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I've never run a game in an official setting. Even if I did, I'd be hard-pressed to call it a "home" over the one I put work into establishing. I've played in published settings and I use them occasionally for inspiration and mechanics, but if you're only asking about people who both play D&D...

Can't help you manage the relationship with your group. Could be that you're genuinely pushing boundaries, or that people have unfairly judged you in some way, or that there's simply a genuine misunderstanding all around. Tiefling I would not say is worth an LA. There's a "Lesser Tiefling" in...

Be a tiefling (or other evil planetouched). Or simply get the DM to agree that a fiend is somewhere deep in your ancestry. The Blood Calls to Blood feat does not specify that your heritage must be manifest in terms of racial abilities; I suspect the wiggle room is intentional.

I'd watch a movie. Two hours simply doesn't offer sufficient depth to justify doing it from my perspective. Is this a one-shot? Or am I supposed to actually get somewhere in that short of a timeframe? When are my players going to be able to make the trek again? My approach to running D&D has...

If they did it while Mind Blanked, how does anyone know to question them at all? And what if they have Modify Memory cast on them so they genuinely don't know they did it. Magic isn't foolproof. It would make criminal justice into an arms race, much as it is today. Cue actual history. The human...

I don't buy that at all. Real feudal systems were often lead by inbred dilettantes. People with supernatural talent who are of low class would probably not see some improved social standing because of it. More likely the power center would recruit a coalition of spellcasters to its side, and...

In 13th Age, it isn't a class ability that you select. It's pretty much embedded in the game. Everyone does damage every time they attack (with some small-niche exceptions). So a lot of the issues disappear, because it's not a thing that someone learns how to do, it's just assumed that whenever...

If adolescents could get 30' off the ground with no effort, and then be stuck there for five minutes, bad things would happen. And that's if we assume it holds off until adolescence. One of the basic conceits with magical abilities is that we assume that only a few people have them, and that...

I would expect an enormous rate of childhood mortality.

It is a terrible idea. I experimented with something along those lines myself once. At the time, I had a serious problem with people wanting to make new characters even if the old ones were not dead, and there was so little continuity I needed to do something. However, acting in such a metagame...

No, it isn't easy, and yes, you have to DM for the players, not yourself. But even if the goal is to entertain the players, sometimes the best way to do it is by screwing them in one way or another. To refer to SavageCole above, that's exactly why sometimes you shouldn't meet their...

I think that's part of it. Another concept I like is specialization. If instead of having BAB and weapon focus (or whatever) you have five points of attack with all weapons, and then if you want a better bonus you have to choose which weapon it goes to (and similarly specialize all your...

That's not the lesson I get from Game of Thrones. The lesson I get is if people don't care, it's a problem. Neither do I, but I question whether having players make a checklist of what they want and giving it to them is going to achieve that.

What, you mean after watching his wife and unborn child murdered right in front of him and knowing his potential empire is crumbling on top of him? Yeah, I'd say the moment was bigger than him.

I think that suggests the idea that instead, you could view it as not a problem at all, simply one of the normal dynamics of play in an open-ended and complex game.

I don't know about that. I see a fair amount of spreading around of skill points. As a DM, I have to do it a little bit more simply and straighforwardly, but people can and will spend each point with care and come out with a couple ranks in a bunch of skills. Mind you, I definitely think there...

You also know if you're playing a dirt farmer (which people do, apparently). Or any character who isn't going to jump out and adventure. Players often knowingly make characters that are less apt at combat or other adventure-relevant tasks, and I don't see the need to shoehorn them into being...

So does being dishonorable. Joffrey's gone, yes? We've seen plenty of nasty people die. ninja'd

I'm pretty sure most actors got into it for fun, and keep doing it because they enjoy it. Only for a small number of people is it ever going to be a lucrative career option. Plays have understudies. Sports teams have bench players. This stuff happens. You can, however, justify it if the game...

One other thing that occurs to me is the idea of spotlight. GRRM routinely stashes characters for later use, or brings them up out of obscurity, or changes their degree of relevance in a variety of ways over the course of their story; it's not just one clean, crisp "zero to hero" narrative...