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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 9251887" data-attributes="member: 6796661">Okay, who cast "Tasha's Hideous Lurking" on me!Man, it took me 48 pages. That's what I get for making my Wisdom score a dump stat. Anyway, as for some of the topics at hand:I would be very interested to see a break-down by age range.  In my personal experience, younger players are much more likely to play more "exotic" species and class combos. My son (15 years old) plays in three different campaigns and I don't think I've ever seen any of those kids play a human fighter. BUT they ALSO seem to stick to what is available in WotC published books. I thought that might be due to D&D Beyond but they all play pen and paper. It could be because they can't afford to buy a lot of third-party books...BUT, at I know that me and at least another dad are D&D nerds. I certainly have lots of third-party content that my kid has free reign over. In my last D&D campaign, my group (adults) used DnD Beyond and a VTT. But I had even had fully homebrewed character options. But most of my homebrew character options in DND Beyond have been with races/species, magic items, and monsters. Not classes or subclasses. It would be very interesting to have stats from Roll20 and DnD Beyond on how many users are playing homebrew or third-party character options. As for the side argument regarding trolls and 1st level characters, this so much depends on the players. My players have played various flavors of D&D for decades and are very tactical and will put in a lot of effort into intelligence gathering, scouting, and preparing--much more than many players would enjoy, in my experience. They regularly punch well above their suggested CR. I recently finished a five-year Rappan Athuk campaign--a mega dungeon that has a reputation for being deadly. My experience from running this campaign is that a prepared, careful group can make official CRs a joke, but a bit of bad luck, a bad surprise and what should be a cake walk can send them running. I believe I have enough experience with 5e to engineer encounters that will be challenging for the players, without CR inflation, but I really enjoy more sandbox settings where they can actually make use of the non-combat pillars to avoid or gain the advantage in combats. Or don't, but get their butts kicked when they just go running into a combat. A sufficiently rich sandbox will always lead to the occasional bad surprise, so I'm not too concerned if most combats are not that deadly. It fits into the more heroic style of play of 5e. I don't think that the game is broken. I'm running Warhammer Fantasy 4e now, and the one thing I love about that system, is no matter how experienced and powerful your character gets, a bad roll on your part or a good roll on an enemies part can mess you up. Instead of bounded accuracy, it makes heavy use of crits, fumbles, miscasts, and advantage pools, and nasty nasty roll tables. You always have to think twice before running into combat. We are really enjoying the change.  But I don't think that 5e should go this way. I don't think it would be welcome by most 5e players and would likely turn off or frustrate new players. Those hoping to find deadlier combat in 5e are likely going to be disappointed with the core rules. I do think that it would be nice if the 2024 DMG gives even more guidance and optional rules for grittier play styles for more experienced players who want deadlier play, but don't want to change systems. Yes, the DM can always tilt the tables by altering or creating encounters to be more challenging. But it really does help to have rules that make things deadlier, even if running official adventures without the DM having to put in even more work to make them challenging for experienced players.</blockquote>

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