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Count me as another one of the 'check with the players before you go there' crowd. You say the group is mature about these things, so you're probably on OK ground; I might put out a note about it in the common cultural knowledge for the campaign, so people can design or adapt characters...

I can feel some of this pain - 3 of the 5 characters I regularly play are leaders. But the words I highlighted here cause me some concern. You have two strikers, in a party of three total, and both of them outrun their healing? And they don't protect their healer? The build advice everyone's...

The problem with true name stuff in fiction is that it functions like most other magic in fiction: it does just what the author wants it to do at the moment, with (typically) little regard for consistency or broader implications (it's been a while since I read Earthsea, but IIRC, knowing a...

Ditto Salabak's 'charge action' analogy. This is the kind of thing that everyone can try, and shouldn't take a feat or martial practice. To be good at it, of course, takes training & practice, but leveling up covers a lot of that territory anyway, with attack adds, feats, and so forth. I...

Wik's covered things pretty well (...must spread experience around...); I would add A) Bad guys shouldn't fight to the death; let them run away, or even better, surrender en masse, at a dramatically appropriate moment. My NPCs tend to suck anyway, due to persistent dice lice (my dice as GM...

I'm simmering my own new 4e campaign; I've been using WW2 as a source of inspiration to plot out the grand scheme. I've got to agree there's a lot of potential ground there... --obviously, engaged in a big battle (whole range of variations here, depending on who's winning and specific...

For some time now, I've been viewing D&D (RPGs in general) using perspectives like movies, TV, metting facilitation, and so on - not in order to get all artsy-fartsy, but to look at the game sesison in terms of time spent and participation. Thus, it's been a while since my dungeon had corridors...

Warlord! No, Bard! Wait... Yeah, the cunning bard seems it would add the best. Count me as another vote there. (I just have a deep soft spot for warlords.)

For me, a physical layout for a fight is crucial; a picture is worth several thousand words when trying to keep track of four to eight different PCs, plus several NPCs. It's too easy to stumble into misunderstandings about distance, cover, location, etc. That said, it doesn't have to be a rigid...

Problem is, it's not easy to get moved to actual tears in the middle of a bunch of friends in a brightly lit room with all the noise of a game session going on. Alone with a book, or in a dark theater, one feels a lot less exposed. Especially when GMing, you just don't usually have time to allow...

I recognized 12, counting only those I could actually link with published stuff; about half a dozen more I thought I recognized, but couldn't think of what they'd done, all off the top of my head. Didn't read much of DW; that was back in my starving-student days, when buying a mini or two was a...

Just to toss in, another thought might be to start a war - the PCs are essentially a special ops team. The y don't have to make big decisions about where to go, they're sent on missions with fairly specific goals - destroy object/person x; bring back object/person x; see what's at location y and...

What I daydream about is real integration between online/computer stuff and tabletop play - building encounters, with maps and critters, and being able to easily print out the info if you want; character sheets integrated with visualizer (hyped since Release Day, and *still* not running!?!)...

Skill challenges do for noncombat what regular combat rules do for combat. Combat, in crude mechanical terms, can be viewed as a series of die rolls. The target numbers vary somewhat, but are set within a narrow band depending on the difficulty of the encounter. Each die roll gives a success or...

The basic idea of skill challenges has been delightful for me; the idea of building an entire encounter using a structured sequence of skill checks has been a great help. Granted, the original DMG layout was very basic; DMG2 does a better job - the writeup in Galaxy of Intrigue (for Star Wars...