Completely agree, and will definitely make that change. As soon as Panera Bread starts selling Chunks.

AI can draw fingers, Midjourney fixed that in their model over a year ago now.

So I'd say we have a real race on our hands!

I enjoyed watching Harmonquest, the episodes of which have parts video of the table and parts animated story. It's a comedy show, for the most part, which genre appeals to me. Past, that, I enjoy a good actual play podcast, sans video, like BomBARDed or NaDDPod, both of which are also comedic stories.

Just watching a group play a game can indeed be boring. But if that game is just a format for the genre of entertainment you already enjoy, that's the appeal.

RIP Mitch :(

I've found that the least inspiring behaviors of players, from my perspective as a DM, are when they hack and slash in combat. Whether it's built into the system, or you brew it on, giving players free skill checks alongside (rather than instead of) their normal combat turns can make things significantly more engaging and rewarding (for both them and the DM).

In 5e: Simon the Devious and the Leather Skins (from What We Do In The Shadows) as a Dhampir Hexblade Warlock with Pact of the Chain.

Between the chain familiar (Count Rapula), a zombie from Undying Servitude (Ken the Accountant), Summon Undead (Blagvlad the Exsanguinator, or Desdemona the Shrieker, or Impussa) and an Accursed Specter (Carol), you have a 4-person posse by level 6. It grows situationally or permanently when you gain access to Danse Macabre, Create Undead, and Finger of Death.

Mechanically, you're done by 13, and can either finish off with Bard (probably Whispers) or Paladin (Oathbreaker). Either way, take Inspiring Leader once you've maxed Cha, and then go get yourself that cursed witch's hat!

A question to anyone who has the book: how adaptable are the narrator-focused sections to systems that are not A5e? As a 5e DM, am I getting cool stuff, or wasting my money?

Is that... John Oliver? What a beast.

It is totally fine to kick or knee or headbutt someone for your unarmed strikes when your hands are busy--this is true with or without Tavern Brawler

I think some of WotC's design philosophy with 5.5 is about encouraging faster progression so that more groups do get to 20.

However, their focus on revamping the PHB, rather than the DMG, leaves the onus for balance on the DM, which has IMO always been the limiting factor. Designing encounters for level 17 players is wildly different from level 16 players. If capstones come at 18 and represent anything close to the power jump that 9th level spells provide, that's two back-to-back power jumps in very close succession. IMO that would actually drive more DMs to end at 17, rather than 18, or even sooner to avoid reaching those T4 power jumps at all. If they delay their BBEG encounter until those powerups, they have little to no experience with their group's new abilities to accurately balance on the knife's edge of very deadly, and risk either a TPK or a floppy conclusion if they miscalculate. "Easier to balance in T3, and end there" is, I believe, still the status quo.

Now, if after the PHB rewrite they make it easier for DMs to balance T4 encounters in a DMG rewrite, thst might change things. In that case, spreading the power jumps out still makes sense to me.

It depends on your medium of play, the members of the table, on how much trust there is, and on how crunchy the entire experience is allowed to feel. These days most of my D&D is in play-by-post discord servers, and I tend to stick to ones that are roll-then-go. It lets the player run the mechanics of their actions through avrae and find out successes and failures, and then describe how they do what they do. There is a strong onus on everyone understanding the game mechanics, and only engaging the DM in "can I?" Questions when pushing the envelope with improvised actions. The result is a faster (IMO) game with better writing (which starts to read like collaborative storytelling, especially if everyone uses a literary style).

In a go-then-roll world, the burden falls on the DM to "ratify" each character's intended actions. " would try to do an acrobatic flip" would need a "The floor is slippery, and falls flat on their face" followup, and this is just really slow in an async format. Inevitably, this is the most common way of sharing out the results of Perception and Investigation, though I appreciate pbp DMs who rely on passive stats and give things out in preemptively spoiler tags (that's whete the trust comes in).

" would try" is also a grating construction that feels terrible to read in general--it's just not a common tense signature. That said, in a low-latency live game, where the DM can roll immediately after learning of the player's intentions, go-then-roll(-then-go) is much more viable, and is probably preferable for new players who are new to the system.

I strongly recommend not multiclassing for flavor--the only good reason in 5e to multiclass is for mechanics (Flavor is free, Mechanics are expensive). PDK flavor is great, but the mechanics are awful--and while both Warlock and Sorcerer would give you some mechanical advantages, they won't offer quite enough to make PDK good.

What about just being a Valor or Swords bard, flavored as a PDK? Mechanically, a Bard can do just about everything that the PDK subclass offers but better and sooner, and both Swords and Valor get you extra attack at roughly the same pace. Unless you are dead-set on heavy armor, you shouldn't need any feats or MCs to make this work for you (and if you are so inclined, then Heavily Armored on Valor Bard works just fine to be Str-based instead of Dex-based). The only mechanical caveat with Valor bard is that you need a musical instrument to cast some of your bard spells--you can either stick to Verbal and Verbal+Somatic spells, or else grab a lute. Flavoring the bard magic as "woah, my words and music are suddenly making thing happen, rather than just being entertainment" fits pretty well with your Wild Magic Sorcerer idea. And lastly, Bards make amazing faces.