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Encounters should be deadly, be it monsters, traps, assassins...what have you. Talking to the local bartender should not be deadly though. I truly don't understand playing a non-deadly D&D. It makes all battles a giant waste of time because if it isn't deadly you know who will win before...

I Put A Spell On You by Screaming Jay Hawkins

I have a couple of characters that appear in the D&D multiverse at various tables. My go to avatar is Sir Percy, the LG Paladin of such nobility your teeth could rot from the sweetness. His dream is to serve his fellow man and he yearns for the day he can find a king so noble that to kneel...

5e can't have a ToH because 5e is so stacked to avoid death. ToH runs counter to everything 5e is about to the point that YP even took the most famous trap/encounter/set piece in D&D history and watered it down with some bogus INT check to let you avoid the trap. A travesty, really.

Level drain is no fun but I love it as a mechanic because the fact that it exists means you should make sure as a player it never happens to you. It just is so great in distinguishing the undead from everything else, and really, the undead shouldn't be just another monster with just another...

Level Drain.

I run it is a narrative and do away with the rigid action/movement/bonus/etc mechanic. You take your shot and then move away, the monster might move too. I see it as your action is just a snapshot of the fight and while you still may move 30 feet, the creature if they didn't move on their...

For quintessential, how about Goodman Games In Search Of The Unknown/Keep On The Borderlands for 5e?

Starting from 2nd level spells the pcs have to have material components. The focus won't work. Focus in general is a bad, lame, game ruining idea that saps flavor out of the spellcaster classes. I honestly have no idea who came up with the idea of focus or when, but it has to be one of the...

It's a mystery solving game. There are five cases to solve but you have a limited amount of actions to solve the cases. The cases are all fictional but there is a backdrop of actual real world history and events which you might have to google or check wikipedia pages (or any page you wish...

Detective: A Modern Crime Game. It came out this year, and all you will need is access to the internet to go along with the game. Fine for 1 or 2 people.

I don't know about that. Game reviewers are not quite the New York Times. Often times they are someone like Tom Vassel or Rahdo, who review games on youtube or run game cons. They almost never give a bad review to games. If they frequently did, a la a scathing Broadway critic circa 1950...

I change rules on the fly and as DM don't mention it to the players. I am DMing a 5e game, but the truth is some old 1e rules make things easier as I am running an old Judges Guild adventure, transposing to 5e on the fly. They are about to encounter hordes of undead at low levels, and I...

Maybe I am just under Errol Flynn's mesmer powers, but Robin Hood should have a charisma 18, and that is his second greatest asset. The Merry Men are not following some common shlock. Maid Marian is supposed to fall for him on sight, no? Also, his Int, Wis, Con and Str should all be higher...

AL would not make a satisfying campaign for a home group of experienced players. They are very vanilla and by design simple enough to be solved in 2 to 4 hours. It is as primitive as possible with the early levels being nothing more than go from point A to point B, have two fights, pick up...

This is a very rose colored way he has at looking at his own design, since the rules he has written is almost the opposite of what he claims his goals are. Just for example, take the assassin. In 1e it was a very themey character class requiring a lot of creativity from the DM where the player...

Hi, I am just curious, but why is an official rule acceptable to you but a rule created by your friend not? It's quite possible your friend has a better mind than the people paid by WoTC, and his rule can make the game better.

This is a great item. I wouldn't quit a game over it, but I think this is a common problem for new DMs. My formula was to start out with one location in a small town, and each session introduce one or two NPCs until I had enough to have them start recurring. Soon, a campaign takes shape...

I quit a campaign because of the over-reliance on dice and skill checks. I was a ranger trying to cross a 10 foot river that was 3 feet deep and had no current. Just to be on the safe side I took off my clothes so I couldn't be weighted down, tied a 50 foot rope around my waste, tied it to a...

There is nothing more old school that CoT as you obviously know. It's very sandboxy too, but the thing that makes it the classic of classics is the more the players put in the more the dungeon gives. It's up to the players to come up with the story, it is not like the modern adventures at...