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I've run four of the five missions in DDEX1-1, and I can vouch for them being a good fit for Encounters. Although they are intended to take one hour each, with inexperienced players I find myself barely getting through two missions in our store's three-hour time slot for Expeditions. I think...

IMHO we're overthinking this one. I don't see any compelling reason not to accept the simplest interpretation: Barkskin gives you the effective protection of chain mail, if you're not already wearing better armor. You can achieve AC 18 with Barkskin and a shield. I don't think it should matter...

I really do wonder if we're all looking at the same adventure. In my copy, it provides multiple options to the DM if the PCs somehow manage to defeat him. One of them is that his minions drag him off to revive him. Another is that a different half-dragon shows up in the later episode. The...

You did legitimately drive off the dragon. As written, the dragon has very little invested in the attack on Greenest, and it explicitly does not consider tangling with adventurers part of the deal. The dragon at least believes that this is a sandbox adventure. Upon contact with a fellowship of...

I like what I've seen so far of the current direction of 5E. WotC seems intent on organizing product releases into story lines, with the first post-launch story line centering on Elemental Evil. We'll have one player-oriented book with new character options, and one DM-oriented book with a...

I ran many 4E sessions for Living Forgotten Realms, including many PCs with pets operating on the no-attacks-without-PC-action design. I never had any complaints about verisimilitude, but then again I never had the monsters all focus fire on the wolf in the room, ignoring the raging barbarian...

If I were starting a 5E Eberron campaign today, I would implement dragonmarks as magic items, a la 4E alternative rewards. A least dragonmark could be comparable to an inherent wand of some cantrip (or boost the efficacy of some cantrip). A greater dragonmark would be something that would fill...

The name "bonus action" seems apt to me and was likely chosen with great deliberation. A new 4E player learns about minor actions the first time they enter combat. A new 5E player doesn't need to know anything about bonus actions until they gain a class feature that provides one.

Sure, I'll bite. I'm an Adventurer's League DM, and I probably will start with RAW if I get a beastmaster ranger at my table. If the player asks why their animal companion is doing nothing while being attacked, I'd describe the animal as focusing on defending itself per the special bond/training...

Let's at least judge the ranger by the version that appears in the book. The animal's base stats are CR 1/4, but you add the ranger's proficiency bonus to AC, attack rolls, and damage rolls, as well as the skills and saves the ranger is proficient in. The companion also has HP equal to the...

Did you notice that the player chooses whether to use the Bardic Inspiration die only after rolling their d20 first? The idea is that you wait until you believe you have a near miss, then you spend the die to turn it into a hit. If in the space of 10 minutes you believe you will have multiple...

Did your players say that their goal is to make money? From what you described earlier, it sounded like they just wanted to have a city to call their own, with the gladiator arena and whatnot. Regardless, keep in mind that the income of a city is a very different thing than a treasure horde in...

I love the 5e bard; my Adventurer's League character will be a tiefling bard (college of valor, soldier background). But I can understand the OP's disappointment with the design. For some of us, the bard is a kind of rogue, in the sense that all the classes can be loosely mapped backed to the...

To adapt an encounter designed for 5 players to 4 PCs, you could always just remove a level from every monster. The math should be about right. This approach is particularly useful for combats involving solos or elites, where you can't just remove one standard monsters. I'll second the...

One related question is how should we interpret fractional CR? Maybe 4 goblins (CR 1/4) should be treated exactly as a single CR 1 monster, including for purposes of the scaling factor. Kind of like in 3E, where you had to combine fractional CR monsters into a CR 1 monster before the exponential...

Skills (and tools) are the mechanism by which players can add their proficiency bonus to an ability check. Most raw ability checks are raw precisely because they require raw ability, not training. So in general, I don't think you add the proficiency bonus to any ability checks not tied to a...

Adding a -5 to Passive Perception with disadvantage is RAW, per the basic rules (p60, v0.2). But disadvantage only applies to Perception checks that rely on sight (p65). So if the observing creature cannot benefit from sound, either due to being deafened, the hiding creature being silenced, or...

I'm hoping we're only seeing announcements for save-the-world adventure paths because those are the ones that require the most lead time to develop and make the most sense as standalone products. Perhaps the kinds of adventures that were once published in Dungeon will instead be published in...

Argh! Reading this from 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino. Need to figure out whose door I need to knock on....

Well, we know that DungeonScape is coming this fall, and we know it will contain (allow you to purchase?) the full content of the rulebooks: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?358271-DungeonScape-(formerly-known-as-Morningstar)&p=6363636&viewfull=1#post6363636 It looks like this app is...