My setting has technology more-or-less equivalent to Earth's 17th century, and a big chunk of my inspiration is Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. The books detail the steps that led to the industrial revolution so my setting also has similar early tech, aided by magic of course.

(Airships, for example, use magic derived from Resilient Sphere to make their balloons supernaturally rigid and impermeable, then instead of filling it with a lifting gas they just evacuate all air from it. Their hulls look like solid wood but they are instead a honeycomb structure made of giant spider silk sandwiched between thin wooden veneers to keep the cold air out, and reinforced with the occasional mithral spar. The propulsion is purely magic though, the props are powered by aetherosiphon engines. There are some secret military projects aimed at creating a fully-pressurized heavier-than-air skyship that can actually fly over the taller mountain ranges; since their passenger compartment is not pressurized, a standard skyship's maximal cruising altitude is 3-3.5 kilometers while a trained military crew can maybe get up to 4.5 km.)

The Forgotten Realms setting is the "default" D&D setting. Most published adventures take place in it, specifically a small part of it (planet: Toril, continent: Faerun, region: Sword Coast, the west coast of Faerun; this region has a number of famous cities like Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Candlekeep, Neverwinter, etc...). The vast majority of lore that you can find in books like the Monster Manual specifically relate to this setting (Volo, Mordenkainen, Tasha, Xanathar, etc... all live there anyway). It also has many famous characters and deities (e.g. Corellon, Gruumsh, Moradin...), countries, cultures, even some languages. And it also includes things like the Kenku curse.

But of course if you're running a homebrew setting like I do, you can feel free to cherry-pick it or just straight-up ignore it.

That was pre-MotM, and also Forgotten Realms lore which holds no water in a homebrew setting.

Because I don't speak Quenya. (I wrote the signature of an Elvish character in Tengwar, but that's about it.)

I have my own language mappings in my homebrew. Most of them only appear as names since most people speak Common, but I did include some people in my game who don't. (I make sure that they are some who speak a language that I speak too.) So the mappings are:

1. Common - English. We're playing in English, duh. (Before contact with Elves, humans spoke "proto-Common" which would be mapped to German if I had to use it. Many humans still have German names.)
2. (High) Elvish - French. Yes, in-universe the Common language has plenty of Elvish influence. (Classical Elvish is Latin.)
3. (Wood) Elvish - Greek. Most Wood Elves speak High Elvish, but their names are Greek and many of them still speak their own language as well. The continents and seas are often named in Ancient Wood-Elvish (i.e., classical Greek) because they used to be the primary explorers before the rise of the High Elves.
4. Dwarvish - modern Dwarvish is Norwegian, old Dwarvish is Icelandic.
5. Halfling - Frisian. (Fortunately I haven't had to say anything in Halfling so far.)
6. Gnomish - Welsh. (Again, fortunately I haven't had to say anything in Gnomish yet.)
7. Orc - Russian.
8. Goblin - Mongolian.
9. Tellurian (not a species, but an influential country) - Spanish. Many people alongside the Bay of Luria speak Tellurian as their native language instead of Common or their racial language.
10. Sylvan - Finnish. (My go-to for weirder names as well. Many Fey-related creatures have Finnish names, as well as those who live near Fey portals.)
11. Giant - Hungarian. (They feature a lot in Hungarian folk tales.)
12. Draconic - Hindi.
13. Hashiman (not a species, but a group of eight islands - though they are also the Kenku homeland so most Kenku speak this as their native language) - Japanese-ish. The language comes in two dialects, Hanego which is used primarily by Kenku but also Aaracokra, Owlin, Tortles, and other creatures with hard beaks that have difficulty pronouncing M and N, and Hadago which is used by the rest. They are identical in writing, differ mostly in pronouncing those sounds.

Magic missile can become a lot more potent than that (on average):

1. Make a Scribes wizard
2. Take the Elemental Adept feat and pick something that very few creatures are immune to, e.g. thunder.
3. Change the MM's damage to thunder.

Now you can pew-pew to your heart's content with each pew doing a guaranteed 3 damage instead of 2, and puming the average damage of the pews from 3.5 to 3.75. Not a huge jump, but if you upcast it to level 5 with 7 pews, that's 26.25 on average instead of 24.5 with a minimum of 21 instead of 14.

