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*long intake of breath*

Well Akshuuuuallllyyy… no wait, I’ll give you the benefit of doubt. Don’t make me bring out the Snopes article about the coffee-in-lap-media-fiasco!!
OK how about the dumbass stickers on a ladder then? Hey dumbass don't think its safe to stand on the top step of a ladder and sway. you will fall. that will not feel good.
 
OK how about the dumbass stickers on a ladder then? Hey dumbass don't think its safe to stand on the top step of a ladder and sway. you will fall. that will not feel good.
I though this was too good to be true but it's also on the Amazon page.


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Edit: I can't stop thinking about this. I wonder what could possibly have happened that made lawyers go, "we better add this disclaimer!"
 
You have to admit that the thematic disclaimers at the start of every 5e book so far have bee cute.
 
You have to admit that the thematic disclaimers at the start of every 5e book so far have bee cute.

Yes, but they all remind me of Magic: The Gathering "funny" flavor text in that it's not quite as funny as it used to be and weirdly self-conscious.

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This talk about race, or origins as people like to call them today (genetics), not giving you ability modifiers reminds me of an article from a Finnish roleplaying magazine from the eighties, that criticized D&D for giving dwarves the same maximum strength as humans. That's because of the simple fact of biomechanics. More height = more leverage = more strength. The article was called, IIRC, 'Dwarves Are Short, Giants Are Tall'.
 
Admittedly, I bailed on AD&D after 1st edition. 5e actually got me back. So far I like a lot of what they're proposing, and there are other items I'm dubious about...but overall positive. (There's a much longer interview that was interesting to watch. See below.)

One thing he emphasizes frequently is that he's looking forward to feedback on these proposed changes. So none of this is set in stone.

 
*long intake of breath*

Well Akshuuuuallllyyy… no wait, I’ll give you the benefit of doubt. Don’t make me bring out the Snopes article about the coffee-in-lap-media-fiasco!!
Funny story. Back in the late 90s I was a barista at a jazz club and Monday was big band night when old people showed up. These old people were insufferable but the main thing was they constantly complained the coffee was not hot enough for them! I saw more than one waitress slamming a coffee into the microwave until it was dangerously hot and distinctly remember the server manager (I had a crush on her) muttering "I hope you burn your fucking mouth."
 
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Dude I am certain that both of these would be money makers. I wouldn't call it mainstream but there is a fairly active "O5R" movement out there and it's not all old white dudes. I showed Bunny this video about the changing art direction and tone over the years and it instantly "clicked" for her. She prefers not only the old school art direction but the "pulp survivor horror" tone of old school D&D (but prefers 5e to B/X). Survival-horror video games are trending hard right now. Not everyone wants to play medieval Marvel Superhero power fantasies.
On the video: You know, I wonder if he read Redwall. My friends told me it's got dark in places. I don't know, not my thing.


In general: I grew with playing the more brutal school of D&D, often playing wizards, and I survived by playing smart, using the character (and my) brains to solve problems and often run away until spells managed to reach a certain level. Newer D&D let's you start out more powerful and effective, I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's just a thing.

I can enjoy both types as long as there is at least a bit of 'earning' the power long run, actual challenges that can't be solved just because of to hit bonuses, or magic spells but by thinking around a problem.

Does this sound bad? Well it doesn't make me as interested as initial 5E stuff did, and I'm a fan of humanocentric baseline (also aren't Aasimar already the tiefling "divine" stand ins already) ?

Anyway, good or bad, I've got other games I enjoy more to play.
 
Funny story. Back in the late 90s I was a barrista at a jazz club and Monday was big band night when old people showed up. These old people were insufferable but the main thing was they constantly complained the coffee was not hot enough for them! I saw more than one waitress slamming a coffee into the microwave until it was dangerously hot and distinctly remember the server manager (I had a crush on her) muttering "I hope you burn your fucking mouth."
McDonald’s apparently never lowered the temperature of their coffee after that frivolous lawsuit. It’s still around 185 degrees.
 
I think it would have been interesting to take the custom background approach to its logical conclusion and do that with races as well. Basically, give people a list of options to choose from for special abilities (maybe assigning them a cost/rank to keep things balanced) and let people create their own, while still offering the sample/premade options. That way they could be tailored to meet the needs of a setting.
Honestly that's the kind of approach they ought to be taking if they've decided racial ability modifiers are inherently distateful.

That, or making them work in some kind of abstract way like fate aspects.

