The Gaming Den

Agreed that having both short rest and long rest-based classes is a big mistake in 5e and that the proper solution is to err on the side of short rests rather than long rests. Setting aside the differences between players' experiences of different power schedules, the DM of an intrigue/mystery adven...

What does PL think the actual problem with attributes is? He seems to say they are fundamentally unworkable, a drag on the ultimate goal of something or other, but I can't quite divine why. All I see is criticizing a bunch of specific implementations and then criticizing the measures to work around ...

I use basically the 4 stats from Shadow of the Demon Lord: Strength, Agility, Intellect, Will, though I call mine Might, Nimbleness, Wits, and Spirit. Wits is intelligence, memory, and perception. It's quickness of thought and internal processing. Perception is its associated save/defense, and it's ...

Mearls has specifically said that 5e PHB has outsold any other edition's PHB, which is a specific comparison but still unverifiable. It wouldn't be too surprising, since 5e has been on sale 7 straight years, which no edition has had since pre-WotC days. Also, one way or another, WotC has been promot...

They claim its all written, and that the PDFs will ship when the kickstarter ends (Their email claims a previous one shipped in literal seconds). As someone who followed the project, I didn't see anything about an upcoming kickstarter, just an announcement it was live. That's on you, then: this blo...

Well they just launched their kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/enworld/level-up-advanced-5th-edition-a5e?ref=discovery&term=morrus So presumably they are trying to get it out the door asap, before 5.5 happens and they have to restart. I was going to say that this is the absolute...

If they were smart, they would do what the comic book industry does and realize there's absolutely no money to be made in TTRPGs and fully pivot into outsourcing the D&D brand to every form of media so only 5-10% of people who are "fans" of D&D actually play it. Where's the Dark S...

I think if they're looking seriously at 6e it's driven by Hasbro, not the D&D team. Hasbro just promoted WotC to a major level of its corporate structure, and of course that's mostly due to Magic, but D&D's brand has been absolutely skyrocketing in value over the last few years with Stranger...

This may be a bit off-topic, but what does everyone think the odds are of 5e eventually getting a cool, ambitious project like this one for it? I think there are already things that approach it, like Giffyglyph's Darker Dungeons . Obviously, it's not on the level of the Tomes, and it's not the same...

"Cleaner rules" means rules with fewer moving parts, I'd bet. Good examples include (where ">" means is cleaner than, not necessarily better than: scaling proficiency bonus > individual skill points per level, advantage/disadvantage > stacking circumstantial modifiers, Crit-ing o...

Maybe it's also the approach? I mean, I don't know what a Wheel of Time RPG adventure is even supposed to look like? Or a Middle Earth adventure? Or Star Trek? I think this is actually pretty close to the mark. D&D has a default structure; the dungeoncrawl. It's straight forward to design, to r...

Without looking at any responses, just the prompt: To you what timing order does this describe? Before -> Event/When -> After Does this look like a description of a hard formalized serialized order of operations to you? Probably not 100%, probably still some flex somewhere, but trying to approximate...

I've mentioned The Alexandrian's "art of rulings" series a few times so here's a link to his social skills article. You may want to start at the beginning though, the whole series is good. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/43360/roleplaying-games/rulings-in-practice-social-skills This ...

I think social "defeat" can take different forms, and making them palatable to players is probably doable so long as you don't touch their beliefs or actions. You can change incentives and let them role-play within that, though. The easiest way is to simply not tell them that something is ...

I don't understand at all the desire to collapse social interaction into one roll instead of several, but then have potentially huge consequences to that one roll like selling drugs to an undercover cop. If this game is about street crime, then playing through the logistics of street crime, e.g. fin...

Sorry, promised not to post anymore but saw this thread and I just can't help how people missed a very important little fact: The 5 feet by 5 feet square is NOT small at all. ... However, a lot of players and modern designers wrongly visualize "adjacent" squares or hexes as having the uni...

I haven't played 3.5 in several years at this point. I would probably be faster to join or DM a 5e game than a 3.5 one, simply because making a 3.5 character would take re-familiarizing with a bunch of stuff and remembering that two-weapon fighting never gets satisfying. In 5e, I can be a fully-real...

The 5e Wyvern is 2 rolls less, because the grapple check in 3.5 is an opposed roll. Worth noting that 5e grapple is also an opposed roll. You roll Strength (Athletics) of the attacker versus Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) of the defender. I know, but there is no grapple in the 5e Wy...

The 5e Wyvern is 2 rolls less, because the grapple check in 3.5 is an opposed roll. Don't mistake my argument to mean I think 5e's Wyvern is good. It's not. We've all said as much. In fact, I don't think anyone has praised 5e's monster design. This is less about monster design than it is about the p...

A process or particular combat tactic having three or four steps to go through is often presented as intimidating in the context of people drawing overwrought comparisons to how 4e and 5e "just work," but really "The wyvern swoops down and tries to grab Joe Fighter, its sting hoverin...

I mean, this is pretty consistent with the basic philosophies of 3.5 vs. 5e: 3.5 has a lot of depth, but only if you and everyone else at the table have internalized a lot of the rules, whereas 5e is "Baby's First D&D" which only does 1 thing and attempts to walk you through that with ...

I'm going to be playing in a 5E game and decided to get some books. Apart from the PHB, are there any that are useful? I've heard people talk about Unearthed Arcana and Xander's Guide to Everything , but I don't know if either are worth buying. Unearthed Arcana is not a book in 5e, it's a column of...

I think 5e may have accidentally done something right when it made proficiency bonuses approximately equal to ability score bonuses, and then called every attack, save, and skill check just an ability check that proficiency may or may not apply to. They did it for Bounded Accuracy purposes, which is...

The biggest giveaway here is that "objective" morality only makes sense if we think of it in terms of made-up scientific particles. The game doesn't describe them that way, it describes them in moral terms from the English language, which are themselves fraught with the meaning that writer...

Recently WotC announced they were going to try to deal with some of the racial determinism by introducing an upcoming product that would let people swap out stat arrays. So...there's no point having different races and you may as well just be differently dressed humans? If +2 to one stat over anoth...