Recent content by SlyFlourish

Not skip a chapter. Skip all the chapters. It’s super clear they wrote in this “what if” expecting to force the story along Kas’s ruse. Again, If you’re good with it, you’re good with it. I’m not trying to convince people who read it to hate it. I want people to consider whether that sounds...

Yeah. It’s like multiple DC 30 checks and the result is Kas either murders the party or they defeat him and you can skip the rest of the adventure and go right to the end. Its very clear that isn’t how the adventure is intended to go.

I'm not a fan of roles because I think it leads to a more cookie-cutter approach towards building and prepping games than it should. Combat tactics is a fine section to include in a monster book and friend Keith Amman has done a great job diving into this in his various "Monster Knows" books. I...

Sure. I don’t have to. I could just run a multi-month campaign adventure that takes all agency away from the players, reveal that all the work they did was for a bad guy they couldn’t ever reveal themselves, and then blame the book when they’re pissed off at never having a chance to change the...

You have to mix the two together. Frankly, no single monster stands up well to a full group of high level characters. They always need some sort of backup. So the Lazy Encounter Benchmark gives you both – four 14th level characters gives you a LBM of 28 with a single creature being...

I follow the a5e rules that a single monster greater than 1.5x the average character level of the group might be deadly.

I think, for many GMs, running a published adventure doesn’t save much time over a homebrew campaign. It’s more about the depth of material you have to work with. But I agree with your sentiment. I shouldn’t have to rework the plot of an adventure I spent $60 on.

In case anyone cares, here's a draft article I was working on that offers an alternative take on the Vecna adventure. I'd paste it here but it's big. https://slyflourish.notion.site/Vecna-and-the-Tears-of-Unmaking-f9a950da21cc42caa02273569e326998?pvs=4

It felt like a big deal to me because it basically invalidates the whole purpose of going on the rest of the adventure. Can you rework the adventure to not include this stuff? Probably. I think its more than a tweak but I've seen (and written) some alternatives that don't force characters to...

I know the review purposefully avoids spoilers but there’s a central plot twist in Vecna Eve of Ruin I found clumsy enough that I cancelled my preorder when I found out about it. I’m sure some GMs don’t mind but I’d want to know about it before I drop my $60 on it or even more importantly...

This is why I’m not that excited to see more products on DDB. It further centralizes a platform already dominated by the biggest RPG producer in the world. Maybe the practical side of this isn’t a big deal yet, but I do hear more people saying they don’t bother with material unless it’s on D&D...

I don't worry about 5e products managing to sell or get funded from Kickstarters, but I do think they're going to be played significantly less if they're not on D&D Beyond. Maybe that's already true. Maybe it's been true for a while. I'm trying out a pure Level Up Advanced 5e game for the next...

Black Flag, the Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide, and the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault are available on Shard Tabletop. Shard is the only VTT I know of that has a good mobile friendly character builder that doesn't require you to load a whole VTT to use. This gives it D&D Beyond-style...

I whipped out my Monster Vault PDF last night for a game and quickly sought out the Revenant which wasn't in it. That's a bummer because that means it isn't a 1:1 replacement of the Monster Manual. I have to somehow know ahead of time that I can't replace one monster with another. I used the one...

This is what I worry about with DDB being the single pillar for 5e. But I don’t think sales there will continue to explode (if they are — we have no idea). The more products posted to DDB, the less each of them will make.