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From a film and television standpoint, Science Fiction really lends itself to minimalism in costumes and set design. Space is just a black backdrop with some pinpoint lights in it. Space-ships can be entirely indoors, and the sets can be made with cheap materials. The costumes can be whatever we...

I hear your concerns. As a GM needing to cook up content for every session, it really helps to be excited about the content you are creating, and sometimes it's a bummer to not have that excitement matched by the players. I think all of the advice here is really good. Generally, the more you...

This article seems a little out of place with the number 1 RPG currently being D&D 5e, which is definitely simpler than 3e and 4e and probably simpler than AD&D 2e as well. (I've never played 1e, so can't speak to that.) Going through my 2e PHB the other day, I was amazed at how few of the rules...

I don't think we outright disallow anything at this point, but we assume that only player material from PHB is being used. So, in that regard, we don't "allow" anything from outside the PHB. If somebody asked, I'd probably look at it and say yes if it didn't strike me as absurd. I'm pretty meh...

This. We're not a power gaming table, but I will say, the number one determinant of how "difficult" an adventure I run feels is the amount of encounters PCs need to get through between long rests. Focusing on the challenge of individual encounters just tends to oscillate between "boring" and...

I think about this from time to time. Not so much "greatness," but excelling in my profession. I work in a semi-creative profession, and most of my colleagues and mentors take their work home with them every night. I'm used to getting e-mails with ideas at all hours, and there's a big emphasis...

I've always been confused by this assertion. With a party of 4, you need roughly 6 deadly encounters to get the 300 xp needed to reach 2nd level. Or 12 medium encounters. I've never squeezed that much out of a single session, especially if there's even one new player in the group. In most games...

We rotate DMs in a mixture of campaigns and stand-alone adventures. Every DM tends to create their own campaign world, and, if that world gets returned to, it generally gets refined and ret-conned between games. I've set stand-alone adventures in a loosely defined campaign world, but more for...

As others have said, assigning and tracking wear and tear, even with relatively simple designations, for a character's entire inventory, seems like a lot of paperwork and irrelevant for default settings where the only expensive adventuring items are heavy armor. In a low-magic and low-money...

Great post. I think this hits on a lot of the key elements of trap design. Thinking as a DM, about how a trap can be located, understood, and disarmed, leads to much more fully realized traps that will engage more of the party and move away from just, "you spot it or you don't" approaches. On...

This has always been my theory of introducing new players to D&D — explain as little of the rules as possible, and pull them into playing the game. Focus on the role play and the idea that "you can try anything that makes sense" and explain the rules and the character sheet as they come up. This...

Interesting! I recently undertook a similar task, though my goal was to get something down to 1 page (double-sided)! This is both more and less ambitious, as you are trying to actually provide a fully playable rule-set, whereas mine was just meant to be an overview. I think the introduction is...

We've had this and sharpshooter in our games and not had it be a game-breaker. As a DM, I find the "ignore all penalties from cover" clause of Sharpshooter to be much more disruptive than the -5/+10. I think the fact that your Barbarian is always attacking at advantage, with minimal penalty, is...

As others have said, the issue sounds like more one of "keeping significant others at the table" than keeping women at the table. We've had three regular woman players in our current group. Two of them were spouses of another player in the group and got bored and dropped out. One of them came to...

If you are running a sandbox adventure pre-seeded with mixed level challenges, players have to be prepared to run into problems that they are not ready for. This is something you should tell them in advance, as others have suggested. Once the players know that their safety is not guaranteed...

I assign a mechanism for every secret door in an adventure. Classic adventures usually don't do this — secret doors are just marked on a map and intended to be found using a "search for secret doors" mechanic, so I look for every "S" on the map and make a notation. They don't have to be...

Let them detect magic! This is something the Warlock invested in. Keep using magic items and magic traps the way you did before, and let the Warlock revel in how great it is to cast it any time in a hurry. But sneak in a couple magic items and magic traps disguised with methods described above...

This erases the benefit of odd ability scores, though, which seems to be the benefit to a straight roll under. Of course, within 5e bounded accuracy, rolling under the ability score is too easy — especially if you want to keep some sort of skill system intact. Maxing a stat in D&D still...

I am always on the lookout for the right tool to help how I run my sessions, so I appreciate threads like this. That being said, in practice, I don't use much: Official DM screen, but I never look at the charts, tables, etc, during play, even when I should. I usually forget what's on the damn...

This feels a lot like trying to define something that is fairly intuitive out of existence. If the working definition of tabletop RPG can't handle the distinction between Roll20 and NWN, I'd say that's a problem with the working definition. D&D the brand clearly includes more than D&D the...