Is there an issue with these sites I’m not aware of?

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.

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.

Granted. Someone has spraypainted racist slogans onto your fence with glow-in-the-dark paint. They also used a pressure washer to draw dicks on your deck, and those dicks are the only parts that are actually clean.

Given how you say it’s happening across 43 states, I should point out I’ll be in Britain.

Also, you’re just saying “lets do something” and not saying what you’ll actually do. Your scale is spread thin and your talking points are empty cliches. In the end, you will do nothing.

Edit: Called it.

Por que no los dos?

“But how were you able to make the casserole? Weren’t you busy with the boss’ plan?”
“Nah, let me go over the details of the plan and explain how I managed to fit casserole prep into my schedule.”

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?

In the tomb of horrors, there is a door that summons a monster to attack the players if the players stab the door. This is apparently something that not only happens in Gary Gygax’s campaigns, but happens often enough that he encoded it into one of the most famous dungeons of all time.

When I was in university, I watched a movie online using alternative means that I had been kind of interested in, but never went to see. I then watched it again. Then I went out and bought a DVD.

A little after that, I watched a lets play of a game that basically gave the entire experience in a single watch. I liked the game enough that I bought it immediately and just let it sit on my steam library without an install, just so the creator would receive their dues.

A year or so ago, I got a game through a charity bundle and wound up playing hundreds of hours of it. Since the creators got no money from my purchase, I bought merch, and waited for DLC to come out for me to buy instantly, just so they’d get something from me.

Recently, a AAA studio let go a bunch of creators while their game was wrapping up, essentially punishing them for a job well done. The creators will get nothing if I buy the game they made, but the studio that screwed them over will get everything. Just like I always have, I will give as much as they deserve to receive.