Recent content by Paul Farquhar

Indeed. D&D is about making the fantasy game you want. Yes. Good. “Overarching continuity” is a liability. You are telling all those players who don’t like the official line to take their money and walk. Or you could just turn up with an elf fighter and smack a few monsters with a sword. All...

No, it’s its strength. D&D is a generic fantasy roleplaying ruleset not tied to any specific setting, and built on the principle that every table is unique. Homebrew was the default from the start.

Corn as in maize? That might explain the discrepancy, since it’s not historically a European crop. However, some is grown round here where I live, and that was harvested two months ago. All the fields are empty now, apart from some pasture for horses, and the lavender bushes.

Yeah, harvest festival first Sunday in October in UK as well, and I suspect most of Europe. But it’s not a big deal and will probably pass by unnoticed if you don’t go to church. What I don’t understand is why American Thanksgiving is so late. If your harvest isn’t in by October it will be wrecked.

Tenth level spells. There are a couple in Ythryn.

“Soylent Green is subtext!!!”

Yup, these spells haven’t been updated to the 2024 rules yet, but they remain technically part of the game and technically artificer spells.

It's pretty certain it won't be. It's the sort of game were you have to get your key-press timings right if you want to jump across a pit, not make an Athletics check. That's not to say your character won't acquire abilities that are based on the RPG, but they won't be rolling D20s to use them.

Which is fine, Spiderman, D&D, it's all just fantasy. And of course, any writer will tell you that reality has much bigger coincidences than you can get away with in fiction writing.

I would prefer if these meaningless subdivisions just crawled away into a hole and died. I'll allow "high fantasy" so long as there is also "low fantasy" on the list. If something has an antithesis it's meaning is easier to pin down. Otherwise it comes down to "is a copy of [insert name of more...

Yeah, but you clearly haven't been reading Fourth Wing. which is clearly the target market for this. In the sense that your horse can be a friend. Anne McCaffery based her dragons on (slightly smarter) horses, and her modern imitators take their cue from that. It's not much good if it can't...

The Jedi games had a strong story (railroad) and plenty of lore. And were more about traversal (puzzling out how to move around the environment) than hack and slash. I wouldn't be surprised if they made the main character a rogue, and there was a stealth-em-up element as well.

No, they are very relevant for determining the baseline understanding of what "elf" means when people come in to D&D. A lot more people saw the movies than read the book (or read the D&D rules before playing).

One thing that I don't think has been mentioned is how long is the character expected to last? My campaigns typically last 1-2 years, so a player is going to be with the same character for a very long time. So they need to be very comfortable with them. And it also gives plenty of opportunity to...

Thanks to modern technology, there is no reason people need to be sitting in the same room together for them to not be isolated.