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Agreed. Dyson Logos is great and I've purchased one or two of his PDFs. And since the maps he posts on his site are hi-res and unnumbered, I should probably just use some of them wholesale. If I still played on Roll20, those would be great. Wow, that is a great image. Thanks for the tip!

Absolutely. I've seen the same thing. Players "outsmart" the DM, but nobody can outsmart the DM, so the DM just moves the goalposts. It's boring. For these sorts of tradeoffs to work, the DM has to be reasonably consistent in how they apply ambient world danger. So, in the example discussed...

The point is not to put an arbitrary sand-timer on every interaction scene. I see it more as just a helpful reminder not to get into an interaction scene without an exit strategy. In the case of a "get things done" business meeting, that exit strategy might look very different from information...

I like to pick up adventures whenever I can. Most of them I'll never run, but I use them more for inspiration and ideas. With that in mind, do you have any maps from published adventures that really stood out to you? It could be because they were really well drawn, or it could be because of a...

It's kind of always about who writes the games. When you put an imprint together, you start with a who, and then you get to a what. If the what isn't interesting, unique or exciting, nobody will buy it, and the world continues. I haven't read or played anything from the three designers behind...

I struggle with the same thing, even though I often find myself running one-shots. So I am looking forward to the replies here. For myself, I have found: 1. Err on the side of obvious. Players only have a little time to "figure it out" so it's ok to use hit-you-over-the-head clues that the...

I find this happens to me when I lose interest or focus in the goals and personality of my character. I went through a while where I felt like my character's personality and motivations changed week to week. If we didn't play for a month, I would forget who my character was and what they were...

When PCs try to ask a random merchant about recent happenings in town, do they get the response, "Favor the bow, eh? I'm a sword man myself." I'd honestly never even considered pre-writing dialog for my NPCs. I didn't know it was a thing people do and I haven't ever seen it in a published...

I'm editing out the rhetorical questions, and I'll try to break this up into chunks that I can respond to. I didn't say that you roll a check for everything at your table. I assume that you do not roll checks to pick up weapons at your table, unless they are embedded in stone. However, when I...

I appreciate that you feel like our approaches (and I mean "our" in the general sense, not just the "us two" sense) are more similar than they are dissimilar. You are probably right in most cases. I don't want to get into parsing out the details of your or my game, because I think it's hard...

This is a swift-moving thread and you're posting quite a bit. On the topic of your original post, where you excerpted one line from an unnamed "published product," I think most people in this thread are in agreement that that is not the best presented advice to a GM. I mean, I don't know what...

Dude, the thing that is annoying is that you keep making these statements about "auto-play checklists" as if that is what is being done by GM's who ask players to describe their actions and intents and adjudicate actions based on that. What I do, and what I think many DMs do, is not "an...

As adventure design, allowing the characters to take specific actions to improve their chances in the face of a potential ambush (which includes allow the players to state that they are going to be traveling more cautiously) is fine. As advice to the DM, it sounds like it might have been poorly...

I'd be curious to hear some of the situations where they have used it to such great effect.

Our group has rotated DM a number of times. Often this is due to a combination of DM and player fatigue, but it's never been a concentrated coup. More just the DM getting tired of prepping material and another player starts to talk about this campaign idea that they've been working on. If a...

Have fun! I love running D&D for new players. I second what everybody else here has already said. I am particularly a fan of keeping players in loosely based turns at all times. I think this really helps to ground the player in the world of their individual character. What is your character...

Shoving and grappling can still be very useful, situationally, especially once you get into multiple attacks. Particularly for a raging Barbarian, who gets Advantage on all Strength-based ability checks, which includes contested Athletics checks to grapple. Any time there is something unpleasant...

This example isn't provided with enough context to know how I would handle it at the table. If, through the course of questioning or investigating, the characters have learned that an enemy is planning to setup an ambush on the road to Big Town, it would be reasonable for the players to take...

A more cheery variation on this: Find an extra player and split the game. 8 or 9 people can easily become two separate games. Grow. Subdivide. Conquer!

Agree with this. I feel like one of the philosophies in 5e is that a party composed entirely of one class should be able to handle all the major needs of your adventuring party, through a combination of bounded accuracy, subclasses and feats. There should just be some classes that are much...