rjshae

Yes, it's irrelevant. I was offering a compromise of limited pre-buffing, one per caster. Why summoning outside of combat, unless you plan to use them as a meat shield? I.e. a form of buffing.

How about this: while in scouting mode, if a party member has a partly red circle, any nearby character can start casting a combat-only spell. However, the casting can not be completed before combat starts. This lets you pause, get off a quick buff spell, then ready your next action before engaging the enemy.

In my case, sadly true...

As long as the encounters are balanced properly, I'm fine with not spending time casting buffs prior to combat. If you allow some players do it, then everybody ends up having to prep with buffs because the encounters will be increased in difficulty.

I'd like to see a way to implement use of a main gauche weapon with the 'one-handed weapon with no shield' style.

Mmm, I believe armor impacts your recovery speed, which would effect how often you can cast spells. A lightly-armored Wizard can thus fire off more spells in the same duration. High Dex also helps.

An axe-wielding enormous muscular barbarian called Thac0.

I'd like to see Wizards get more forces and fields spells, like the Bigby's Hands spells, telekinesis, Otiluke's Resilient Sphere, or repulsion.

For me the Pull of Eora spell has proven devastating time after time. I lay it down just behind the toughest opponents, then overlay it with a damaging wall spell. The pulled in enemy has trouble return to the front line (perhaps because of walkpathing issues?), and they get almost constantly damaged and worn down by the wall. The spell seems overpowered, even at 4th level. Have others had that experience?

The one thing I wish they would do is put a little reminder in the quest messages about where you need to journey to reach the end point. Typically they'll just give a name of somebody, who I met once briefly several weeks ago (in real time) and then quickly forgot. I usually have to visit a cheat site to remember where they were found. Yeah, okay, so I'm old and have a memory like a rusty piece of... wait, what was I saying?

It's not a bias. Guns did supplant bows, but only after their accuracy and rate of fire improved. The historical period is relevant here.

Granted, a typical English longbow arrow hitting plate armor at a grazing angle would most likely deflect, but that's likely true of musket balls as well (hence why tanks have sloped armor). Longbow arrows could penetrate 10 cm of oak though, so they were pretty formidable.

Bows were better than guns in the 16th century. Tercio Pike and Shot tactics would beg to differ. Hmm, are we comparing weapons or battlefield tactics? The minimum practice range for longbows was 220 yards. Muskets could barely hit anything at 100 yds. Longbow could penetrate plate armor, so muskets didn't have an advantage there. The English longbow rate of fire was typically six per minute so as not to exhaust the supply. Under optimal conditions, muskets could fire 2-3 rounds in the same time span. The main advantage of muskets was that it didn't need anywhere near the same amount of training. Hence you could train a bunch of peasants to shoot in a few weeks, and group them into large formations. Longbows took years of training.

Bows were better than guns in the 16th century.

Magic can cause non-physical injuries to your soul-based powers.

Broliloquy must have quite the bunker in his back yard.

The "Back That Thing Up" achievement?

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, I guess. It wouldn't be my preference.

I'm perhaps a little surprised that Scientific American falls into the "mixed record" camp. They do include some editorials, but for the most part it seems pretty sound. Somebody's opinion, I guess.

If they just level scale the critical path, give side quests of various challenge levels, and remove the level cap, it should all work out.

But that's not how people played - they unloaded their spell books every encounter, rested, then and ran back to town to replenish supplies, often half way through a dungeon or area. Which people? I didn't. There was typically a camping supply or two to be found in each significant dungeon, so I managed the supply and lived with some damage and per-rest ability loss. At higher levels, magic items helped with the extra spell slots, as did spell mastery. I usually only withdrew for supplies if I got clobbered a few times, which is what you'd expect.

In the SE part of the Abbey of the Fallen Moon is an interactive boulder where one of the characters tosses a grappling hook. The text message starts with the character I selected, then switches to Edér: That's it really; just a confusing message switch.

^ Well, whatever. The party is healing up some pretty nasty injuries in the span of just a few hours. Seems like magic to me, even if it is "slow" acting. I'd like to see a more plausible mechanic than "camping supplies" for that, without resorting to healing item consumption during combat.

Scurvy