Recent content by KidSnide

I don't see this as an attempt to remove racial stereotyping from the game. (And - in particular - I'm quite sure that WotC isn't sending commandos to your house to police the content of your game.) Instead, I see this as a necessary effort to revise the parts of D&D that reinforce racist...

I just never have time for 6-8 encounters in one day. I only get 2-3 hours to play, my players want more role-playing than combat, and the next session will involve a slightly different set of PCs (based on inconsistent player attendance). I'm much closer to one encounter every 6-8 days than...

I don't like it when some PCs are significantly more powerful than other PCs. If you have more of an old school sandbox game where characters are of different levels and may have significantly different levels of equipment, then it's fine to be random -- the game isn't supposed to be fair. But...

I'm kind of torn about the whole FG / 5e pricing scheme. I used FG for 4e games, and it's pretty good. But the total price to repurchase everything I have in paper form is a little steep. I guess it would be worth it if on-line table top was my primary avenue for gaming, but it's just too...

The powers (e.g. spells) are far more important for psionics than the casting mechanics. If you had a solid power list, it would be pretty easy to build a satisfying psion with, say, the sorcerer mechanics. -KS

I'm a little surprised by all the people saying that magic solves this problem. I always describe the stench of humanity when my PCs enter a city. Con checks seems like a bit much, but describing smells is a great way to establish immersion. (I would get sick camping in standard adventuring...

If you want something more frenetic and unstructured, take a page from Dungeon World style "initiative." In Dungeon World, there is no initiative, the DM just focuses on individual PCs as it makes sense. (Google "dungeon world initiative" if that doesn't make sense.) In D&D, you could adapt...

I've had games that lasted 10 years and 15 years, and neither got close to level 20. The one exception I'll note is that both games had moments in which the players had a chance to play their high level NPC allies (often in the face of near total disaster) which did provide a brief opportunity...

If you want to provide an incentive to take down time, you could say that the cultists pull their forces back to their strongholds after one of the other cults suffers a setback. That means the cults have more guards and they are on higher alert, but there is less proactive cult activity. The...

I don't claim to have given any particularly deep thought into this, but this partial Rise of the Rulelords conversion adopts a 5e DC = (3e DC - 5) × 0.75 + 5 formula. I'm not sure the difference really matters, but this is the type of thing where it would be convenient if WotC provided some...

There are a few things where a general conversion guideline would be useful. For example, it would be nice to have a conversion table for replacing 3e or 4e DCs with DCs appropriate for 5e. But overall, I agree that conversions depend more on "use good judgment" than anything else. What would...

Agreed. I like the idea of adventures that linked together but L1-20 (or even L1-14) is just way too long. I can't imagine ever wanting to run a published game that takes that goes through that much material and the focus on a campaign-long plot makes it harder to pick and choose individual...

The essential question you need to ask is why the travel is interesting. If it involves exploring new territory (e.g. hex crawls), making it through dangerous terrain (e.g. deserts, water rations and sand storms), sneaking through hostile territory (e.g. avoiding attention of goblin patrols)...

That's important. I ran a solo dragon encounter during the playtest with 9 PCs and the legendary rules that showed up in one of the on-line articles, and I built a lot of custom solo monsters for 4e. Here's my quick and dirty formula for good solo play: a) Make sure that the creature has...

+1 Seriously, I like how Dark Sun is a big enough world where you can run dozens of types of campaigns, but the campaign built up in the opening adventures (and the novels) is such the prototypical "standard Dark Sun campaign," I can't imagine why you would want to set the campaign setting...