Hiring monodrones is usually cheaper. They are the simplest Modrons, and they would be perfectly willing to work for a Lawful king (the evil-good axis doesn't come into play) because it increases the amount of order in the multiverse. But every modron has Truesight.

Hell, maybe hire a whole team of modrons. Monodrones to stand watch at all ingresses, with orders of "raise an alarm if you see any disguised shapeshifter enter through that window / door / arrowslit / whatever", and duodrones with orders of "patrol the castle and raise an alarm if you see any disguised shapeshifter".

And that's why you as the DM can do passive skill checks (neé "taking a 10") for non-stressful situations. A routine landing is just 10 + ability mod (probably INT on a big plane with full FBW) + PB. It's only with 3 of the 4 engines down, the 4th on fire, the computers are fucked, you're trying to land the 747 on a dirt strip, and oh, there's a hurricane when you need to actually roll for it.

Though I'm also down with Esper's idea of every class having a limited reliable talent. So every character could pick one class skill at level 7 and one at level 14 in which they couldn't roll under a 10. The "expert" classes (rangers, rogues, bards, and artificers) would have additional picks at levels 3, 10, and 17 with full reliable talent being their capstone feature.

Yeah, the story setup makes it seem like your mission is actually urgent, so I also only long rest when it's absolutely necessary.

That will just turn the same dead commoners in that r=20' sphere extra crispy. I don't think there are any spells in 5e that increase their AoE when upcast and not the damage, duration, or number of targets.

(Either way, if the street is significantly narrower than 20' then a lightning bolt is going to maximize the carnage.)

If it's a common item with a listed price, and you're in a city big enough to reasonably have that item in stock, just do your shopping "offline". Sometimes I even include a low-level Forge cleric in small towns so the party could do their sub-100gp item shopping. (In that case the cleric charges an extra 10% donation for the Forgetemple, which they will use to feed orphans, create farming equipment, etc...)

That being said, I straight-up stole Dr. T'Ana from Lower Decks as a ship surgeon.

Exactly. The duration is one round, the distance is "any distance", and the target can reply immediately. If it had lightspeed delay then the distance would be limited to 3 lightseconds.

Sending already allows FTL communication.

If you want to set up a proper telegram system with D&D tech, Magic Mouth is a better choice. Let's say you set them up onto poles that are spaced 30 feet apart, 4 magic mouths per pole. Say, the line is going east-west:

• Mouth 1: If it hears a "one" coming from the east, it says "one".
• Mouth 2: If it hears a "zero" coming from the east, it says "zero".
• Mouth 3 and 4: same but from the west.

Each pole costs 40 GP to set up, so this telegram is rather expensive, costing 7040 gp per mile... but once it's set up, it doesn't sleep, doesn't need payment, doesn't need maintenance, just two people on each end with a binary code table. You could say that these are skilled hirelings, working in 3 shifts that means that the upkeep of both ends of a line is 12 gp per day.

Peasants shouting the message... well, to make it absolutely sure that the message is heard, you need to put a messaging post every 100 feet. (Loud noises are audible at 2d6×50 feet per the DM screen.) If they are working in 3 shifts, that's 6 sp per day per post, making the upkeep of the line ~32 gp per mile. Thus the magic mouth setup would become cheaper after only 220 days.

Monodrones are probably much more reliable for that. Or you can straight-up use monodrones to set up a proper Clacks system.

If we're about to simulate physics, the wooden stick would turn into an expanding cloud of plasma about halfway through the "railgun" anyway.

Evil DM: the bookcase is also a mimic.

A recurring villain was introduced on the first session. She was a human pirate captain with very pale skin. One of my players immediately thought that she was a vampire.

...

So she is a dhamphir now. (Couldn't make her a full vampire, they met her in daylight.) Not like it gave her much of a boost except for a climbing speed and spider climb anyway.

Greek is also Indo-European though.

If 1-2 players are missing then their characters receive the Talisman of Protection from DM Stupidity and I take them over in combat.

