I wasn’t a good DM either. But then I learned. I threw encounters at the players I thought might be fun, and I missed the mark almost every single time. But my players had fun, so I don’t see the problem in getting those encounters wrong. And every failure taught me so much more than every success.

If you fail, but you keep it fun and learn for the future, what have you lost? Only your pride.

But some monsters are strong against certain builds and weak against others. Some monsters are stronger in certain environment and entirely nullified by others. Some monsters are stronger given certain allies and weaker when alone.

If you could devise a system to assign monster complexity based on every scenario you can imagine that monster being part of, then either that’s an astonishingly small number of scenarios or an absurdly complex calculation to force on anyone.

I think it’s mostly cowardice, personally. People don’t want to risk putting their own choices into a game based entirely on choices, just in case they aren’t as good. It’s better to use someone else’s decisions than risk your own pride.

Then you have ignorance. A lot of people don’t know how to fill the gaps, and WotC has never bothered teaching them how. Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren’t something to use without thought (like CR), so people complain for reason 1 again.

In a single round of combat, a wizard can use a spell to rain fire and bring a max health fighter down to 1 hp.

In comparison, in a single round of combat, a fighter can swing their sword four times and bring a max health wizard down to 1 hp.

So they’re both as good as each other in a hypothetical 1v1 combat scenario which is unlikely to ever come up during an actual game. Bravo. Can we stop having this argument? It’s been 4 months since this exact meme was posted.

Ironically for a post complaining about reading comprehension, but you misrepresented the original post you’re talking about. Even have the classic “quotation marks around a thing that was never said” in the title.

First, and perhaps most obvious, this wasn’t “everyone”. This was one person, and they didn’t get many upvotes. When I recommend a TTRPG, for example, I’m recommending Genesys (like someone else did).

Second, they weren’t saying to homebrew old editions of D&D. They were saying you don’t need to homebrew at all. At most, they said you could reflavour something in 4th edition. Their entire point was that you don’t need to homebrew when you can just find a system that already has what you would have homebrewed in.

Third, they were suggesting this as an alternative to homebrewing specific material into D&D 5e. Pathfinder can provide the experience of “5e with time travel” that you wanted without any modifications. BitD is so different from 5e that it can’t.

You are, however, correct that they did backtrack. I’ll put this down to poorly explaining their argument to start with, as they downplayed the “5e but better” games in their first comment while that was really their entire point.

Personally, I like homebrewing. It’s fun to tinker with the rules and materials. But there’s also an argument to not repeat work someone else has already done.

Sure, but I’m part of the minority that likes to remove the rest of the sheep first.

I get your point, but I will say the Captain America scene isn’t completely out of the realm of possibility. Cap weighs the helicopter down for a few seconds, and grabs a support beam for the helipad as soon as he can. If Cap can keep a grip on both the beam and the helicopter, then the propellers will only lift him if either Cap or the support beams break.

Of course, whether he should have had that much effect on the helicopter for those first few seconds is another matter entirely and I’m not enough of a physicist to make that call.

The only good example I can think of where people actually explain themselves is Agents of SHIELD, which isn’t even a movie. It’s amazing. She doesn’t doubt his loyalty for a second and understands, given their situation, why he had to keep it a secret from her. You still get drama, but it’s drama from everyone being on the same dramatic page.

The sword’s power changes with time, and as it racks up more kills. Soon, it gains a +1 to attack and damage. Then, it can become wreathed in flame as a bonus action. Then, it grants advantage to checks made to locate creatures. Then, its base power inverts and it can only kill non-evil creatures.

Do not tell the player about that last one. Insist to the player that it works exactly as you first described. The Paladin can kill innocent shopkeepers and little old ladies, but cannot kill this assassin working for the BBEG.

Will he question his own stab-first ask-later methods? Or will he turn evil without even noticing?