Yeah, there’s a fine line here. The DM improvising something whimsical and funny on the spot can be enjoyable to everyone, but if the party is going out of their way to do their absolute best to derail and force DM to waste any and all prepared material they’re just dicks. The DM is still a player in the game doing it have fun too and doesn’t owe you a campaign that bends to all whims of the party without restraint.

Also, a good lesson for GMs is to try and write any prepared material in a way that allows it to later be reused if players manage to miss it. Just because the party didn’t investigate that one cave with a goblin ambush in it doesn’t mean they can’t run into a goblin ambush later down the line somewhere entirely different.

What portion of the 18 skills 6 saves + AC 30+ tools do you list for every character on your GM screen?

Oh please, you don’t have to make this stupidly contrived. The base attributes, skills and AC are plenty enough. You might not even need the skills outside of outlandish expertise cases as even proficient skills are not that far off. You do realize the way skill scores are calculated is extremely predictable in 5e? Save DCs come from rules text most of the time, and besides, you probably should not be doing outlandish DC checks like 2 or 40 that often for it to become a trouble. When’s the last time you’ve actually needed to know the players’ tool proficiencies? You know the rogue can pick a lock and the bard can play a lute. If they have something more outlandish, they’ll let you know.

Are you running games with 6+ players?

No, because my experience tells me too large groups lead to singular players having their time in the limelight so infrequently boredom is practically assured. Even then, a table with 6 or even 10 colums is barely wider than one with 3. Like literally, go boot up Excel, paste the skill names on the left column and you’ll see very quickly that it’d all easily fit on one sheet of paper. The numbers don’t take up much space horizontally.

Noticing that the Rogue has been doing very well on thieves tools checks and thus not making them roll to pick a lock is a clear example of the possible ways DM bias can occur, since another character (let’s say a Wizard with History expertise) with a skill bonus that’s just as high that hasn’t come up as much won’t get that same benefit.

This is silly. The solution to this is to take note of the wizard’s specialties too, not to punish the rogue with having them roll pointless rolls. Your characters are not going to have that many outlandishly high scores that you couldn’t just round up these outliers and make a note of them. From all of my experience with 5e and various DMs and DMing myself, most DMs make their players roll way too many damn pointless rolls. People forget the old rule of thumb that says that you should not roll unless both success and failure are possible and both provide a meaningful outcome that carries the story forwards. If the characters are not under time pressure and they can retry endlessly, just let them have it without a roll. The rolls will feel far more suspenseful when 90% of them aren’t wasted on meaningless drudgery.

That all said, if you have auto crit fails on 1s, why are you not asking for rolls all the time, anyway?

You have it backwards. You should not be asking for rolls constantly because 1 always fails, you should only ever be rolling checks if 1 can fail! If 1 can’t fail (or 20 succeed) you just don’t roll. It’s that simple. When’s the last time you missed your mouth when trying to eat a sandwich? Doubt that’s happened to you any time recently. Similarly, don’t ask for rolls on trivial things. You don’t roll to get out of bed, you don’t roll to climb a set of stairs, you don’t roll to not choke while drinking. Accept that the player characters are good at what they do. A pro does not fail a trivial task 5% of the time, so don’t use a die to force them to. The rogue has picked locks his whole life and picking one is trivial for him, unless there is a specific circumstance that makes it otherwise, like time pressure, risk of getting caught or a particularly difficult lock.

4d8 + cantrip, other spell or even melee attack every turn is still considerably more damage than 1d8+5 per turn, whether they do that for one, two, three, …, or ten turns. We are comparing damage per turn, the number of turns is irrelevant.

At this point you have yet to make one cogent claim on the subject so I’m going to assume you’re trolling on purpose and will not engage you further. Have a good day, sir.

I really wish they went over the weapons for the next edition and made sure that at the very least there were no weapons that were objectively worse than another. Might want to just homogenize the weapons under some handful of archetypes that have some legitimate advantages over each other.

I once played a cleric worshipping Loviatar so thematically I made him use whips as his weapon of choice. Roleplay-wise I loved it, gameplay-wise 1d4 damage is ass and reach allowing me to mostly harmlessly tickle the enemies from very slightly farther away is absolutely useless 99% of the time.

“bottled spells”

“Bottled spells” that don’t recharge on a long rest but instead cost an arm and a leg and heal for a pittance, basically ensuring that in the time that it takes to gulp one down you’ve already taken twice as much damage than what it’ll heal. I guess I get the idea but RAW, the potions are just awful outside of last resort to bring up downed characters (and that’s assuming your GM has no problems making an unconscious character forcibly drink them).

The DM doesn’t necessarily have your modifiers memorized and asking what they are every time slows down play.

Pen and paper or even a tablet exist for a reason. Having the key stats of your player characters stuck up to your GM screen or open on your second monitor is about the best use of space there is.

Besides, it doesn’t take much brain power to put together that making the rogue who’s been making short work of locks the past month roll for a simple lock under no time pressure is just silly. I get if an AL GM doesn’t know the characters but for majority of weekly groups’ GMs this is an absolute non-issue.

Ultimately if 1 will not fail or 20 will not succeed, why are you even rolling? While there is no default automatic success/failure rule, it’s a natural assumption that 1 and 20 are automatic fail and success based on the fact that the roll is pointless otherwise.

I know the spell. I told you. Two attacks with a longsword from one hand will do more damage than that.

4d8 for ten turns is on average 180 damage. For one bonus action, total. Two one-handed longsword attacks even at +5 assuming you never miss is 19 damage average. If they want to keep doing that they will have to expend their action every single turn. I have no clue why you assume the wizard is going to just take a coffee break after applying heat metal instead of using their actions to deal further damage every turn it’s active. The wizard wins out massively.

I have no idea what you’re smoking but I want some too.

There’s something really wack with the scale of things in the potion scene. Like, the potion bottles fit comfortably in GS’s hand, meanwhile they appear bigger than the rhea girl’s head who is basically supposed to be hobbit sized but not really smaller than that? Weird.

Overall the art isn’t quite as crisp but it gets the job done, and at the very least there wasn’t any scenes with CGI Slayer (at least not yet, we’ll have to see once we get more action on screen) which is a huge win.

Shield Hero

the content/story is much more mature than Frieren.

Goddamn Robbie Rotten has deeper motivations than any Shield Hero villain.

I’m surprised they didn’t make the list given the general popularity, but let’s be real here, Goblin Slayer is honestly mediocre and Shield Hero has been spiraling down the drain ever since it started.

While I do often feel that way too, it needs to be pointed out that Anime Corner is a bit of a niche site and this reflects only the opinions of 5408 people. Their polls are known to have a bit wack results at times. If you look at other sites, MAL for example has had 25k people rate the list’s top entry, Sousou no Frieren. If you want to truly gauge something’s popularity, it’s worth looking at more than just one site.

The player characters are generally adventurers fated to achieve greatness, for them the extraordinary is just ordinary.

While true, there are some languages that are the wrong tool for every job. JS is one of them. I’ve dreamt of a future where web frontends switched to something sane but instead we got stuff like typescript which is like trying to erect steel beams in quicksand. For web frontends I can understand that historical reasons have lead to this but whoever came up with node thinking JS would be a great backend language has a lot of explaining to do.