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Well, the Mages Guild is supposed to be politically neutral. Maybe they volunteer to be election scrutineers. Actually, that's not bad, because they're supposed to be neutral, but if it's done right there could always be the suspicion that they really are taking sides after all. Intrigualicious...

Re Giant Space Hamsters... Maybe not in your campaign...

We're all thinking it, so I'll just say it. Giant. Space. Hamsters.

I don't think it's fair to "cull" monsters. I know they will, and I can understand why they might, but to label individual monsters as useless or lame is being a tad unfair. There's a niche for all monsters, even the lame ones. It's just a matter of finding it. I personally was sorry to see the...

Well, I'm convinced... But seriously, I wasn''t implying that they'd try and make D&D exactly like WoW - if anybody got that impression I obviously needed to tweak my words. But WoW is very popular, popular means profitable, Wizards and Hasbro are corporations and it doesn't take a genius to...

OK. In my country we have an expression. "More arse than class" means something is pulled off entirely by accident, but yet has a positive impact on everything. An example might be a person who, after blundering through a forest, totally lost, suddenly discovers the body of Jimmy Hoffa. That...

I don't go out of my way to point out and introduce sexual elements into my games, but I certainly don't gloss over them. Of course it depends on the setting, and you can go a little too far sometimes. One example would be a friend of mine who ran a game in which all the PCs were elves. At some...

I don't play WoW. I don't want to have to start just because the designers tell me to. I'm not particularly worried, but if I was worried about anything it'd be 4E becoming too similar to WoW. It's not supposed to be the same - it's supposed to be a very different gaming experience. If it's too...

Make up your own damn pantheon. Why should the designers do all the work for us? If you're using a pre-published setting, fine; if you aren't, make up your own gods. Exercise a bit of right brain.

There should never have even been a "core" pantheon. Making the Greyhawk gods "core" in 3E was one of the dumbest ploys ever, not to mention the most transparent. "Hello? Marketing? I've got this great idea how to increase Greyhawk product sales..." Please. If 4E has a core pantheon, and it...

OK. Here's a way-out-one. The campaign I'm working on right now is an update of my previous one. It's a steampunky setting with a healthy dose of film noir, so we have a culture based on the United States during the Depression. None of which is really relevant to my point, which is that the home...

Weekly sessions? "Luxury..."

Humans usually use "pointies" as a derogatory word for elves in my campaigns, and use "stumpies" (which someone's mentioned) for dwarves, but also for halflings and gnomes. Racists usually can't tell the difference anyway - "they all look alike" etc.

Or not. Conversation heard in my campaign, about a PC's Rod of Wonder (it's a Rod now): "Seriously, if you activate that thing within five hundred feet of me, I'll insert it in you pointy end first." "Haha." (pause) "Wait...you were kidding, right?" "I was not." Classic.

The only thing I do with mage duels is adhere very strictly to the rules, including specifiying what you're doing before you roll initiative and making you reroll every round (usually I only make players reroll when changing their action, to speed up gameplay). But I do this for all duels. I...

Give your weapon a name. Doesn't matter if it's a run-of-the-mill longsword or a piece of a tree you've turned into a club - if it's called Bloodbane, Ancestral Weapon of the Jarok Clan, Slayer of Chiefs it's going to sound cool. They don't have to know you made the whole thing up - that's what...

This has never happened to me. If it did, I have a simple response I think would be appropriate: "Shut the hell up and get out." Works every time. Rule One: The DM is always right. Rule Two: See Rule One.

And here's a third one. Do you use different voices or accents when playing PCs or NPCs? I usually do, because it helps players and the DM know when I'm "in character" and when I'm not. Pretty much everybody does an American accent when we play Shadowrun or our current Spycraft campaign (I do a...

OK, here's another one. When you're naming your PCs or your NPCs, how much thought do you put into the name? Do you pick something that sounds good, do you try to make it culturally appropriate, do you reference popular culture, do you make the name 'mean' something? I tend to give a little...

My sig tells people that in a STARP session, it's one hour's roleplaying and ten hours argument. That's a slight exaggeration, but there's a reason ST stands for 'Side Tracked' in this instance. I'm just wondering on what side of the average we are here. In a normal session, which will begin at...