TieflingMelissa! She’s a pretty significant community figure on Twitter and Twitch, great memes, nice discord server.

She’s very down bad for dragons (same), but honestly she’s actually pretty wholesome; her server doesn’t allow explicit NSFW and she spends a lot of time helping new players learn the rules of the game.

Disguised??? She’s the biggest icon in the community for it lol (and a legitimately great content creator)

God this feels EXACTLY like Azeroth from World of Warcraft. But hey the dragons have some isles and eggs so I’m down for that, love me some dragons that are actually doing well in a setting

Skill Issue

(I joke, of course)

If you have advice for how to reword it so that it’s

-Easily comprehensible

-Does not have loopholes that rules lawyers will exploit

Then I’d be happy to correct any flaws you identify!

And you’re not the first to bring up the Wyrmling point, however tying the power of a player character to their age is a terrible idea because that would make it exceedingly difficult to level up during a campaign.

Oh you must not have seen Vex’s memes! I might not be as funny as them but I do my best; they’re a Lancer (Mech RPG) memelord pretty well known for making memes about the game that were good enough to actually get a significant amount of players into it.

Here, check these out

https://vexwerewolf.tumblr.com/post/701919090911182848/what-if-i-just-posted-all-26-of-the-lancer-mech

While you make fundamentally good points, I think there is a core reason that balance is important to me: DnD is a multiplayer game, not a singleplayer game.

I actually think it’s fine that different classes are strong at different levels! The entire premise of Wizard is that they’re a squishy who will die if they’re sneezed on at level 1, who grows into a reality-warping god by level 20. Having someone that needs to be looked after at low levels and can then look after the team at high levels encourages teamwork!

The reason that I say DnD is so badly unbalanced is because once level 5 comes around? Casters very, VERY firmly become way better than non-casters for two reasons. Casters have AoE damage, and casters have utility. Non-casters have no utility, and because they also really struggle to increase AC, they can’t function in any role except for single-target damage. A good level 5 caster can make the rest of the party feel really lackluster because they can do in one turn what the rest of the party needs 4 or 5 turns to do (HP and AC are much less of an issue at this point too). And this gap only gets wider and wider with every passing level, which rapidly makes it less and less fun to play a non-caster.

Once level 13 hits, anyone who isn’t a full caster is completely irrelevant. That is not fun for anyone who isn’t a full caster. Hell, it’s SO badly broken at this level that it’s almost certainly the reason why Baldur’s Gate 3 only goes up to level 12- and that game already does a huge amount of buffing martials and nerfing casters. A 13th level caster can instantly beat pretty much any encounter not explicitly designed to bully them, and even then there’s a good chance they find a way to solo the encounter on turn 1 anyways.

I mean, even as a DnD player, I appreciate that you DO need to turn a profit as a company, and I enjoy my favourite hobby getting wider attention. I’m actually not opposed to them making this into a bigger franchise because I think that it IS suitable to fill that sort of Marvel role, contrary to the article. It has clearly defined heroes and villains, iconic designs, and very flexible storytelling, all of which CAN be compared to a more mature Marvel. Making a handful of recognisible heroes and villains and promoting them honestly seems like a perfectly sensible and legitimate business tactic.

HOWEVER.

As a DnD player, I also actively dislike the story design in most official content because it’s painfully generic. Everything is made to be very comfortably within the realm of mass appeal and staying within the realms of conventional fantasy. They have unspoken rules and tropes that they simply Do Not Violate and as a result they struggle to craft stories that aren’t predictable. They are noticeably complete shit at having any idea how to make a force for good that’s more powerful than the players that isn’t used as a punching bag to make the players feel like they’re in danger. And my point is that they COULD and should take more risks when doing storywriting and character design, because the nature of DnD is that even if you totally fuck something up, because everyone runs their own worlds a retcon isn’t going to destroy everything- and more than that, writing out a story, while time-consuming and requiring effort, is nowhere near the money sink that a movie is. It’s fine to take risks! Defying conventions is OK! It’s completely fine if not everyone likes each product, so long as it’s well-made on the whole!

