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I'm about to start DotMM and I'm planning to use the Tension Pool by good ol' Angry: Why’d You Have to Go and Make Things So Complicated? Except I'm calling it the "Doom Pool" because that's cooler and I try to avoid mechanics that tell the players how to feel.

If you crunch the numbers, it turns out the average forumgoer is exactly "selection bias" years old!

I hate it. I do it, but I still hate it. There are games where the mechanics are abstract and need to be skinned, like Mutants & Masterminds or Savage Worlds, and I like skinning mechanics in those games. It works really well because those games are designed for a lots of flexibility in how the...

I got the PDF from Kickstarter and I must say... holy naughty word, I am amazed. This book is incredibly creative but also exremely useful; it really nails the whole "fairy tale" vibe while also working within the D&D rules. I'm particularly impressed with how much cross-linking there is between the...

OK, so not counting all the excellent published adventures I want to run someday (Curse of Strahd, Moonshae Season of Rising Shadows, Dungeon-in-a-Box...), here are my own ideas: The 19d20s: Orcish gangsters with tommy guns; gnomish speakeasys; hard-boiled dwarves; elven femme fatales! I...

I've played games like this, and I hate them. It feels like there's a trade-off between staying alive and doing cool stuff, and that's not a fun trade-off to me. I realize that this is all in my head, but since I play games to have fun, I don't like to argue against my head too much.

I bribe the charmed player with Inspiration and/or bonus XP for role-playing their charm really well. (I award XP to every PC at the same rate, so all the other players are happy to see the bonus XP come rolling in.)

Here's another take on vampire PCs. There are two versions; I recommend reading the newer one (v3.4). https://www.enworld.org/resources/vampire-player-characters.1282/

Worth looking into: The Hidden Halls of Hazakor - Insane Angel Studios | DriveThruRPG.com

I never run Inspiration by-the-book (although my current campaign comes very close, following @iserith's method of making the players call out their own BIFTs). Here are some experiments I've tried. Reroll: For some reason, the players around here, including me, universally make the mistake...

The formulae involved in engineering a proper steam engine (pressure, tolerances, heat, timing, etc.) also resemble magic. I'm reminded of Freemasonry. Supposedly, in the Middle Ages, the knowledge of how to build a cathedral that wouldn't collapse was incredibly valuable, but also difficult to...

For a low/rare magic setting, the question I ask myself is: how did the belief in magic an magical creatures affect the actual Industrial Revolution? The answer is, probably not very much. In the low/rare magic genre, magic is very much NOT commoditized or commercialized, and magical creatures...

Many years ago I was working on a setting in which the ruling class was all dragons in human form. Showing someone your dragon form was considered crude and distasteful, sort of the equivalent of losing control of your emotions. It was only appropriate between close family members and enemies...

Imma just leave this here: https://www.enworld.org/threads/dragons-as-player-characters.669136/ And also this: https://www.enworld.org/threads/dragon-player-characters.438478/

I will answer the OP by mentioning some systems that I myself have felt compelled to create in order to fill in some gaps in 5E: 1. Magic item balance. Sorry, but major/minor and uncommon/common/rare/etc. are just not granular enough. I need to answer the question, "Do all my PCs have roughly...

I created it. I've never heard of a Guardian Dragon, or of Tharizdun having a tomb. This was just an example of a Tharizdun-inspired nasty final boss monster. I really like the idea that there are 333 gems forming the gate to Tharizdun's prison, and that even a single one of them is such bad...

My first character was simply a high elf rogue (arcane trickster) and I was shocked at how effective it was. Stealth Expertise + longbow is really amazing damage, shield is such a good spell that it alone is worth the price of admission, utility spells like minor illusion and disguise self and...

Everybody (players and DMs) should carefully consider whether they want to participate in a game that relies on technicalities and loopholes like this. Some people really enjoy it -- it gets kind of like a puzzle, and it allows rules-savvy players to predict the outcomes of their decisions...

By a strict reading of the rules, @Sword of Spirit is correct, a dragon's breath weapon (despite being called a weapon) is neither attack nor spell and thus does not break invisibility. Here are some ways the players can abuse this loophole: Racial features: dragonborn's Breath Weapon. Class...

In my last campaign, a single one of the 333 gems was entombed deep underground and became a magnet for evil. The Final Boss of the campaign was this guy: