Ever since 5e came out, I’ve talked around how medium armor isn’t great. There are a few specific builds that are stuck with it, but its positioning feeds into the problems of Strength vs. Dexterity in 5e. To put that another way, any Strength-focused character that can’t wear heavy armor has […]
I’ve commented on warlocks a lot in this blog, and some of those posts are among my most-viewed. I stand by the problems, but some of the solutions I’ve explored don’t quite suffice. In the past few years I’ve talked to Kainenchen and GFo about their experiences with the class. In […]
Martial arts moves named for animals, especially in the form of a Three! Word! Attack!, are such a common concept in the source fiction and nonfiction that it’s the weirdest thing in the world to me that it’s unrepresented in 5e monk subclasses. For that matter, if it was a significant […]
You should definitely check out the history behind this image, brought to you today by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m particularly interested in this one because of some work I’ve recently done over in Tribality, as well as how seamlessly this image fits into Aurikesh. (Yes, I know that […]
Over in that Twitter thread, we were talking about the function of totems as 4e magic items. I suggested that they could be intended for druids, especially the Circle of the Moon, and might boost the stats of lower-CR Wild Shapes, so that if shapeshifting to a wolf or panther is […]
Posting over in Twitter about 4e, I happened to recall that 4e genasi had a lot more varieties than 5e genasi do. Their metagame position is also quite different; 4e genasi have unique offensive powers, while 5e genasi have spells that might be offense or utility, and are substantially varied […]
Last weekend’s D&D game ended in the biggest boss fight of the campaign – a fight that has been coming since it started six years ago, and that the players learned was coming around two and a half years ago (36 sessions ago), and have been actively preparing to fight […]
I’ve been reading a bunch of Ars Magica 5th Edition lately – make sure you check out Samhaine’s Rules Summary posts – and it got me thinking about the interesting Stuff in a wizard’s laboratory. Going on adventures and spending downtime to do nothing but improve your laboratory is a completely valid campaign-long […]
I’ve been digging into Waterdeep: Dragon Heist like a whole lot of 5e fans right now. I think this book acknowledges and incorporates the Spellplague more than any other adventure we’ve seen so far, which is to say any – but I haven’t read every adventure and may have missed things. There’s […]
Sure, In the Company of Giants (5th edition, Revised) has been out for nine months and I’m just now getting around to writing a design diary. Today I’m going to talk about it a bit. The first thing to understand is that I was hired to write a revision of an earlier […]
