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They can do, particularly if you are making use of combat manouevers - if you open with Trip attack then the subsequent attacks will have to take that into account, or the use of the assorted critical feats that apply penalties may affect your attacks. Rolling out all your attacks in one go...

There are a couple of problem areas that can slow things down if you aren't prepared for them which are worth being aware of. 1) Summoned monsters - if your players are planning on using these ensure that they have their stat blocks available and understand them. Particularly if templated...

When I ran this, I made quite a few tweaks (mostly to allow it to be run in one long session) As for why the stone is wanted - using up all the stones would open up a planar gate at the heart of the town, allowing assorted devils to get out. This was part of a long term plan by the Architects...

Is speed dating a substitute for a commited relationship? This is what I'm seeing Encounters as. Something you can pop in and do on a whim with a low level of commitment that puts you in contact with like minded people. I don't think that the idea is that people play Encounters and only...

There really isn't any dicotomy here. Roleplaying your character (as in portraying their personality, goals and so on) is pretty much orthogonal to character optimisation. Whether my character has a +5 or +7 to hit has pretty much nothing to do with how likely they are to stand up and make a...

Hmm, depends. By having play begin with some change in status of the PCs, then they can both be new arrivals and embedded into the relationship map. For example, the game could start with (or shortly follow) a "coming of age" ritual of some sort, so while the shape of the relationship map...

I think there are some interesting edge cases here Its relatively common for a group to have a character creation session before play proper starts, building their characters together in order to achieve some desired starting condition. I imagine that you do something similar, if only to avoid...

If we're talking 3.5, then you can't make potions of death ward. Potions only go up to 3rd level spells and death ward is 4/5. You could make scrolls of it instead, but you are still looking at 350g+28 xp at minimum each. This protection only lasts 9 minutes, so if you are going to be...

No, I can believe that. I've seen a single *action* take 45 minutes to resolve in high level 3.5.

Theres an additional effect that causes the 15 minute day - arms racing with the DM. If the game rewards "pre-buffing" strongly, then the availablity and duration of those effects will go a long way to determine your activity pattern. Importantly, if you start relying on those buffs then your...

I think the point is that predictability actually helps with this. If the participants of the game want high risk, they can use the guidelines based on the predictability to build a high risk game. If they want low risk, they can do the converse. If your guidelines are not good, then it's far...

Here you go SignalGK: Online Traveller Resource :)

I suppose some of the confusion may be over whether 3e actually had some of the things you are worrying about. It had strong rules/heavy guidelines for advancing existing monsters by HD, a strong procedural method of adding class levels (and a huge library of classes to add) but creating...

I think Exalted is a good source of examples of bad rules - its been a while since I read the book but I recall Two-Target Method for Lunars in 1e was a particularly egregious example of this. IIRC it was a charm that let you make two attacks but was strictly worse than just splitting your dice...

There are some other ways of looking at it that may help this disconnect. From designer description and examination of their presentation in the monster manuals (Ogres are a good example of this) minions seem to be primarily an administrative abstraction. Their purpose (much like the mob...

Yeah, that makes sense. Theres a subtley here that I think may be part of the confusion. Earlier in the thread it was suggested that a fully simulated "sandbox" was impossible. In that putative state, the DM knows that there is a dragon in the swamps and it's current position and plans. If...

There's always the Elitist Jerks solution The Banhammer - Elitist Jerks

Theres a further observation that can be made though - the existance of the "holy trinity" in its current form arises from the heritage of the MMO, easily tracable back to magic user/cleric/fighting man. Its interesting to note that the Blizzard designers, for example, are now trying to shift...

Theres an interesting side point here actually in terms of what DM's get out of hack'n'slash games. We can mostly agree that computer games do that niche in a faster and more accessable fashion for the players. However, *creating* content for a computer game is generally massively more time...

As with all things, depends on your campaign. No experience, but I think it's doubtful that its sustainable over a 20 year mega-campaign in the same way other styles may be :) That said, over the course of a strongly episodic relatively short campaign (say, 20 sessions or so)? Sure...