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Ok, I'll bite: In 2020 the highest grossing movie that was not based on a video game/novel/comic book or existing franchise was - 1917. Written and directed by Sam Mendes. 88% critic score and 88% audience score on Rotten Tomato.

OK lets disregard any film that had the director as co-writer. In 2021 five nominees had the director as the sole writer and only one the director was not involved in the writing at all. In 2022 five nominees the director had the sole screenplay credit (one was based on a novel and one had a...

Looking at the Best Picture nominees for the last two years. In 2021 seven out of eight best picture nominees were written or co-written by the director. (Interestingly, the only nominee not written by the director (Mank) was written by the director's father). In 2022 eight out of the 10 best...

Well if your point is "people who are bad at writing screenplays shouldn't write screenplays" I agree. But your post specifically calls out directors writing scripts as the reason for bad movies and I don't think that holds up to any scrutiny. Lots of the best movies in recent years were...

Some of the best writers in Hollywood today ARE directors : Christopher Nolan, James Gunn, Quentin Tarantino, the Cohen Brothers, Guillermo del Toro, etc. etc. (edited out my edit to add the point later in the discussion)

One obvious suggestion here is just not to interrupt the players (unless it is something they have clearly overlooked like "that orange stuff on the map that you just put your mini on is lava"). Let the players finish talking. If you still feel compelled to add something when they are done, go...

Lore needs to provide interesting and relevant hooks for adventure writing and character building. It needs to inspire me and give me ideas I can use. And that's it. Lore does not need to be deep. I would rather have a location write up give me three relevant things that inspire me to make...

I'd give them a fair opportunity to run. If your group isn't normally inclined to do that you could suggest that to them either in-fiction (maybe the alu-fiend says "He's too strong! We need to get out of here!") or straight up suggest it to them out of character ("The lich seems like he is...

Is the sorcerer using their Tides of Chaos feature? Because once they use that the DM can decide that any spell triggers a wild magic surge, which recharges the ability. Seems like you may be overlooking this if you are complaining about the lack of surges.

I think the artisan is a stone giant. They are often depicted as grey skinned and bald. The figure here is carving stone, and the MM states "Among stone giants, artistry ranks as the greatest virtue....They esteem stone carving as the greatest of skills." MM 152.

Another player in my group made a goblin wild magic sorcerer one campaign. Yeah, the chances of bad roll on the wild magic table dropping a fireball in the middle of the party made this an unpopular choice with the rest of the group. To make it worse the player decided his character was SO...

Blame it on the rain?

Wikipedia says the Judge's Shield came out in 1977 which would have predated the AD&D DM's Screen by two years. A review of the Judge's guild product excerpted on the Wikipedia page states "Unless you have made up your own, an essential for any serious DM." Which would imply people were making...

I think the default resting rules work well with dungeons or other environments where there are lots of encounters in a short period and getting the PCs back in fighting shape quickly makes sense. It tends to work less well for journey/hexcrawl type games where the PCs essentially get...

I don't know that there is a one size fits all approach here because I think there could be many different reasons why this happens. Does the player want to RP a crisis of faith/rebelling against the commands of an evil Patron? Was there a miscommunication between the player/DM on the...

I'm not opposed to it in theory, but tracking reactions adds more bookkeeping to a fight. I often run fights against a dozen or more mooks, and trying to keep track of which ones had used their reaction and which had not would be a big enough hassle that I would probably skip it. (The monster...

I think this was a bit of a thing back in the 70s and 80's when it was fairly well accepted for a player to bring an existing PC into another DM's game. People tended to be more strict about leveling by the book in my experience, so the only way to start above 1st level was to use an existing...

I think individuality is great up until the point were one PC is doing something to actively undermine or sabotage what the group as a whole decides on because "its what my character would do." I think that crosses a line where it makes the game less fun for the other players. A classic...

Dragonlance is like: -Star Wars with dragons instead of spaceships -Game of Thrones without all the moral ambiguity -Lord of the Rings if the hobbits were way more annoying (edit: Kender joke intended to reflect the commonly expressed sentiment, not to imply that they are objectively bad or...

The easiest way to run a battle is to treat it as normal combat for the PCs with the rest of the battle being done narratively. I usually set the "default" result of a battle, and give the PCs a specific objective based on the overall narrative. If the PCs succeed in their objective they shift...