Most Kickstarter rewards ship in a year or less. Why did shipping take an entire extra year for him?

Oh man, you want the real answer?

The people who run these kinds of companies ascended to their roles through a mixture of amorality, naked ambition, willingness to do whatever it takes to ingratiate themselves to those above them, credit stealing, blame shifting, and sabotage of rivals. As a rule, they are uncreative, unintelligent, and cowardly, but they have arrogance in spades. If you think you’ve met an exception to the rule, you’re either wrong or they just haven’t been pushed out yet. Natural sociopaths are common, but so are those who have intentionally become sociopathic in the pursuit of power. It’s a trait that’s selected for.

They will replace successful leaders with their own cronies and yes people because they would rather suffocate a successful thing they don’t control completely than tolerate success from someone that’s threatening to their ego.

For all of their performative hand wringing about layoffs, they don’t actually care and will say terrible things in private.

Long story short, they’re all Carter Burke from Aliens, but the more power one accumulates, the more of an asshole they become.

Source: from millionaires to billionaires, I’ve had to deal with these human-shaped bags of shit up close and personal my entire career.

The Making Of book sounds really interesting. Maybe covers similar ground as Playing at the World, but I’m interested to find out.

For anyone confused: this isn’t D&D 6th Edition. (It’s a homebrew system.)

I agree. I think both should be completely redesigned from the ground up, but they’re not interested in doing that in 6E.

• Wizards should be boosted in early levels and nerfed in later ones, and should be split into multiple classes focused around illusion, commanding undead, AoE damage, control, buff/debuff, etc. (but not all of them simultaneously).
• Fighters should get maneuvers and cleave damage focusing on one or few targets.
• Rogues can continue occupying their niche of single target, high risk / high reward critical damage (but note key phase: high risk). Etc.

Everyone should have a clear specialization with a little overlap. A class should be the best at a thing and adequate at something else.

Yes, OK, two sessions, maybe three since wizards level slower. In AD&D your GM should be awarding for good ideas, role play, encouragement of other players, etc. though, as well as enemies slain. And it’s common to be a little generous with XP in those first sessions.

There was a reason wizards carried daggers and slings as well in early levels.

I just get tired of magic users complaining that they need to do equal damage to fighters from the beginning at range and also be able to warp reality in higher levels.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, any mechanic designed around providing characters magic items at their discretion in a system not balanced around magic items seems broken by default.

Exactly, the single session where wizards are level 1 in an inaugural battle that likely lasts 2-3 rounds

It’s not about breaking the game. To match a caster in damage you have to build a munchkin martial, and even so the caster will still be more versatile.

Thankfully the Rules Lawyer has an entire video about this that captures my view so I don’t have to write an entire post about it.

https://youtu.be/x9opzNvgcVI?t=9m54s

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Start by not really worrying about balance too much. CR is next to useless, even at very low levels. Just feel it out experimentally over a few battles, and if you go too big, withhold some of the nastier enemy abilities.

I do those big creative boss battles. I start by finding the most similar enemies to my custom enemies and running some basic numbers in Kobold Fight Club (maybe 5 minutes). Then I eyeball a rough difficulty multiplier based on their level, classes, and magic items.

My players are currently level 17 with minimal magic items and based on some experimental results I take whatever Kobold gives me for extremely deadly and then multiply the difficulty by about three to actually have a difficult battle. That might mean more enemies, or it might mean more damage, higher HP, higher AC, increased saves, etc. Right now a challenging battle for them is one in which I take a put maybe three CR 20-something monsters on the field against my party of five.

Yeah, I don’t know how anyone who paid attention during the OGL fiasco could say they are being a good partner to the hobby. This is all just backpedaling from that disastrous move. I welcome it, but let’s not rewrite history.

As for being good stewards of D&D, I think the next edition is shaping up to be an overly cautious iteration on what’s already there, and they’re unwilling to make changes of any major significance in order to fundamentally improve the game.

After the OGL debacle and seeing the extreme risk aversion of this new version and the questionable direction of the changes they do want to make, I decided to move on from 5E as my main system. I’m currently running a 5E campaign to level 20 which should wrap by the end of the year, after 4 years. I’ve run another multiyear 5E campaign, played in others, bought the books…

I’ll check back in for the edition after this one.

They’re great, and I’m buying every release they put out. But I do kind of wish they reined in the excess a bit so they took up less shelf real estate. A three-volume set following a two-volume set is pretty silly. Goodman isn’t exactly known for restraint, though; nothing compares to their Judges Guild Deluxe sets which are as large as reading the The New York Times…