But the problem is that so much of modern D&D is based on the illusion that you can have your cake and eat it t0o, so they persist it holding to sacred cows even as they increasingly insist on hollowing them out.
 
I see an opportunity for some enterprising game designer to make something halfway between One D&D and Pathfinder 2E.
There is EN worlds Level-up product which is sort of that.

It basically struck me as an attempt to basically respond to all of the most common forum criticisms of 5e.

(Although upon reading it kind of struck me as an illustration of the problems of giving people what they want. ie. it fixed the perceived issues rather than the real issues.)
 
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and I'm a fan of humanocentric baseline

Me too, but I've found my long-term solution now: Humans only, but if a player wants any fancy feature from another official race, I'll let them take it and label them a "fey-blooded" human or some other suitably mythic pretext for inherent super-powers.

Thus, I no longer care about the official fidgeting in the race section of the book. If we're being honest, most DMs and players really didn't do much anyway to make elves and such feel different from just an eccentric human culture.
 
I see an opportunity for some enterprising game designer to make something halfway between One D&D and Pathfinder 2E.
Like 13a? New edition coming too! Seriously, just better :smile:

this whole thread has more feckless angst than I could muster in all of my teen years. I just can’t see all of the slap in the face and nail in the coffin about this. All so very old person raging against the change. It sounds like people complaining about the Load album
 
Thus, I no longer care about the official fidgeting in the race section of the book. If we're being honest, most DMs and players really didn't do much anyway to make elves and such feel different from just an eccentric human culture.
I don't know how big it is offline but, online, there seem to quite a few players for whom race/species is all about optimizing character build - making sure the bonuses go in the best places and that the other special abilities meld well with class abilities. If you can put bonuses anywhere, those poor bastards will be forced to choose species based on flavor text about culture.
 
Me too, but I've found my long-term solution now: Humans only, but if a player wants any fancy feature from another official race, I'll let them take it and label them a "fey-blooded" human or some other suitably mythic pretext for inherent super-powers.

Thus, I no longer care about the official fidgeting in the race section of the book. If we're being honest, most DMs and players really didn't do much anyway to make elves and such feel different from just an eccentric human culture.

I like Shadow of a Demon Lord's handling in the core book a bit. But I'm fine with the elves/dwarves to some degree- it's just when there are 14 sub races and variant and such. Ugh.
 
"
This reminds me of the old software engineer joke. Engineer sees there are ten competing standards. So he writes a new protocol to solve their problems and replace them all.
Result, there are now eleven competing standards."
 
I don't know how big it is offline but, online, there seem to quite a few players for whom race/species is all about optimizing character build - making sure the bonuses go in the best places and that the other special abilities meld well with class abilities. If you can put bonuses anywhere, those poor bastards will be forced to choose species based on flavor text about culture.
There's still mechanical racial features.

The cycle hasn't got to them yet - that's the next step. The first step was about removing class restrictions. The next was about removing ability score penalties to free up people's choices. The current one is about removing bonuses to do the same. There's still at least one step to go.
 
First they came for my gender based attribute scores and I said nothing.
Then they came for my racial class restrictions and I said nothing
Then they came for my racial ability scores and I said nothing
Then they came for my racial features and everyone had already taken an extra feat instead….
 
Like 13a? New edition coming too! Seriously, just better :smile:

this whole thread has more feckless angst than I could muster in all of my teen years. I just can’t see all of the slap in the face and nail in the coffin about this. All so very old person raging against the change. It sounds like people complaining about the Load album

We called it the Load…of crap album back then.
 
McDonald’s apparently never lowered the temperature of their coffee after that frivolous lawsuit. It’s still around 185 degrees.
Aaah I can’t help myself. The representation a whole lawsuit was grossly irresponsible fuckup by the media.

If you have a moment, please check out the REAL story, not the bogus urban legend. Despite the truth, most will STILL not budge and still call this whole thing frivolous.


tl;dr she originally asked for only 20K to cover her medical costs. McD’s told her to fuck off. There had been HUNDREDS of past complaints but McDs laughed it off. The court case escalated. Things went wild. McDs eventually settled, I think, for the value (or a fraction of) the value of the total sales of coffee for a single day.
 
Aaah I can’t help myself. The representation a whole lawsuit was grossly irresponsible fuckup by the media.

