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Pretty twisted that they decided to air that on Father's Day.

I think it's nice that we can research factual questions in real time if they come up. That said, I think the negatives of having active electronic devices at the table vastly outweigh the positives, and I try to avoid having them around. Attention is the key commodity; if people's attention is...

I have physically separated the players before, but it was a pain practically and I haven't done anything that required that kind of intervention recently. It's not entirely clear whether the topic refers generally to cases in which the characters are separate and doing things that each other...

I remember one DM who nearly had a heart attack upon learning that gnomes could cast speak with animals to communicate with burrowing mammals for one minute a day.

I'm in the camp of being not particularly happy about paladins, period. That being said, taking a word that has noble connotations and trying to ignore them is not a particularly good idea. Trying to make a non-good divine warrior, on the other hand, is a good idea.

I definitely see that trend in the published game. I wonder how true it is in what people actually play. Even with regards to the published game, I don't think it's some inexorable force, simply a trend. If anything, I expect that over time it'll pass the point where it pisses people off and...

Which is a subset of a broader question, one that could look much like the poll question but would instead ask whether the DM is running a game that is completely independent of the players, whether he's taking them into account and tailoring some aspects, or whether he's building it around...

It is a weird outcome. Mostly because the spell has the cold descriptor, but isn't dealing cold damage or really even using cold. It's just a regular conjuration. It's just part of the whole conceptual mess that is energy types. What is the point of using Energy Substitution here other than to...

lewpuls Just an FYI that the ability to post links kicks in when your post count reaches a certain number, which I think is 10.

I hope that's not true. Hard to know.

All of that is true. One other way of looking at it though, is that if you're a DM, the characters the players create are your template, and on some level it can be advantageous to pass the complete responsibility of character creation to them, so you can then react to whatever they design. If...

I wouldn't go that far. It's something that could be done and done well if you're trying to have a more player-driven game than is typical. But it's a tall order. Usually, character creation guidelines make things easier and enable better communication between player and DM.

If you're going towards the latter option in this poll, the guidelines are a product of the group process on determining what the party is going to look like. So they're different, but not unrelated.

They do. "Go make a character" without any other guidelines is a tall order.

One thing I've found from non-D&D games is that when I'm running a horror game with "civilians" who aren't really adventurers, those characters will often get made independently, and sometimes I'll even bar the players from talking to each other or have secrets between them to add uncertainty to...

Understood. That's why there's no wrong answers here. Limitations do breed creativity, however it's worth noting that party dynamics are only one possible source of such limitations. For example, a setting might dictate them, a DM might dictate them, or a player might self-impose them for other...

I get that. I can see the impetus as to why jerking people around with changing poll questions is bad. I just would like to fix the typo at the end of the question, and change the phrasing to "your players".

Playing with no healers is definitely an educational experience. D&D rulesets dramatically differ in how healing and access to accelerated healing work, so it depends what you're playing. My experience through 2e and 3e has been that the difference between having a true healer (a cleric built...

I sure wish the software would let us edit polls. It's awful hard to write a poll question and answer choices without either some typo or misunderstanding. The intent was to ask what you do, not what people in general do when playing the game that you play.

Yes, the distinctive thing about the first option is that you can and likely will get situations where clashing personalities emerge (depending on the players, of course). This can work, but presents a challenge that many groups want to avoid. Interesting. I've never heard that one before. Good...