What works at your table?
Natural weapons are weapons that are "built in" to a player character race. We're taking a look at how the D&D designers have built natural weapons through the history of 5th Edition and making a template of our own.
Grappling is a D&D mechanic that has evolved from many maligned paragraphs of text to a simple skill contest. Let's look at where the current iteration stands, and what can be done to improve grappling in your D&D game.
Flesh to Stone is a 6th level transmutation spell that has new mechanics from prior editions. Instead of instantly petrifying the target in ye olde "save or die" fashion, the target is restrained on the first failed save, and only petrified if they lose a “best of 5” save mechanic. Let’s examine how often its successful.
Contagion is a necromancy spell that requires an attack roll and a "best of 5" save mechanic to inflict a disease. Is this a good spell? Check your odds against the whole gamut of monsters.
Dungeons & Dragon’s May 2018 Unearthed Arcana released the Centaur race. There was mixed reception of the decision to shrink playable Centaurs to Medium size. Due to D&D 5th Edition's design, it was the right decision to keep them medium, as depicted through most of art history.
Dungeons & Dragon’s May 2018 Unearthed Arcana updated the Minotaur race. With three years since the original release, the improvements in the race design can tell us a lot about what lessons the Wizards of the Coast D&D team learned in that time.
I grew up hanging out in ballparks. Every once in a while, you'd see some grognard jotting notes in their program as the game progressed. Eventually, I tried keeping score myself and I loved it! Tracking a game on a scorecard gives you a heightened level of engagement and serves as a fun memory of … Continue reading RPG Scorecards: Action Tracker
The "Bag of Rats" Problem is an issue that arises with RPG mechanics that trigger upon a kill. While kill trigger abilities are intended to reward the character for disposing of a foe, they incentivize players to metagame by carrying around a lot of easily-squishable pocket-sized creatures. Explore the solutions and find out which are best.
Elven Accuracy gives you "super advantage" via a mechanic that lets you select the best of three dice rolls when you have advantage on an attack. This is widely regarded as a very strong, if not broken, feat. The truth is that the "super advantage" part of the feat doesn't do that much, because already having advantage is normally good enough.
In January of 2018, I ran a poll asking D&D players about feat strength. Nearly 60% felt that the Sharpshooter feat is "broken": Are they right? If so, when? Nobody is always right--except the Dungeon Master. To find out, I built a calculator to determine the benchmarks where Sharpshooter is advantageous to use. Introducing "The … Continue reading How Strong Is Sharpshooter?
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