Susaga

"Yes, I worship the majestic mother, bringer of life, she who brings all colours into the world. No, I don't feel inclined to tell you her name."

And we played the first thing that came to our heads
Just so happened to be
The best song in the world
It was the best song in the world

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.

I believe it was Running who stated "If I have seen further, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Referring, of course, to the works of noted giant Thrynn Walk.

Is Jerry Seinfeld alive? According to google, yes.

I'm confused by the college of eloquence being in a system that is clearly not D&D, since an int of 2 would make you non-sentient and a con of 1 would be dead.

Sidenote: Jesus christ, I blocked one guy and 43 comments vanished.

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.

I guess it depends on how Konsi feels about garlic bread.

Just off the top of my head, you could give them a flaw that, while it doesn't make them any less cunning, it does let the players see what's happening.

Method 1: Gloating. What is the point in being a genius if nobody ever notices? When the villain has the party on the ropes, have them point out moments of the plan that the party could have noticed but didn't. Maybe they wait to give the shopkeep the bounty until the party can see it happen, just so they know.

Method 2: Worse minions. The plan is amazing, but the people carrying it out aren't quite as discrete as the villain. Maybe the security make a little noise as they stalk the party, and there are moments where the players could spot them.

Either way, the players will know something is up, and might have an opportunity to use this new information to turn the tables on the villain ("might" and "opportunity" being the key words there).