Divining the Dice

Grappling is a fun and unique mechanic which people often tailor their characters around. Commonly the Goliath Barbarian or perhaps warrior is a popular choice, for a number of obvious reasons. However due to me liking to raise the bar for a number of ridiculous reasons I would like to put forward my favorite alternative. The Bugbear Sorcerer Grappler. Yes... sounds ridiculous doesn't it? Grappling Refresh Ok so first things first, lets refresh our memories as to the grappling rules. As taken from a terrific post by Ktkenshinx on grappling from Enworld , lets have a look at the basics: Grappling is a "special melee attack". To grapple a target, you must "use the Attack action" to then make your special melee attack (the grapple). From an RAW perspective, the "Multiattack" ability of monsters cannot enable multiple grapples because it is its own action type. If you have multiple attacks for the Attack action, you can replace as many of them ...

The concept of a session zero is a great idea which allows the party to create characters without potentially stepping on each others toes. In reality however, I often see people just pick the characters they want to play, which could lead to 3 melee tanks and a wizard or 3 charisma based characters and a cleric. Now this isn't wrong in any way, it just means that more people are capable of filling the same niche, which leads to less overall coverage of all the various skills and abilities. This can potentially complicate things further as it means there's more competition to fulfill certain aspects. Hence the 'stepping on each others toes' issue. I think DM's and players at this point have a responsibility to attempt to split the responsibilities evenly between the group to ensure everyone has their own niche and chance to shine. So to counter this issue in my own games I have devised a simple setup to have players "specialise" in a particular field...

Looking through FiveThirtyEight's  amazing survey the other day yielded a number of interesting insights to the types of characters people enjoy playing. The most baffling thing to me though is the very poor representation Druids received in the survey. They ended up being the least popular class, which for a class with such utility, diversity and flexibility, really left me surprised.  There's 6 druids in this picture... maybe. Lets Talk Options Druids have to be almost hands down, one of the most flexible and interesting classes to not only play, but also role-play. I think that most must simply view them as forest dwelling hermits who hate everything but trees and things that cannot speak. This however, doesn't have to be the case. Perhaps your druid is an urchin who has gained their powers after spending time with the vermin that frequents a large city. Or maybe, your druid trained as a cleric following the teachings of a nature god but was never blessed with th...