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Yes, this is a matter of presentation and the horribly bad advice/examples on DMG1. Every "published" skill challenge has had that problem because the underlying presentation, the one the DM must do at a table, is not the overt on the page presentation. DMs have not had good advice on that...

I think that is mostly a problem with the presentation of the skill challenge, and the underlying mechanics. I've had great success with skill challenges when it is simply a goal oriented situation and the players are not concentrating on the "rules". The same applies to combat. When I'm...

I kind of agree on this part. The good thing is that if you want to spend time doing the accounting game you can. Count your arrows, count your potions, count your bolts, count the shots, etc., but it is not a NEEDED element of the game. So if an encounter, or adventure should have the...

I wholeheartedly agree with Klaus assessment of them as an organizational tool. IMO, skill challenges simply provide a "framework" for organizing non-combat encounters and actually provide rewards. In the past you had to make up the rewards ad-hoc with no real good guidance. The DM was...

Favorite version in my mind's eye would have been Moldvay / Cook B/X - that's what I started with and I tinkered endlessly with it. The Erol Otus cover was inspired, IMO. Every time I see that cover, and his other covers for adventures in the 80's, it brings me back to those days of summer and...

I'm thinking that a barbarian devotee of the Raven Queen would work great. He shows up during combat because his "mission" is to send her the souls of the fallen, and he doesn't want to miss the fun of making them fallen. From my experience a companion character works great because of its...

I think the price was vile, and the fact that it was not a hardback. LOL

First of all the background stories of these characters are very good starting points. Definitely use these as the starting points for the campaign. I can already think of meeting other ex-cons, encounters with undead that have to be "saved", and conflicts with dwarves because of having an...

I've always run with a large group. My current group is 6-9 players (we've had up to 12). However we play if up to 4 can show up. I've found that my encounters scale much better if I design around a party of 4, with planned scalable "upgrades". Rather than building for a party of 5-6 and...

You will have 3-5 players, so when you build encounters you will probably have a mix of 3-10 monsters on average. Your players and monsters will occupy 6-15 squares without moving at all. If the monsters are large quadruple their area. So you can see that when combat is joined, if you want to...

It really depends. Under most circumstances the battles that are insignificant can be done in an 8" x 10" inch location, and some even smaller. If you use smaller you will get some weird dynamics as movement will be hampered and you won't be adding much terrain. You will also lose some of the...

Yep, I heartily agree. Pathfinder might not be my cup of tea for very similar reasons to yours. However Paizo deserves every bit of praise for the work they do, even if I'm not a fan of their game system.

Thanks for the compliment. Great minds think alike and all that. LOL I get that vibe too, but I'm not so sure if some of their comments are more a "devils' advocate" type comment, or not. I've argued against Mearls's "clueless" comments in the past. I think the comments sometimes come off...

Cheap is a relative term when you're talking about producing movies.

I would look at a movie like 300 for inspiration of how combat pacing works well. You might also want to modify the conditions for Opportunity Attacks against the players for movement. Nothing bogs these things more than going back and forth about provoking an OA. Before you start you might...

I think another great thing that 3e had was Paizo really busting their hump to put out good adventures in Dungeon. I remember spending many commutes to work reading over the material. A lot of it did not play out as well as it read (Savage Tide I'm looking at you). But they still put a lot of...

This IMO is quite true, and very telling. I think the Delve format for the presentation of encounters had quite a lot to do with that. However it was almost as if the writers forgot that there is more to D&D than combat, and you can't blame the edition, or the long format for that. The latter...

Which would mirror exactly the decision-making process of old TSR looking for content to release quickly for sale, and publishing their convention content because of it. Well said.

Exactly my point. IMO, "scientific" is extremely removed from "magical". Unless magic is simply science with a different name.

If magic is completely reliable all the time it becomes decidedly UNmagical, almost like technology with a different name. Magic in D&D has always been quite UNmagical.