Clone. Doesn't work post-mortem, but if they can last for ~120 days... and if they can't, there's always Imprisonment or True Polymorph to keep them alive until the clone body matures.

Plan 1: Raulothim's Psychic Lance. By the time I get to take that spell, I must have had at least one ASI so I'll just take metamagic adept for subtle spell. I just have to know the name of the target and be within 120 feet of them (240 if the second metamagic option I take is distant spell), and it's pretty close to a guaranteed kill vs. a commoner, no murder weapon, and nothing showing that I was there.

Plan 2: Clone. Claim that it's some revolutionary stem cell rejuvenation therapy and sell it to the super-rich. (Though I might make it fail accidentally if it's someone like Murdoch or Kissinger. Payment in advance, no guarantees, and I'll do it on international waters.)

This was my motivation behind allowing more players in the first place. My previous group basically fell apart because I had 3 players and when one of them canceled last minute - which was basically all sessions - there weren't enough players for a session. When one of those players dropped out permanently, I went online to look for more players, and I figured: "Hey, if I have 6 players with the same flake ratio then I'll have a 4-person party most of the time. Let's do this!"

But then the fuckers started showing up consistently for every session!

And even though I'm a noob (well, not so much since I've been DMing for a year now, 7 months of this for this large weekly group... but I still have no idea what I'm doing) I still have to make some new applicants take a number. Which just underlines how much of a DM/player imbalance there is.

(I'm planning to split the group based on player experience level into two biweekly campaigns of 5 players, that way I might be able to allow a couple of newer players to join and still preserve what was left of my sanity.)

Just put your foot down and refuse to add more than 5 players until you're experienced enough. (*sigh* I wish I had followed my own advice.) Sure, CR started with 7 regular players and sometimes they have even bigger parties with guest players... but that's Matt Mercer, he knows what he's doing, and the players are also good enough to avoid making it a nightmare for him and each other. You as a noob DM will have your hands full with herding 4-5 overly excitable cats and managing the rest of the game.

Yeah, there's a ridiculous imbalance.

And then you start DMing, even as a beginner who has no idea what he's doing you get 6-8 players at the table, that party size is unsupported by the balancing tools given by WotC so you wrack your brain trying to come up with challenging encounters for the whole group, burn out, stop DMing, and the imbalance worsens even further.

Magma mephit says hello.

Oh hey, that's my dice. In game and in life.

That final element has this amazing interplay where you feel that you’re burning your humanity (or species neutral equivalent term) as you use magic, and your innate or monsterous side comes through, it was a really cool design and I’d love to see it taken even further with a subclass that also incorporated hitpoints into the flow somehow, meaning that you are a tank before you cast your spells, but literally burn out your life force as you do so, revealing the monster underneath. It could be really cool for a vampire or something else that has an interesting interplay with harm, healing and magic.

The Order of the Lycan blood hunter has a similar mechanic. Every blood hunter has abilities with a HP cost, but the lycan might also go berserk if they start the turn with less than half HP.

Whenever I have a problem, I chuck a fireball at it, and BOOM! I have a different problem.

You're forgetting Toll the dead. Long range, WIS save, d12 if the target is missing even a single HP. (Sacred flame is crap though.)

(Minor correction, wizards have no access to heat metal. It's only available to druids, rangers, and bards. But at level 7 wizards have access to Conjure Minor Elementals, which can summon 4 magma mephits and they each have one daily casting of heat metal.)

Yep. While the bard-sorcerer maintains that level 4 heat metal, they can also do 2d10/turn with fire bolts if they don't want to expend additional spell slots. Also assuming that all of those hit, that's 110 additional damage beyond the 180 from the heat metal.

Cantrips. Which also get more powerful based on character level.

Read the spell description.

Sure, 4d8 in itself is not much, of course. 4d8 per round as a bonus action for 10 rounds with a single spell slot, however, is a lot, especially at a level where a paladin only has second level smite slots. Which is why upcasting heat metal can be extremely powerful. (And it gives disadvantage for those 10 rounds, and there's no saving throw or attack roll involved. If you're wearing metal armor, it will fuck you up. And if you happen to be resistant or immune to fire, well, that bard 3 / sorc 4 might have transmuted spell.)

