Recent content by earthboy

You're missing the point. Trenches don't turn artillery hits into misses. Artillery which lands on a soldier in a trench is quite effective against that soldier. What trenches did was turn near-misses into total misses. An artillery attack has an area of effect larger than just the target of...

(Emphasis added.) So wait. The spell which specifically tells you that its primary use is to dig things like trenches before battle, and that it's too slow to collapse those trenches on creatures, that spell is your argument for not using trenches in D&D?

Trenches provide cover, which protects you from area-of-effect attacks. Shrapnel & shell fragments, for example, were a real-world threat which trenches protected against. The damage from an explosive attack changes from "everyone nearby" into "only people if it lands right in their trench"...

Yeah. At early levels, the 4e mechanic is much larger than what you'd get in other editions. At later levels, it falls off rapidly, so a high-Con Wizard would still be noticeably squishy relative to a Fighter with the same or lower Con. 4e started you with a bigger buffer -- you don't fall...

IIRC, the 3.5e-era lore for Dal Quor is that the plane goes back and forth from being the Plane of Dreams to being the Plane of Nightmares, with the resident Quori all changing their natures to match the plane. What the kalashtar lineages do is preserve a few of the old Plane of Dreams natives...

Looks like you've been speaking from the perspective of a player, in which case I need to ask: are YOU the person who will ruin the game (for others and yourself) if you are given any clarity about what helps you level? Asking because that's NOT how most of my players have behaved.

You honestly think giving people visibility is "driving them to minmax"? Letting people know what to expect is "driving them to minmax"? Nah.

As the DM, what I want to do is run a fair game with well-communicated expectations for my players. I want them able to make informed choices, and part of the information they need to make choices is when they're going to level. "Oh but just do whatever you want, it's so narrative" gets me...

Agree, and IMHO that's a more interesting distinction too, especially if shields have facing -- so flanking a shield-user is more beneficial than flanking a heavy-armor tank. Heavy armor + shield could still be viable against larger-than-human threats, or against magical threats where you don't...

As far as I can tell, all editions of D&D do have an MM and premade monsters (of varying quality). Which game are you talking about?

The Dwarf "Fighters" start singing almost immediately, though, so maybe they're all secretly Bards.

For a hexcrawl, you know the neighboring terrain types and major features so you can prep some encounters between sessions and not need to invent everything on-the-fly, no matter which way the PCs go. Yeah later 4e was great about monster design, but for me designing monsters in 3.x (or finding...

You can even use words on the map. Consider using a blob-scribble with words like "Brick Rubble" / "Broken Chairs Heap" / "Shrubs" / "Thick Mud" / etc. -- any of those give the players enough info about the environment to answer questions like: - Can this be set on fire? - How does this...