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The players don't need to know the rules at all. If the rules of the game conform sufficiently to reality and game fiction, and the players are conversant with the game fiction, then they could make all of their decisions on this basis. For me, this would be the perfect game. Unfortunately...

This is going to vary table to table. For me, there is no looking up monsters or magic items during play, and I ask the players not to do so out of play. It removes some discovery elements of play and makes the game significantly less fun. Can I enforce it? Of course not. But after having...

I very much dislike excessive contrivance in fiction, whether it be a movie, novel, or RPG session. Someone famous said that in SF you get one impossibility free, any others you have to work for. For me at least, coincidence is similar: I'm willing to accept an extremely unlikely event as the...

And that seems oddly slow. About, 17 mi/hr if I got my math right, and world record 100m dash speed is a shade over 23 mi/hr. I expect top D&D character performance to be in the superhero range, significantly above human capacity.

I think some posters here are too anxious to throw rocks. Based on the OP, it looks like you guys had an awesome, if brief, combat. I bet it was fun. But there's not enough info here to tell if it's a "good" game or not. Are a lot of the encounters like this? A few? Was this unique? Are...

I really like WarpedAcorn's idea - I can see it leading to a lot of new and interesting mechanics for D&D. From my POV, adding additional depth of strategy is almost always a good thing. I'm imagining a maneuver "tree" for fighters. You execute tactic A, and as a result B, C, and D are...

First off, the Savage World damage mechanic sound awesome. I may have to pick up the game now. Second, the OP's problem sounds like a DM issue. If the DM would stop upping the toughness of enemies and instead make more of them, it sounds like he'd hit to effect often enough for the game to...

To me that seems like a good thing. For some monsters, e.g. red dragons, the smartest tactics are snatch-grab-drop and breath-weapon, fly til it's recharged, breath weapon ad nauseum. Neither of these makes for fun fights. If the monsters are a bit more vulnerable, you have a a reasonable...

Dr. DOA by Simon Green IIRC. Pretty good book, as are all of the other Secret History books I've read. The 4th Alcatraz book by Brandon Sanderson, read a chapter a night at bedtime to my son. Very enjoyable. I've also started 8-10 books from the new SF/fantasy section in my local library and...

First, if this is what you want, then D&D is the wrong system for you. D&D is about killing things and taking their stuff. Second, according to various things I've read, in order for people to kill easily, they must first de-personalize their targets, In other words if one sees someone/thing...

The biggest limiter on an AD&D magic-user is spell interruption. Ignore that and they're going to dominate. They were very, very vulnerable to being interrupted and losing spells, and required solid team play to cast to good effect.

"Minn-uh-tarr" for me. Reminds me of an experience in grad school. One of the profs kept pronouncing the Greek letter "theta" as thee-tah (soft th) when everyone knows it's pronounced thae-tah. Drove me nuts that he was so wrong and refused to do anything about it. Then I found out that he...

I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree here. I'm plenty familiar with the various definitions on alignment and how they've been implemented in published material across all of the editions, and I still disagree with you.

Depends on the setting. The barkeep who ends a fight by pulling a shotgun from behind the counter and firing a warning shot in into the ceiling is pretty much a staple of the western genre.

It's really not. D&D alignment is based on real world morality in exactly the same way as hit points are based on real world biology, which is to say not at all except they use a few of the same words. Much as hit points are a fictional depiction of biology created for gaming convenience...

In D&D, this is in the lawful/chaotic spectrum, and has nothing to do with good/evil. Nope. D&D morality as presented by the alignment system and published books in general, is not the same as real life morality of any kind (at least that I'm acquainted with.) If someone's on team bad-guy...

Baloney. If the bouncer tried to kill an unarmed person then that's attempted murder and the PC is justified in dispensing summary justice. If the PC attacked the bouncer then the bouncer was acting in self defense and doesn't deserve punishment. Remember, this is D&D not Law & Order. I...

Not enough info. Once the bouncer drew, what happened? Did the battlemaster attack him anyway, or did the bouncer attack first?

It's back 9/30/16

My favorite chargen system is LBB Traveller, which is almost entirely random. IIRC you pick a class, but you need a roll to successfully enter it, and when you're done you can choose to do some more chargen (and maybe die) or call it done. You end up with a set of skills, possessions, and...