you made a huge shadow above him, he knew you were coming.

Somehow I doubt it was established that the fight was at noon on the equator until that moment.

Aren’t drow Australian?

Darkness creates a heavily obscured area.

It never actually specifies where the heavily obscured area is. But I think it makes more sense to interpret it as only the area in darkness is heavily obscured. After all, the area behind it depends on the observer, and there’s nothing about that what’s heavily obscured by darkness depends on where you’re standing.

On the other hand, if this just makes everything in that area dark, but still lets light pass through it, you’d still be able to see silhouettes of anyone standing in it, which really doesn’t seem like it’s heavily obscuring them.

Why don’t they just cast Zone of Truth and ask her if she cheated?

But going to a restaurant and buying a loaf of bread is equally unnatural. It’s not like that would get them pegged as vegetarians specifically. Also, weapons and armor (metal or otherwise) are unnatural. Adventuring is unnatural. Supernatural powers are unnatural.

I think it’s odd that they’re not. They’re generally portrayed as liking nature, and nature has no problems with animals killing and eating each other. I’m a vegetarian because I care about the individual animals, and I’m not a fan of nature and I would never become a druid unless it’s part of overthrowing the natural order.

Source? They just happened to independently start speaking a language that humans did 40,000 years ago?

It shows that one failed that time. I just asked ChatGPT. I can’t be sure how original the riddle is. It’s possible it copied the description of the double meaning from somewhere. But it looks like it understood it, and based on how LLMs work, there’s no reason it shouldn’t.

Make an original riddle. Explain the double meaning behind it.

Riddle: I hold many keys, yet open no doors. I sing without voice, yet keep perfect scores. Though I’m struck, I never feel pain; What am I, in sun or rain?

Answer: A piano.

Explanation of Double Meaning:

Literal Interpretation
    “Hold many keys, yet open no doors” refers to the piano's keyboard, which holds musical keys instead of physical keys for doors.
    “Sing without voice, yet keep perfect scores” alludes to how a piano produces sound through musical notes (without a voice) and follows written scores (musical notation).
    “Though I’m struck, I never feel pain” describes how piano strings are struck by hammers to create sound, but, of course, the piano doesn’t feel.

Play on Words
    Keys are often associated with doors, but here, they reference musical notes.
    Scores traditionally refer to results or outcomes, but in this context, they represent musical compositions.
    Struck typically implies being hit and possibly feeling pain, yet here, it refers to the mechanical action within a piano that produces music.

Each line has a figurative layer connected to musical terms, creating a double meaning based on the dual use of “keys,” “scores,” and “struck.”

Orks don’t speak English. Whatever they’re calling space marines is, by definition, their language’s word for space marine.

It can predict that the word “scales” is unlikely to appear near “books”. Do you understand what I mean now? Sorry, neural networks can’t understand things. Can you make predictions based on what senses you received now?

But they have wings. Maybe it’s a kobald that likes riddles.

Why does it have scales but no wings? Also, lots of living dragons don’t have flame and breathe lightning, acid, poison, or cold instead.

That’s what I was thinking at first, but since when do banks have riddles? Though maybe in-universe riddles are considered top of the line security.

It’s more advanced than just syntax. It should be able to understand the double meanings behind riddles. Or at the very least, that books don’t have scales, even if it doesn’t understand that the scales that a piano has aren’t the same as the ones a fish has.

Given that they’re immune, you may as well always keep them poisoned, just in case.

John King was somewhere from eight to eleven when he became a pirate.

And there’s also pirates right now who are downloading stuff they don’t own.

It’s a sourcebook they charged money for. They couldn’t have bothered to do basic playtesting to earn that money?

And there’s plenty more where that came from. Between a Shadow and a Tarrasque, one can safely be beaten by a low-level party, and the other is a threat to the whole world. The CRs reflect that, except they’re backwards.

In fairness, caught early, Shadows wouldn’t need a level 20 party to stop them. But they’re still above CR. And with the Tarrasque, all they had to do was leave in the anti-cheese measures they already had. And steal all the immunities from Pathfinder.

Speaking of CR, that was a bad way of doing things. Sure it’s convenient if you have a party of four players fighting a monster, but if you have to figure out how to recalculate it based on different party sizes, you may as well just use level to begin with and then figure out what level would challenge your players. Then it would work just as well on enemies with class levels. And it would mean Polymorph could be at least somewhat close to being balanced. As it is, a single spell can turn one party member into a monster capable of challenging for characters of that level, and then when defeated, they still just turn back.

It’s impossible to make it perfect, but it’s trivial to make it better. For example, get rid of Silvery Barbs.

And we’d really hope with a large corporation behind it, they could do more than get rid of the obvious. They could do the playtesting necessary to properly balance martials vs casters.

But it is useful for someone to make rules that are balanced and lead to interesting gameplay. There are entire companies that make their business around printing rule books and selling them to people who think it’s worth the money.

Think of it like this: if you have a high enough GM skill, then you’ll pass whatever check God has and make the game fun. But with more balanced and interesting rules, you get a bonus. Even if it’s just a +1 bonus that makes your game 5% more likely to be fun, that means everyone who plays that system gets that bonus from one person making it. You’d be crazy not to do it.

Different things work for different groups. But some things tend to work well in general, and others do not.