Fail but barely? You hear one of them say he needs to use the chamber pot and head towards the door.

Speak With Dead doesn’t bring the soul back.

Reviving someone is expensive. What you do is kill the Zealot Barbarian, have him ask the victim who killed him, then revive him.

If the lich is dumb enough to use a mundane lock, there’s easier ways to get through it. I guess they could do that trick with Imprisonment (Minimus Containment) to get an indestructible gem, but you could still use Stone Shape.

The proper way to hide a phylactery is in a demiplane with a bunch of random knick knacks so people can never guess the “contents and purpose”.

This article suggests he was.

Although there is no explicit evidence in the Gospels, we have reason to suggest that he also may have worn phylacteries.

Personally I think the players coming up with some cool new trick for each encounter sounds pretty good. The problem is when they find one cool new trick that works for everything. Like, casting Create Water in someone’s lungs sounds awesome the first time you do it, but you don’t want a whole campaign of just that. But even if the players agree that that would be boring, it’s hard not to do that without justifying why it wouldn’t work, and if it wouldn’t work every time, why would it have worked the first time?

If we’re counting that, how about proficiency bonus? And do we count the chance of the attack missing entirely?

I did not. But if you get a nat 20, it’s not a d4, is it? I assume they were accounted for in the death saves, but I just looked up the answer for that part.

I looked it up on Anydice and it would have a 31.25% chance of killing a random Commoner. Unless they get death saves, in which case it’s only a 12.5% chance.

They weren’t doing anything smartphone manufacturers haven’t been doing for years. Or those guys that make McDonalds ice cream machines.

Add in the Rogue only being here because he’s friends with the Barbarian and we’re set.

Where does it say a Warlock has to sell their soul? And it definitely doesn’t have to be a deity. They can make a pact with a unicorn.

It’s only a debate when it’s about RAW. Here the DM is making their own rules, and they can do whichever they want. They each have advantages and disadvantages. Maybe once you lose a phantom limb, you can no longer heal the limb. And transgender people can get the body they want with a simple healing spell. Though then you run into the question of if you can turn a scalie into a dragon with a healing spell, and that’s just OP.

In 5e, even poor people still get 2sp a day. It’s not clear how much it costs to hire someone to cast spells, but it’s either something they could reasonably pay for to cure blindness, or it’s so much that players can make enough money casting spells that money becomes a non-issue even at fairly low levels. Also, that’s not going to work if you want an NPC that is blind instead of was blind until they met a PC who had a spare second-level spell slot.

I feel like having family who would cast a spell to regrow your arm is part of having family who will help you, but it wasn’t exactly trivial at that point. Regrowing an arm is much more costly than curing blindness or paralysis.

5e isn’t that bad. Even poor people make two silver a day, and if hiring someone to cast a second level spell to cure a family member of blindness was more than they could afford, you could get so rich casting for money. But those rules are just a suggestion, and I’d probably make it so at least some cases of blindness are a little harder to cure. And you could also make it so economic disparity is much worse.

Personally I think of guns as just being specifically missing in fantasy, rather than a marker of when it takes place. Like crossing an ocean in a sailboat doesn’t feel out of place, even though the people who did it in real life had guns.

Or just have house rules about how magical healing works. Maybe it can only bring them back to their natural state, so someone who is born blind can’t be cured. Or it’s some kind of curse, and you house rule that Dispel Curse doesn’t work on plot curses. Or you just don’t have Lesser Restoration.

My boys are otherwise engaged.

Does D&D ever classify what metal is? I thought that was one of the things they leave up to the DM.