Casters also get proficiency up, that depends on total character level.

And higher spell slot levels still increase the character's damage output and specific utility. Some spells - such as Cure Wounds or Hold Person - are pretty much designed to be upcast, and some others (e.g. Heat Metal) are unexpectedly great. Someone with Bard 3 / Sorcerer 4 might only have second level spells, but a level 4 Heat Metal vs. a heavily-armored target deals 4d8 per turn without a saving throw for up to 10 turns.

TBF the only class that gets more than one extra attack is the fighter.

Now of course it would make sense to sum up the levels you have in classes that get multiattack, and if you have >=5, you get an extra attack. But since attack progression is far less regular than spell slot progression, getting something approaching regularity beyond that would be difficult.

Now if OneD&D wanted to boost martials and introduce some sort of a multiattack scaling across multiclassing, here is how that could work:

1. Introduce features called Special Attack and Signature Attack. (Simply because just stacking extra attacks in a way that gives a bunch of half-casters extra attack at level 5-6 would give full martials a ridiculous number of attacks per turn at higher levels.) Special Attack is an attack that deals double weapon damage (which stacks with crits), but other extra damage sources like smites don't get doubled. Signature Attack is a Special Attack that can also force a save, either a STR save vs. being disarmed, a DEX save vs. being knocked prone, or a CON save vs. being dazed. You pick which one when you get the feature, and you can change it on level up.
2. Introduce an attack progression table which details how many regular and special attacks you get per warrior level. (IDK if Lemmy's MD syntax allows tables in lists, so see the table below.)
3. Like for spell slots, some classes (fighter, barbarian, monk) count as whole classes, others (paladin, ranger, artificer) count as half, and some caster subclasses (bladesinger, swords bard, hexblade, etc...) count as third.

The table:

So:

• A level 12 single class fighter gets 1 normal, 1 special, and 1 signature attacks.
• So does a fighter 6 / barbarian 6.
• A level 12 paladin counts as a level 6 warrior so they get a normal and a special attack. (Also, in OneD&D the divine smite is a bonus action spell like every other smite, so the level 18 paladin can't go too nuclear with 3 smites per turn.)
• A fighter 6 / paladin 6 counts as a level 9 warrior, 2 normal attacks and 1 special attack.

Of course this could be refined a bit further, e.g., instead of a generic "special attack" they could pick power attack (must be a strength-based attack), precise strike (must be a dexterity-based melee attack), or pinpoint shot (must be a dexterity-based ranged attack) and they could swap this one on level-ups too. But I think this should be a start.

Until you read Interesting Times.

::: spoiler Interesting Times spoiler

His wife was murdered by one of the warlords of the Agathean Empire during one of their emperor-sanctioned skirmishes. :::

Look, you spring a door mimic on them just once...

They have 7 spell slots.

They actually have 9 each with Harness Divine Power. (I don't think they even know what their other channel divinity options are.) Which comes to a total of 27 smite slots per long rest among the three of them, 15 of them level 2. That's 69d8 (nice!) radiant damage just from smites against non-undead, non-fiendish creatures, and without crits or the weapon damage, averaging to around 310.

(And again, I have to ask myself: what the fuck were the WotC peeps smoking when they designed the paladin? HDP for clerics is a minor boost that restores spell slots of their low-level spells, roughly equivalent to the wizard's arcane recovery or the sorcerer's sorcery point conversion. HDP for paladins restores one of their highest level damaging abilities, and they even get the 3/day version earlier than the clerics. As if the already pretty busted base class needed another boost.)

Splitting the party sounds good from the DM's tactical perspective, but it's horrible from the players' fun perspective. It's basically twice the prep for the DM, only for half the party to spend half the session scrolling on TikTok.

"As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero."

Dunno. Arcane Tricksters tend to have a higher DEX modifier than INT (and then pick spells that don't care about the spellcasting modifier), so they are better off with Booming Blade (if stealth is already off the table) or Green Flame Blade unless they run into something that is resistant or immune to nonmagical damage at levels 3-4 and don't have magic weapons. Might work well with a maxed INT Arcane Trickster / Bladesinger build though.