This is a continuation of the last post. I’m working through more of the Player’s HandbookBackgrounds and official variants. Criminal (Spy) By surviving one or more tests of loyalty, you rise to positions of influence in a royal or freelance intelligence service. You become a spymaster. Spymasters sit at the […]
I’m a bigtime fan of 5e’s introduction of Backgrounds, particularly as a source of skill and tool proficiencies and noncombat features. Even more than (most) classes and subclasses, Backgrounds also suggest a trajectory of your personal story, beyond zero-to-hero. But within that arc, your Background features don’t change. Inspired by […]
This is the story of how, a couple of weeks ago, I had an idea eight years too late for the problem it solves. There’s a lot of development history to go into this, though, so bear with me and I’ll get to it – or you can skip straight […]
I don’t know if this is going to be one of my Unpopular Opinions, but I think it’s easy to look at the warlock Pacts (not Patrons, just Pacts) and expect them to deliver more than the designers seem to have intended. Today I want to talk about the Pact […]
Back in January, I posted the Way of the Wild monastic tradition, drawing on the Five Animals of Southern Style kung fu. There are a lot more than five animals and five styles in kung fu, so I wanted to add more options – Monkey Style because it’s a real […]
A Twitter thread the other day explored a lot of the issues around two-weapon fighting in 5e, so I wanted to write a blog post that covered the whole deal, including potential changes to correct things that I see as issues. Stands-in-the-Fire crunched a lot of the numbers on this […]
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 […]
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 […]
