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I'm not Pemerton, but I've seen sandboxes go wrong before, at least in the eyes of the players, in a variety of ways. This isn't to say that these things are happening in your game, but I've seen them happen in others to the detriment of those games. First, a sandbox game can hinder...

I can sometimes find the process of discerning a DM's style and biases as analogous to code-breaking, especially when the DM is opaque and refuses to discuss the game or how s/he runs it. DMs often exhibit patterns in their decision making and players can sometimes gain an advantage in the game...

On the other hand, old school dungeons often had a lot of death traps, cursed magic items and the occasional overpowered monster if you explored it and just being in the dungeon risked death by wandering monster even if you stayed at the entrance. There was risk all around, often arbitrary risk...

It's hilariously appropriate that a victory for LN ends in a dispute over exact procedure and rules lawyering. Even in the midst of Law there is Chaos.

So, the cooperative DMing approach vs totalitarian DMing? Are most voters DMs?

4e strikers did *targetted* high damage, most having some way to ignore or bypass the enemy front line and target a particular foe, whether that was ranged attacks, high mobility, stealth, teleportation, forced movement etc. Some have less such abilities, other have more, and it was possible to...

Lawful Good 19 Neutral Good 22 Chaotic Good 21 Lawful Neutral 18 Neutral 17 Chaotic Neutral 8 Lawful Evil 21 Neutral Evil 21 Chaotic Evil 11 Lawful Good +1 because I'm nostalgic about old school paladins and shiny armour Chaotic Evil -3 because players of CE pcs typically try to burn down the...

As I and other posters have mentioned player buy-in is crucial. And I mean genuine informed buy-in. Situations can arise where players say they agree to play a module or adventure path, and but their actions in the campaign contradict this. This can arise for a number of reasons, including...

I agree. Also I have some minimal familiarity with ancient Irish hero stories, in which all the adventurer heroes were mundane characters with extraordinary abilities, and the closest spellcaster analogues were druids and bards who acted as plot devices in the stories and were clearly NPCs in...

I disagree completely with your thesis, that the granted attack has to be weaker than their own. Especially when one of the signature 4e Warlock builds was the Princess build who relied completely on other PC at will attacks, and dumped their own basic attack stat, and a lot of players liked...

I'm still playing 4e and don't think I will pick up any of the 5e books at this point. I probably fit into the OP's category 2, in that 4e suits my needs very well, in that I like long campaigns, low PC turnover and high level play, which 4e the way I run it does well with less work than other...

I've run adventure paths before, and have some opinions on how to do so effectively. First, you need players willing to play through an adventure path, and PCs who suit the genre and themes of that path. Adventure paths often assume more or less heroic protagonists and may have insufficient...

In some games, any deal with devils will backfire sooner or later, every compromise adding weight to the evil side of the cosmic scales and hastening the End Times. In others it never will and devils are more trustworthy and tolerant than paladins or angels. Most are somewhere in the middle on...

I find that humour is a very subjective creature, dependent on personal tastes, language, history, cultural references and a whole raft of other elements. As a consequence humour isn't guaranteed, it's hit and miss. Even professional comedians have to keep the jokes coming one after another as...

Nowadays I would never choose to play an old-school paladin in a new game until I had figured out how the referee runs his or her world and what the other players are like. IMO the problem with old-school paladins is they incorporate multiple game-endangering points of failure in one shiny...

For me the necessary features are to make sure there's room for the players to grow into the setting, and that it's sufficiently lenient on new learning players that they can make mistakes and learn from them rather get their PCs instantly killed by those mistakes. Strange cultures with strong...

The marketing speak around RPGs often emphasises player freedom. "You can be anyone! Do anything!" In practice I find this is often misleading, depending on the system used and the style the referee encourages/imposes. Depending on how dangerous the game is to PCs, how much the referee thinks...

Well, it's an abstraction so always loses some information, the relevant question being does the abstraction aid or hinder discussion on the topic? Personally, I have become more reserved in my appreciation of these proposed dichotomies, while at the same time feeling a strong urge to classify...

I believe it's more important that a player portrays their character in a way that's at least minimally compatible with the expectations of that particular game table than trying to meet some theoretical standard that can never meet universal agreement. Some groups are into token roleplay as a...

2e adventures like the Dragonlance modules and Ravenloft modules, which were often highly railroaded, and also often featured tie-ins to novels. They were to some extent written to appeal to readers who might never actually use them in a D&D game, which was one of the factors contributing to...