maybe a mistake, but you put it together with the Horror Subclasses UA and the...

They didn't go anywhere. It's us who moved. We're in "not technically a new edition but really it is in a lot of ways" land now. And they're revising a lot of the subclasses that originally appeared in Xanathar's Guide to Everything to be in line with the new mechanics and evolved design...