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See, that's true in so many games, but man, my life has been better since I got rid of that assumption. I'm blessed with players who do as much prep for a session (in terms of coming up with plans and future complications) as I do. Again, though, it helps that we're rules-light, so I only need...

It's a courtesy issue -- weighing ten minutes of your free time vs. ten minutes of the whole group's time, and deciding anyway not to update your character sheet until the start of the next session. But not everybody will see it that way. Our group gets together for about 3 1/2 hours once a...

I don't really get that. If the cleric's involved in an adventure, then their church and deity probably support the mission, right? So how is using their massive power to help fulfill the mission going to displease their god? On the other hand, if the god doesn't approve of the adventure...

I agree with the original poster. If something exciting and tense is about to go down, that's when I reach for the dice -- until then, I say "yes". I figure there's no reason for system to prevent players from having their characters do things; it's only when there's meaningful stakes and...

It's a lot of fun. I wouldn't worry about people "breaking the game" with it -- if anything, I had a lot of early experiences where they'd just narrate success and that was it. I would encourage them to shake things up a bit, throw in a possible plot hook or connection to their backstory, that...

As has been said, power attack covers this. So do iterative attacks, as well as the fact that BAB means you're more likely to hit, so on average more damage is done. (I've seen lots of people describe misses as hits that didn't get through armor.) But in D&D, losing hit points doesn't...

My experience is that the people who do this kind of thing don't actually ever end up doing that much. For some reason, the "tee-hee, I've got a secret" attitude satisfies them. Yes, I think it's silly, and I think it basically boxes them out of meaningfully contributing to the game, so I try...

White Rose, Here's what I think you should do. When dude acts up like that, just keep on going. Don't let him take the spotlight. What you've described is exactly like someone coming to dinner, and trying to monopolize every conversation. If you don't kick them out, then you talk around them...

Sorry, you're boned. These aren't problem players -- they're players with a different style than the rest of the group. There's no "fixing" them. In general, talking explicitly about styles of play helps with this kind of situation, as sometimes people are interested in trying different...

There's no in-game explanation for a player misplacing a sheet of paper with names of stuff on it, then finding it again. It was an OOC goof. Just retcon the equipment back into the game, IMO.

I have a player who can't stick with the same character for more than six sessions, guaranteed. I've been lucky that recently he's done what you described. At least that way, there's plenty of continuity.

Gah. Apologies if I'm reading this wrong, but the way you describe this is all too familiar. You're saying "realize the structure", "meta-awareness", "play along". Please, please tell me you're not just trying to make this kind of play magically happen without talking about it. If that's the...

I could be off base here, but it sounds like conflict resolution (in addition to task resolution) could be useful here. Conflict resolution involves setting the stakes for success/failure for a given situation, and using the die roll to determine if those stakes are won or not. That's usually...

Dude, you're not buying All Flesh Must Be Eaten because you think an optional supplement is stupid? Wha? Would you stay away from D&D 3 because you thought Ghostwalk was silly? :) I just don't get where you're coming from. AFMBE is a really solid zombie apocalypse RPG that's played straight. If...

I know, I know, we're never going to get a good definition for railroading. I'm still sticking with "Making decisions for the player that they wanted to make themselves." So it's not railroading if they wanted to do it (or went along with it), nor if it's just putting them in a situation then...

Magic Weapon, Magic Armor, Bull's Strenght and other buffs, and Blade Barrier. The last D&D game I played in, my support cleric had to step up and help out a lot more in combat than I'd designed him to, but he cleaned up. A wand of Cure Light Wounds is a big help, as you won't have to save as...

This is really interesting. It's kind of similar to the rules-light games I tend to run. We first did something like this with D20 Modern, except we let people spend Action Points to be the GM for a while. So rather than switch every 30 minutes, we'd switch once or twice a scene, say every...

Oh yeah, What Steel Wind said. It's a fantastic game that didn't come out of the gate very well. I honestly think it'd be a much more popular game if no one had ever played the original packaged campaign. Some of the stuff people like Stefan Gagne have done with the toolset is just amazing...

I just wanted to poke my head in to cheerlead Vance's Dying Earth books. I really, really think they're worth reading. As much as I love Cugel the Clever (who's a fantastic iconic rogue/con man), Rhialto the Marvelous and his fellow mages are how I'll always imagine archmages. Plus, all the...

Okay, I was exactly in the situation the original poster is. I switched over to FATE (http://www.faterpg.com/), and I was extremely happy with it. Those few times that we actually wanted to use rules to figure out what happens next, it was there for us, and the rest of the time it stayed out of...