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Starting campaigns (or an adventure) can always be difficult. The PCs all have to be in the same place or it doesn't happen. One campaign, I gave the PCs several ideas of how to start. One of them was using N4 Treasure Hunt (where the PCs start as 0-level characters). The entire first act is the...

Hovermale? Who else is on that team? A Flyboy? Walkman? Floatguy? Runnerson?

Because players trust the DM to come up with interesting adventures that everyone will enjoy participating in. Something like this often occurs at the start of a campaign. Player: "I don't know enough about the world, my PC, or the other PCs to really know what I want to do. So I'm game for...

I now tell players my expectations in Session Zero. Players are required to know what their characters can do. In combat, they have 10 seconds to start talking and telling me what their PC does or the PC takes the Dodge Action. Also, Just Roll the Damn Dice. Set higher expectations and stick...

I didn't pick up a copy of Pharaoh until 2015 (and got it signed by Hickman!). I also should have mentioned that as well. Its design and layout are stellar. Really lays into the 3 Pillars in each encounter. It's so much easier to run Pharaoh than basically any 5e adventure. Rahasia reads...

If the PCs take a monster hostage he automatically gets a name, a character sheet, and a long sad backstory designed to make the PCs not kill him. Right? It can't be just me.

Ravenloft AND DragonLance? I think you could give it to him (and Laura Hickman for the modules and Margaret Weis for the books) as the biggest influence after the creators of D&D itself, chronologically. Hickman influenced two tracks of early to mid-'80s D&D - adventure design and best-selling...

I always include politics, factions, social, religious elements. Any of these are easy for characters to grasp without having to overexplain them. A few years ago when I started DMing 5e I ran the old module N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God. It's originally set in Greyhawk but I moved to...

The best thing about Mystara compared to other official settings is the lore doesn't have a few decades of cruft added to it. I've also found that being based on real world cultures and civilizations makes it REALLY easy for new players to grasp what's going on and immerse themselves. Also...

As an Arabic linguist, that 5e pronunciation makes my brain hurt. mi'-RAHJ is more accurate. The apostrophe isn't a glottal stop but a sound that doesn't exist in English.

Average HP and point buy for stats. This means you can change your character if something isn't working or roll up a new character or whatever and no one needs to see the rolls - because there aren't any. Do it on your own time, show up at the table, start playing.

I think what we're all trying to get at in this thread is Ernie needs a "Sokath, his eyes uncovered" moment.

My experience with 5e has a DM has generally been players who know the rules well and don't need to discuss them and players who don't know the rules but trust that I as DM do. So most of the rules discussion is at the start when I going over house rules or explaining (vice discussing as it's...

That's, like, the opposite of a blacklist. It's a whitelist.

Double Pass. But I hope others find the books useful and fun.

I agree that trying to define a CG society in a way that actually functions is hard. CG elves are just really weird. Maybe it's a continuum of how much order and structure there is in society and an individual. As an example from my favorite D&D world, Mystara (D&D only had L/N/C but I think...

Heroic death, if you can pull it off, is awesome. I've had one campaign long ago that had this. We were all jealous of the player whose PC died heroically.

The best I can say about Magic is I made a ton of money selling my Unlimited/Revised/4e cards with the associated Expansions when I decided to liquidate my Magic cards last year. More specifically, a few cards were what made me a ton of money.

For comparison, that's roughly the weight of a US dollar coin. Coins per dollar (US currency) penny (2.5g): 181.8 nickel (5g): 90.9 dime (2.268g): 200.35 quarter (5.67g): 80.14 half dollar (11.34g): 40.07 dollar (8.1g): 56.1