Recent content by rmcoen

I tend to make "real" places. Actual locations that people would actually build - complete with bathrooms/latrines, and kitchens and eating areas - or natural locations that might exist (cave systems with the water that created them, for example). This lets the PCs intuit some of the "design"...

I have to echo others' posts: Start with a Bang! Start with something that gets the blood pumping, and start the Action rather than hope they pull on the Hook. Additionally... give the PCs a reason to know each other and care about staying together. It doesn't have to be "all of them" to...

Given that my gaming group has been together (mostly) for 30 years, we don't generally have too much difficulty in this regard. As the "forever DM", I will generally give the players an idea of what restrictions (or lack thereof) the next campaign will have. And since our campaigns tend to...

In COMBAT, nat20 always hits - but if you needed a 20 or more to hit, then the nat20 isn't a "crit", it's just a hit. A nat1 always misses, even if you're +10 and attacking an AC 8 zombie. In either case, you (player) or I (DM) can and should describe why you succeeded or failed despite all...

From a "defend my place" perspective, traps are meant to discourage or kill intruders when you aren't there, or supplement your defense when you are there. Traps should never be about mildly inconveniencing the intruders... that's just a waste of the defender's time and resources. [This goes...

To the OP, most D&D worlds exist in a post-apocalypse setting. Otherwise, why are there so many ruins and monsters, versus (usually) widely scattered low-tech population? With that in mind... why would all the previous civilizations necessarily be low-tech/medieval? My current campaign is...

I'd say my prep time averages about 1 hour for a 3.5 hour session, but what tends to actually happen to make that average is several hours of thinking about things while mowing or doing other chores, anywhere from 1-4 hours writing up notes from the vague thoughts, then 30-60 minutes making sure...

Wow, OP, that was a long time ago! I think D&D was "8yrs old" through "went to college" (BECMI, then AD&D), since there just wasn't opportunity to encounter other options until then. At college, though, its hard to know what I ran into first, because they came like a shotgun. Rolemaster...

I would love this, my players would range from "meh" to "ugh" to "I didn't remember to track that". And under it all, "F No!" unless there was a similar mechanic that limited/impaired the magic users (all flavors).

This is HackMaster's solution. That greataxe doesn't do 1d12, it does 3d4 (actually, I think in HM it does 4d4).... much more likely to trigger incremently small-but-frequent damage boosts. Most weapons' damage is reconfigured around this 1d4 concept, except intentionally Ranged/Missile...

I tried to translate a custom version of the Axis & Allies game my friends and I had made in college, into a space game. All of this thread is why it never got made. We had dozens of kinds of troops - irrelevant in a space game. Territory control matters little on the scale of ship movement...

I've played in four "SH" campaigns. one V&V, two Champions, and one M&M. (don't know the editions of any of them, sorry). The V&V game, we were definitely street-level; a telepath/telekinetic, an empowered martial artist, a "speedster" (actually "stopped time" in small increments), and a...

I used to give out character-specific rewards. Never a penalty; when the party split up, the different groups got different XP. Sidequests and personal quests sometimes gave different XP - personal quests especially, because everyone would get the "quest XP" (for overcoming the challenges /...

One thought I've had in the past - in movie terms - is "the camera is on these guys because they end up having the epic story. It could have been on any of a thousand other people. They don't survive because they are the stars; they are the stars because they are the ones who have (or will)...

I guess I do the same (in my current campaign), but weighted closer to the Schulb side of the scale. level 1ish is kids, teenagers, and completely untrained. level 2 is normal competence or older-but-not great. level 3 is very competent or normal-but-experienced. level 4 is elite/master...