Otherwise the game is also super unbalanced (I know this because I have extremely extensively created homebrew for it, I can tell you EXACTLY how and where it is unbalanced), although this isn’t as bad as it would be in a lot of other games because you won’t really notice the balance issues if you’re just playing a casual game with your friends. If one of your friends is trying to play the game optimally though, then they can rapidly make the game unplayable by taking advantage of especially unbalanced parts of the game.

And this is to say nothing of the fact that the absolute greatest strength of DnD is the fact that players can do whatever they want. So trying to make stuff that tells players they need to act a certain way is only going to diminish that strength.

WotC aren’t making any money off my homebrew, and I genuinely like the existing designs for their dragons

Sweet artwork! Hey, tell me a bit more about your setting? I’m always curious about how people like to build their worlds

I’ve never gotten to cast it (not yet anyway)

The biggest problem with casting Mighty Fortress is that you need a game to go to 17th level so you can learn Wish

Yes, I know it’s an 8th level spell, but if you think that I’m coughing up a diamond for a temporary home you’re out of your mind.

Oh that sounds pretty awesome! HotDQ/RoT was the first experience I had with DnD and I was the DM, I couldn’t escape constant thoughts that

-There were no dragonborn in the module

-There were barely any dragons in the dragon cult

But that said the module does still have some good concepts! Your cleric, were they helping Tiamat achieve her goals? I’d love to hear more, if they were a pro-dragon adventurer.

My party’s Cleric meeting Tiamat:

The +16 Persuasion Silver Dragoness one of my players made (+6 cha, Expertise, level 13 total. Playable dragon template) is extremely funny because there’s an entire evil organization trying to convert her to working for them and she’s convinced 2 of their 5 top brass that instead of her defecting to them, THEY should defect to HER. The others are more firmly evil but honestly it’s by far the funniest way to deal with the mafia I’ve ever seen

Excellent news.

I’ll take five, gonna pop out and buy them a miniature trench coat later so that I can stack them up and call them Tinymat.

Good homebrew you can pillage? My calling.

https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/liOJvZSBDaur

Have fun!

On the contrary, this is a great way to teach a player that making a Perception check when they enter each new room is a really good idea, and allows you to establish how you run said checks (how easy it is for players to give Help for skillchecks, whether or not you allow rerolls when the party has time for it, what circumstances the players are allowed to make checks under, etc)

Having highly motivated players makes it ten times easier to get players to learn the rules, learn how to handle the game’s rules quickly and easily, and to get them to all become genuinely invested in the story you’re telling.

Hmm. Detect Magic might be a good shout; dragon eggs ARE magical. Also depending on if your DM uses Draconomicon egg sizes or modern, then the size of the ‘rock’ might be a giveaway. (Modern eggs are always 4ft long and 3ft wide, Draconomicon eggs are 1ft long for White, Black, Copper and Brass, 2ft for Green, Blue, Silver and Bronze, and 4ft for Red and Gold). Also remember, gem dragons like to use Stone Shape to just seal their eggs inside walls, because good luck finding them in there before they hatch. The kids can break their way past some stone easily enough.

Still, props to that DM. They’ve created a player that’s going to exhaustively examine every last bit of their dungeon, because they know the reward will be worth it. That’s how you get your players engaged and invested for the long haul

Full credit to the guy for managing to play 40 sessions like that, though.

Characters rarely, if ever, turn out exactly as they’re envisioned- that’s part of the beauty of them. As long as you play someone that works well with the team and keeps the party together so everyone can enjoy the adventure, then you’ve done well. Sure, this guy probably turned out to just feel like a haunted, cold person travelling with the party for no clear reason, but that can still contribute to having a solid party dynamic.

Yu’hiss my beloved, long may he meme