I'm glad that they have the animate dead spell, but I don't like the implementation. The minions you can create are pathetically weak and only last a day. On the other hand, There's no limit to how many minions one can animate, so players can literally have like 20 zombies following them, each with their own actions and rolls. Yikes. There goes the action economy! And the spell still goes out of its way to tell you how "evil" and "badwrongfun" it is. *sigh* So animating a minion from a dead monster's corpse is evil and taboo and terrible,
Actually, that's pretty much how it is in my games. Necromancy is illegal/evil by default.
but casting irresistible dance on someone and making them dance for 10 days straight, torturing them until they die from exhaustion, there's nothing wrong with that! Seriously?
Maybe it depends on what dance you choose. Making someone do the macareena for 10 days is definitely evil. Making someone do, say, Lindy Hop, is less evil because:
a) they'd enjoy it
b) it's so energetic that they'd die of exhaustion much faster
*ahem*
I can't stand this +1 to every stat concept either. It reeks of 'people cannot handle penalties' to me. Humans [in my opinion] should return to the +0 baseline and all other races should be balanced around that. The pluses and minuses that other races get should be a comparison of how they match up to humans (our obvious real world baseline). Otherwise you're effectively saying stats now run from 4-19, and these other races have a -1 in practically everything. Look at elves, they are 'slender and graceful' with their +1 to dex... which puts them exactly on par with humans' for being graceful.
This could have been written the opposite way around:
Elf ability score adjustments: -1 to str, con, int, wis and cha.
If humans are based on 3-18 instead of 4-19, it's the
same thing.
Ick! The same thing applies to all the races (except half orcs now?). Dwarves have excellent constitution... so excellent that they... are as healthy as humans. Hmmm. That's not really a standout fact about the race which is worth commenting on is it?
For critical hits, I'd like to see the idea that additional 'dice' are maxed.
e.g. roll to hit and roll damage dice together. Longsword is 1d8. On a crit (19-20), longsword becomes 1d8+8.
Greataxe is 1d12. On a crit (20), greataxe becomes 1d12+24.
It's simple, and it makes crits impressive. One thing I disliked about 3E was that you spent all this time to confirm a crit, and then rolled a 1 for the extra damage. How is that a critical hit? It should have either been, no confirmation required, or a different damage rule.
With the max damage on extra dice rule that I just outlined, I have no problem with rolling the extra d20 to confirm the critical - doing so is always worth the extra time.