Recent content by Composer99

Using the 5e SRD as a basis for your own game - or using any RPG 'game engine' that happened to be built for a specific game but is openly available via licensing arrangement - is functionally equivalent to, say, using the Unity engine for a video game, save that a typical RPG 'game engine'...

Apropos of the subthread of discussion, I rather doubt that the painters creating mammoths and horses in caves tens of thousands of years ago, animals that might seem to come alive in flickering firelight, were trying to make their viewers uncomfortable (though I also could not say if their...

Puts me in mind of Limit Breaks from Final Fantasy games or the warrior class's Rage resource in World of Warcraft.

I would reckon that if a given map is going to feature in one, maybe two, play sessions, non-linearity is going to play a small part in making it interesting to play through. The larger the map and the more play time it will occupy, the more non-linearity is going to be part of the fun of...

I'd put in a vote for Tyranny of Dragons, because Tiamat would look amazing. Although with all the dragons it might be too much to make it live-action.

Space Aliens (Us) Visit Werewolves

I dunno. On the "control spells wreck boss fights, hence legendary resistance" thread, there were a few good ideas about alternatives to legendary resistance. For instance, if memory serves, one person suggested that action-denial spells (hideous laughter and so on) could prune away legendary...

I don't really read through 2014!5e or 2024!5e optimisation discussions, save on a very casual basis, so I can't really speak to the added value that collegial disagreement or adversarial discourse might provide there. In discussions outside of char-op, I think it is valuable to have a...

That may be true, but I think players' sense of loss aversion is going to drive them to prioritise "my character survives" over "I had fun in the moment" if the game's design (a) sets up a conflict between those two aspects of play, and (b) rewards player character survival and punishes death...

My condolences to Rob's family and friends, and, since he was a regular writer here, to all the folks on the EN World team. It's hard to lose a friend.

The main problem, by my reckoning, is when your game design ends up not matching the way the majority of your players want to play the game. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the majority of D&D players want to play D&D as a game of Big Darn Heroes, doing Big Darn Heroic things. To the...

Speaking of tragic backstories, I'm playing right now (we're paused while someone has a must-take call), and we just came up with the idea of a slaad adventurer. Their birth made them a murderer and an orphan all at once. Tragic!

D&D - 4e or 5e - or a 5e-like such as Tales of the Valuant or A5E. I've run a 60+ session game for 5e, and played in 60+ sessions of 5e and 4e, and enjoyed them all.

Which is why no one in arts or history uses the term to define distinctive periods in time that - oh, wait, yes they do. All the time.

To my mind, the turn of the century is suitable demarcation for "modern" in RPGs. Here is what I mean: Just as, say, musical historians use the year of Johann Sebastian Bach's death as the demarcation between Baroque and Classical periods in European art music, even though it is of course a...