The rules text says it creates an area of darkness, and with your interpretation, it doesn’t, which means your interpretation is wrong. Yes, the ability could be written more clearly, but the logic for a reasonable way for it to function follows pretty cleanly. Your interpretation is not RAW or RAI.

There’s a reply on RPG StackExchange that covers a similar line of logic to what I wrote above.

Remember that Fifth Edition D&D is intentionally not written with the same exacting precision as games like M:tG. The game doesn’t have an explicit definition of magical darkness, but it’s pretty clear that the intent is for magical to trump mundane (when it comes to sources of light and darkness). Even the Specific Beats General section says that most of the exceptions to general rules are due to magic.

If you have normal darkness everywhere, there isn’t a reason to use it, but you don’t always have darkness everywhere. In fact, you generally don’t.

Not all monsters with darkvision have access to light sources. Even if they do, they may need an action to use it or may be out of range. A torch or the light cantrip only has a 40’ range. If you collaborate on positioning with the caster, you can basically set yourself up to have advantage every turn thanks to the darkness, since as a ranged attacker you don’t have to stay within 40’ of your enemies.

Also, Gloom Stalkers can’t see through Darkness like Warlocks can, so this effect is useful to them in a way that the Darkness spell isn’t.

That all said, Tricksy wouldn’t do anything if it didn’t block nonmagical illumination, so it’s reasonable to run it as though it does. Sure, it still wouldn’t block even a cantrip, but it would block torches, lanterns, the sun, etc…

And running it as though it doesn’t block nonmagical darkness results in nonsensical behavior. You’re in a torchlit chamber and use the ability - now there’s a cube of darkness, blocking the light of all four nonmagical torches. If you move one of those torches away and back, why would it suddenly pierce the magical darkness? If it wouldn’t, why would a new nonmagical light source?

Maybe they just wanted to improve it for Gloom Stalker Rangers?

In AD&D, you still had access to the abilities of your retired classes, but if you used them you had experience penalties (if you use them in an encounter, you gain no experience for that encounter and your experience for the entire adventure is halved) . The reason was that you were supposed to be learning to do things a new way, and if you fell back to the old way, you weren’t pushing yourself anymore. From the AD&D PHB, under “Dual-Class Benefits and Restrictions”:

This is not to imply that a dual-class human forgets every-thing he knew before; he still has, at his fingertips, all the know-ledge, abilities, and proficiencies of his old class. But if he uses any of his previous class’s abilities during an encounter, he earns no experience for that encounter and only half experi-ence for the adventure.

The paragraph goes on to explain what’s restricted (everything but HD and hit points), then ends with:

(The character is trying to learn new ways to do things; by slipping back to his old meth-ods, he has set back his learning in his new character class.)

Sorta turns the AD&D mechanic on its head. And it makes more sense than the way it was done in AD&D - I like it!

Context: in AD&D, humans could “dual class,” which is similar to what you described - effectively retiring in one class and beginning to advance in another - and non-humans could “multi-class,” where they gained experience in two or more classes at the same time, leveling more slowly but getting the benefits of both classes.

Damage taken from being the Fall season would be called “Fall damage” in English though.

If I’m in a fight, I’m fighting. If I’m on a walk, I’m walking. On a hike? Hiking. If I’m at a party, I’m partying. If there’s rain in the air, it’s raining. If I’m applying butter to my toast, I’m buttering my toast. If I’m on a boat, I’m boating. If I’m in the middle of a fall, I’m falling.

Is it hard to understand that someone is referring to the act of entering Fall (or being in the middle of Fall) when they call it “falling?”

Regardless of whether you find that difficult to understand or to accept, it’s a well-established linguistic phenomenon known as “verbification.”

You are not falling. It is fall. Falling is only from a present tense verb of fall.

You’re wrong on several counts.

First, you don’t suffer “falling damage” from falling. You suffer it from landing after falling (refer to page 183 of the PHB if you don’t believe me). However, casting Feather Fall is a reaction that you can take when you or another creature “falls,” so it was appropriate to cast it at the start of the season.

Second, “falling” is not the present tense of “fall.” The simple present tense of “fall” is “fall” or “falls,” but other “present tenses” include: the present perfect simple (“He has fallen”), present progressive/continuous, and present perfect progressive.

“Falling” is the present participle, and it can be used both as an adjective (“The falling bard”) and as part of the past continuous/progress (“The bard was falling”), present continuous/progressive (“The bard is falling”), and future continuous/progressive (“The bard will be falling”) verb tenses, as well as with their perfect variants (had been falling, has been falling, will have been falling).

Would you appreciate it more if I told you that the bar in question is a gay bar?

(Clarification: It’s not.)

I interpreted “biological” in this context to refer to women who’ve been impacted by the difference i hormones, i.e., a cis woman with average amounts of estrogen / testosterone would qualify, as would a trans woman who has been on estrogen for a couple years. Sort of a “people for whom the following statement is relevant” kind of an adjective.

By that description, the vast majority of people are evil. Well, both evil and good, since most people at least occasionally do things that aren’t in their self-interest to help others. But primarily evil, thanks to the inaction clause on the evil side and nothing comparable on the good side.

They’re also more evil the more educated they are, since they’re more aware of ways that people are suffering harm that they could potentially abate.

For example, if you are not homeless and you are aware that some people are homeless and a storm is coming, if you don’t help them all find shelter - to the extent of bringing them into your own home even if it means you end up not having a place to sleep - by your definition, you’re evil.

I’m not a fan of that definition, either for D&D or anything else, but if it works for your table, great!

The DM doesn’t necessarily have your modifiers memorized and asking what they are every time slows down play. The DM also likely doesn’t want to share the DC. The easiest fair solution is to always ask for a roll (assuming it’s possible, generically, to succeed or fail) and to then consider passes to be passes. If you only avoid asking for a roll when you know the player will make it, then you’re likely to be biased toward the players whose characters you’re more familiar with.

So a 1 should always be a fail.

RAW this is not the case. From the DMG:

Rolling a 20 or a 1 on an ability check or a saving throw doesn’t normally have any special effect. However, you can choose to take such an exceptional roll into account when adjudicating the outcome. It’s up to you to determine how this manifests in the game.

My experience with having nat 1s being auto fails and is that this results in characters who are “erratically … tragically incompetent” as well as taking away player agency (Nick Brown on rpg.stackechange explained this well). Maybe you and your players like a game like that, but I certainly don’t.

It’s the second shittiest common house rule, assuming you mean that if someone with a +15 bonus rolls a nat 1 on a DC 5 check, they automatically fail (possibly with a worse effect than if someone with a -1 rolled a 2).

On the other hand, there are other ways to have crit fails on skill checks that are much more palatable, like:

• having a slightly worse effect when someone rolls a nat 1 and would have failed anyway
• having a worse effect when someone’s total is 1 or lower
• having a worse effect when rolls are failed by certain thresholds, like by 10 or more (potentially, but not necessarily, only when the roll was a nat 1)

(The worst common house rule, btw, is crit miss tables for additional effects beyond an automatic miss when you roll a 1 on an attack roll.)