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For me, the first thing that comes to mind is this: Roll "encounter checks" until you have 10 successes. Success is 5+ on d10. For each point the party fails by, each character loses one resource of the player's choice. One resource is 1d6 damage, 1 expendable magic item, 1 condition, or one...

This type of fact is most useful in game design. The designer tries to guess what percentage of attacks being successful will be the most fun at the table then build the rest of the mechanics around that. I seem to recall that there was some research that found that optimal fun for the average...

This very similar to another thread I just read. According so some posters over there, ruling that "shoving daggers repeatedly through an enemy's eyes and into their brains while they are helpless" does in fact kill the enemy is unsupported by the rules and therefor a kind of cheating.

Speaking to this requirement, first, assume a good aligned party. Make the god of death evil aligned; whichever god the cleric performing the resurrection follows, the god of death must still be appeased to release the soul of the resurrected character. This appeasement requires the ritual...

Just a heads-up since someone with mod privileges probably couldn't notice this. On the "view all threads" page, I'm seeing threads for the top-secret mod-only octopus rock forum. And while I can't get to the thread by clicking on it, mouseover does reveal the first several lines of a post.

I've played a pacifist character of sorts, and DM'ed for a player who had a pacifist PC. My PC was trained from birth to be an assassin, and the first time he killed a person (prior to the campaign start) it felt so horrible he swore he'd never do it again, kill a thinking being, that is, he...

My first take on this is that the DM should try to solve it. First, involve him in combat. If he's there with the rest of the group then he's close enough to hit. In fact, smart enemies might make him a prime target. In their place, if a PC was seemingly doing nothing for an extended time...

This is a really obvious approach so you've probably already tried it, but explain how roleplaying is essentially Method acting lite.

I've run 2-3 PCs per player for many years, and it works quite well. There's been no particular problem with RP. The players swap back and forth between characters and their mindsets quite easily. It has some big advantages too: 1) If one of your PCs dies or is incapacitated, you're still in...

Not unethical. Figuring out what to charge different groups of people is a very important part of any business strategy and practiced in virtually every industry. Frex, if you're in the group of people that wants to see a movie on release, you pay a lot of money in a theater. If you're in a...

I like Ravenloft too. As a setting for fiction, you can tell a lot of cool stories there. As others have said, it's all in how you present it. You can do Scooby Doo or you can do Interview with a Vampire. The thing is, D&D rules don't do horror very well. Unless you really work at it...

I've done this pretty much since I started DMing Basic back in '80. If the rooms in a location are occupied by monsters that are allied in some fashion of course they're going to reinforce each other. I find this makes the game a lot more fun. Stealth and tactics become more important. The...

Thanks, OP, for the cool pictures. Those were fun to look at. Unfortunately, as others have noted, they don't prove the point. Acrobatics requires strength and balance and coordination. You could make a case for including str & dex in acrobatics-type checks, but leaving out the dex component...

I like your ideas, they add some interesting flavor to your campaign. The 1d4 damage might be too much, as it makes characters really vulnerable to certain circumstances. Frex, spending a couple weeks in jail could kill them. I'd go for disadvantage from the start of the day until the first...

The only reasons I have to object to character switching is if it interferes with other players' immersion, or if it interferes with a overarching plot (something I don't actually do much of) that the other players are enjoying. I generally allow character swaps between adventures but not...

I really like the idea of Ravenloft, and some similar places, being deep in Shadowfell. If I were to run Ravenloft I would certainly do it that way. I think the main appeal is that rather than saying "it's roughly impossible to get out" I can say, "you can travel in an outward direction, but...

Perhaps then you could expound on what you mean by authorship. I'd assumed you were using the standard definition with respect to RPG theory and the remainder of your post seemed to support that assumption.

I'll agree that there's a continuum, but there certainly is debate over whether players are and should be authors or actors. There are other options as well. I've read and participated in a fair number of discussions on just that topic on various forums, and your belief that authorship is...

If it's something your character should know about, and especially if the players on the table have a consensus that this is the case, then what you're talking about is not metagaming. You are acting on the knowledge that your character has, which is the opposite of metagaming.

Your approach could work, but requires one major assumption, that being that players are playing the game as authors rather than actors. This is a pretty rare approach in my experience. If your group prefers to play as actors then this isn't going to work at all.