The Gaming Den

So, here, WotC claims the following sales numbers for the Starter Kit (not the PHB):

2014: 126,870
2015: 91,190
2016: 123,990
2017: 185,580
2018: 306,670

Critical Role debuted in March 2015, Stranger Things debuted in July 2016, and D&D Beyond launched in August 2017.

But still racially determinative. Adventurers are already on the fringes of their respective cultures, there is absolutely no reason they would universally reflect the racist genetic bell curve theories that D&D assumes. NPCs can still reflect those if it's important to you that Elves are genera...

Not that this should surprise anybody, but this is making the rounds about a certain someone who is summoned by typing his name. I think we went with shitmuffin as an acceptable alternate? To give this thread some closure. https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10215845527064252&id=102757...

I meant more in the narrative sense than anything else; creating internal consistency in a world of magic and fantasy. Sanderson's First Law Sanderson's Second Law Sanderson's Third Law Start there. Magic in narrative is, ultimately, a narrative device, and it follows the rules of all other narrati...

How do you define "legitimate"? Several real-world governments did just as you described in the 20th century, just at a scale of millions rather than billions. There is a fairly strong school of thought in international affairs which holds that when a government commits sufficiently massi...

You could argue the second tenet of the code forces any Paladin to protect Aldorande. Except Aldorande is part of the Empire; Aldorande's citizens aren't innocent at the moment the Empire says so, and the second tenet doesn't apply. They actually tried to refute this kind of circular reasoning by t...

Obviously all of this is founded in people wanting to give Critical Role their dollars, As Cham pointed out, no, this is a different guy. Now, he is friends with Matt Mercer and also Liam, so he guest DM'ed for CR at one point I think, and he was the writer for the CR comic books, so there is almos...

Yeah, the combined effect of these sounds like: "Your ideas don't matter, only your ability to polish my ideas and make them presentable. And if you disagree, I will say you're just trying to gratify your ego at the expense of the community."

Mike Mearls did an AMA on Reddit. Apparently WotC was looking to hire a game designer and this was literally his reply when someone asked about what they're looking for in that position : The hiring process has been interesting, because it forced us to really look at what we value and require. Here ...

Oh, also change Inspiration so it just works like FATE points.

1. Advantage/Disadvantage cancel out 1 for 1 but don't stack, so if you have 3 disadvantage and 1 advantage, you just have disadvantage. 2. Instead of racial ability modifiers, all 1st-level characters get a +2 to their class' primary ability (see PHB p. 45), and then +1 to two other abilities. 3. P...

The week that Xanathar's came out, Publisher's Weekly had it as, in fact, the top-selling nonfiction hardcover . That paragraph also notes that it outsold the core books in their first weeks. I have no idea how Mearls justifies the idea that its the fastest-selling book in the history of D&D, bu...

Products in this industry stay afloat by brand recognition, and brand recognition comes from endorsements from the industry gatekeepers who already have market share. The audience is so small and so idiosyncratic that "quality," however defined, simply has very little independent effect. I...

There is value in having a fully independent mass combat mini-game with a range of inputs, which the PCs can affect by their actions in the regular RPG scale of the game with no intermediating step of abstraction: eliminating the enemy sub-commander affects the mass combat resolution by directly rem...

While say, Clauswitz's much more 'modern' "On War" (which was both post-Fabian, post-Washington, and post-Napolean) is largely relegated to being studied academic military historians, not at military academies. No, the basic curriculum at West Point still teaches Clausewitzian Critical An...

Has anyone suggested that the surge of DnD podcasts using 5e (Critical Roll, Adventure Zone) also might be responsible for the popularity of 5e? Everyone I know who got into DnD also knows of/listens to at least one of those podcasts. It's probably two separate things: an increased interest in DnD ...

There's a definite increase in the hobby's mainstream visibility. That probably has to do with the rise of streaming platforms and the mainstreaming of nerd culture than it does with any particular virtue of this edition. That being said, 5e's oversimplification is probably more amenable to new play...

Mike Mearls admits that 5e is just nostalgic wankery, and never aspired to be anything more.

Did you miss the announcement?

Establishing the illusion of set physical laws is the baseline of what (at least some) skills need to do, but preferably they would be used in decent Chase mechanics or Stealth mechanics or what-have-you that are actually fun to do. D&D resolves chases and stealth and anything besides combat in ...

DSM, have you ever read a book of prose fiction? Cover to cover, the whole thing? Because if you had, you would find that the "logical content" you're waving like a flag is necessary, but insufficient for a good analogy. The logical connection you're convinced is the end point of an analog...

Note: I tried to edit this in the bottom of the above post, but even with no tags around it, it ended up inside the spoiler. Apologies. Edit: Lago's right, he has consistently at least said that he would not autofail an attempt if there were explicit rules, just that he would if there weren't explic...

See here, the point is not to get you to register that yes, McBride fell and exploded because physics, the point here is the gruesome scene of someone falling to their painful and messy death, presumably in terror. Describing that with a Hefty bag filled with soup doesn't evoke any of the same idea...

Shiritai: Yeah, you're a fucking liar. Here's what Kaelik actually said: If you want to make an attack, that is fine, but making an attack is different from staying something. Only then does OgreBattle bring up the Tome rules, as a counterpoint , because in Tome they are not actually different . Luc...

Oh, man. I am licked. Guys, I've been soundly thumped here. You'll have to carry on without me.