If you have a moment, please check out the REAL story, not the bogus urban legend. Despite the truth, most will STILL not budge and still call this whole thing frivolous.


tl;dr she originally asked for only 20K to cover her medical costs. McD’s told her to fuck off. There had been HUNDREDS of past complaints but McDs laughed it off. The court case escalated. Things went wild. McDs eventually settled, I think, for the value (or a fraction of) the value of the total sales of coffee for a single day.
When I got to the part about her putting the coffee between her legs to add cream I pretty much stopped there. I think if the coffee was poisoned and she got sick drinking it, she had a case; or if the bottom of the cup had a hole in it, she had a case. But putting the hot coffee between her legs and taking the cover off? No. I’m sympathetic to the burns, but not to her lawsuit.

But this thread is really not about lawsuits or debating their merits, so I’ll stop there.
 
I don't use inspiration or feats so I'm not keen on the changes that bring them into the "core" rules (I guess inspiration always was core but easily ignored as it wasn't used to "balance" anything).
 
Arldings are dumb, and I’m not sure why they are needed when we already have Aasimar. Everything else on my first skim through seems… fine.

I like the half-kin ancestry thing. The idea of playing a human-dwarf, or Tolkien forbid, an elf-dwarf hybrid seems neat.
 
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  • An integrated "hard mode" option with slower advancement (ideally based primarily on treasure accumulation), slower recovery of hp and spells, fewer at-will and "push-button" abilities, more dangerous (save or die, save or suck) effects, more emphasis on resource management, and other stuff that makes the game feel more like the old days - sure, the DM can already house rule all that stuff in, but I'd like to see it as a fully developed and officially sanctioned option that works in the VTT space with the flip of a switch

The DMG includes a set of recommendations for something like a "hard mode" (including "gritty realism" that reduces the effectiveness of rests and hence adds a greater resource management element).

IME, simply not using feats and inspiration has helped make the game feel less "super-hero-ish".
 
In some ways, I kind of find it funny. There's so much online angst about every change made to any edition of D&D, but I've played with so many people over the years and none of us ever managed to give two shits about most of it.

A friend of mine is running a 5E Greyhawk game. He picked 5E because we're all familiar with it and we've all got DnDBeyond subscriptions and I'm doing campaign sharing so everyone has access to the full suite of character options. But since it's Greyhawk, he said only elves (and half-elves), dwarves, humans and halflings for races, since stuff like Tieflings would be killed on sight (Iuz kinda poisoned that well) and he didn't want to work in dragonborn and so on. And no warlocks for obvious reasons.

So we created a bunch of characters and we're playing a very old-school feeling game, using 5E. We're using milestone advancement, and we've leveled up pretty slowly (we're at 3rd now), but it's mostly the choice of adventures and monsters that contribute the most to making it have the feel of early AD&D campaigns.

But I've seen people online who would argue that it's literally impossible that the game we're playing could possibly resemble old school games, or that we don't know what old school is, or whatever. I just wish people would spend less time complaining and more time actually, you know, trying it out.

And I'm not just talking about playing 5E here. I'm talking about making some simple choices to bring about the game you want, regardless of the rules edition you use.

It's why I love to read robertsconley robertsconley 's posts about his campaigns. He's tried a bunch of stuff, kept what works for him and his players, tossed what didn't work, and focused on having a good time in the game.
 
Like 13a? New edition coming too! Seriously, just better :smile:

this whole thread has more feckless angst than I could muster in all of my teen years. I just can’t see all of the slap in the face and nail in the coffin about this. All so very old person raging against the change. It sounds like people complaining about the Load album
I think my frustration with D&D is that I have trouble getting people to play 13th Age even though it's a better game.

I mean obviously it being a better game is not a universal opinion but I keep seeing people trying to hack 5e for a play style 13th Age seems better suited for but they flat out refuse to try it because "not D&D".

I've also played 13th Age with people who basically admit it's superior at the table, but then want to go back to D&D anyway because what they really want is to feel a part of the wider gaming community and get excited over new product releases and I don't know how smaller games can really compete with that.
 
I think my frustration with D&D is that I have trouble getting people to play 13th Age even though it's a better game.

I mean obviously it being a better game is not a universal opinion but I keep seeing people trying to hack 5e for a play style 13th Age seems better suited for but they flat out refuse to try it because "not D&D".

I've also played 13th Age with people who basically admit it's superior at the table, but then want to go back to D&D anyway because what they really want is to feel a part of the wider gaming community and get excited over new product releases and I don't know how smaller games can really compete with that.
Try being a Savage Worlds fan…
 
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