Ah, my mistake there- I thought that was another one with "attack with a melee weapon". It does make more sense that crossbow bashing would be strength based tho, surprising to see the rules as written following logic XD

Jeremy Crawford's rules are also inconsistent dog shit. That's why we're here, looking at this meme :)

As far as I can see, the rule for using a ranged weapon for melee is just: "If a character uses a ranged weapon to make a melee attack, or throws a melee weapon that does not have the thrown property, it also deals 1d4 damage." That says nothing about changing the traits of the weapon, nor that the weapon is treated as an improvised weapon for the purposes of the attack- the rules for improvised weapons are a seperate clause within the same paragraph. As such, I'd argue that hitting someone with the butt of your heavy crossbow is effectively an attack with a martial weapon, damage 1d4 bludgeoning, with the traits Ammunition (range 100/400), heavy, loading and two-handed- of which ammunition doesn't apply because it's not a ranged attack, and thus loading doesn't constrain multiattack (because only being able to load 1 piece of ammo per round doesn't affect the bonks per round). Per the thrown weapon rules, I'd also argue that bonking people with a crossbow would rely on the attacker's dex, because it doesn't have the finesse property and as a ranged weapon it's dex based.

I won't- per Jeremy Crawford, a thrown melee weapon isn't an attack with a ranged weapon, so by the same logic a melee attack with a ranged weapon wouldn't become a melee weapon attack.

Sharpshooter specifies "an attack with a ranged weapon"- so the only argument I could see against using a crossbow for bonking counting for that is if using a crossbow as a melee weapon makes it not count as a ranged weapon. That's an interpretation I disagree with, though, per the sage advice on thrown weapons and sharpshooter- if throwing a dagger isn't an attack with a ranged weapon, it implies that "ranged weapon" is inherent to the item rather than how it's used. Throwing a dagger at someone is an attack with a melee weapon, ergo hitting someone in the face with a crossbow is an attack with a ranged weapon.

Yeah, but there's also plenty of magical martial arts right, like hamon? DnD wizards have a particular flavour of spellcasting (int based, using a spellbook and weird spell components) which doesn't really fit well with stands or nen, right? Like, performing magic through sheer martial prowess rather than study and arcane research feels like something that DnD doesn't have much support for.

That would be a good point if this was an argument, and not just me bellyaching. Also, the supernatural side of anime swordsmen tends to be "They studied the sword so much that they've got these expert abilities" rather than "they spent long enough in the library to unlock these techniques". To my understanding, I'm not a big anime person.

Grizzly? I thought the pun was koala-ty, but I guess I can't panda to all audiences- I bet you just don't like puns because of astrology, what's ur sine?

"Fiend pact warlock? No, you misheard- I took Pact of the Demon Core"

Huge fan of having a bell curve for most rolls, my main concern is that in combat the random initiative might make it kind of swingy; the initiative system is that if the hope die is higher the players go next, if the fear die is higher the enemies do, for about a 46% chance of enemies going next each turn. So that's about a 15% chance of players getting three turns in a row- if the game is balanced for quick combats (which seems likely given what we know) that could make a massive difference in how hard a combat is- and in the counter situation, where enemies get three turns in a row (about a 9% chance) an otherwise easy encounter could go very wrong. This is all speculation, of course, but the initiative system being fully random does worry me, since the action economy seems like it would be a major thing in this system

Fortunately, they're very strict on architectural safety- lots of building soupervisers

I wasn't expecting this level of analysis on the meme, but I kind of love it. I just figured Myconids would grow a range of different fungus varieties, especially with everything that grows in the under dark as a matter of course