Recent content by jayoungr

The "enhancing" threads are meant to be places for people to share any cool thing or idea that will make the adventure run better at the table. All of them have included ways to add to an adventure without changing it, through additional resources or add-on side adventures. Maybe this particular...

For background, the title came from a similar series of threads back on the old WotC forums. It has the weight of tradition behind it. This is definitely the kind of thing that gets shared on these threads.

Help! Players saved Thavius Kreeg and plan to make him open the puzzle box. My players forced Amrik Vanthampur to draw them a map of the dungeon under the villa, and they entered through the sewers, which meant they could go straight to the vault after making a slight detour to rescue Falaster...

There is always going to be talk about better balance. The question is how dominant it is.

(Haven't read the rest of discussion, just responding to the OP's question). I don't hate gnomes, but they don't have a strong niche in my mind. They're sort of halfway between halflings and elves, but not distinct enough from either one to feel like their own thing. This leads to me...

Ah, got you. No, if you're talking about a whole population, like kobolds, that just makes them more individualized.

Personally, I feel like it leads to a rather sterile pigeonholing of monsters. I think it's more fun if they can be messy and defy categories.

Having them in third-party material is enough for me. I don't feel like they need to be in core D&D. You might like this book--I recently got my copy from Kickstarter, and it looks like they're taking late orders...

Curse of Strahd has a place where graves are protected with grates like that. I wonder if it was based on this real-world practice. (In the case of Barovia, though, you'd think it would be to stop those inside from getting out...).

But the difficulty of the combats or obstacles is up to the DM. If you want to play a class in a sub-optimal way, and the rest of the players don't mind, and the DM is willing to adjust for this ... then nobody is doing anything wrong.

Really funny to see these two posts back to back!

And personally, I love Concentration. I feel like it forces interesting and meaningful choices between one buff (or debuff) and another, instead of just stacking them all. That said, there are a few spells where I would remove Concentration, given the choice. Witch Bolt, for example.

Video Resources Here are some video resource playlists for the adventure that I've found useful:

Yeah--I think on the whole, people were just a lot less sensitized to cheesecake/beefcake than they are now. Whether that is better or worse than today, I'll leave as a subject for others.