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I'd rather have strange / unusual / useless in combat magic items instead of Generic Sword +1. You can always scale combat situations up and down to fit the party anyway; that's not hard to do. Party has a bunch of cool pew pew toys? Add more bad guys or make them tougher. The game hasn't really...

Players sitting it out does suck, but there are some things that can be done to mitigate the problem. For combats, the player can take control of friendly or hostile creatures on the battlefield. 13th Age has a "Fighting In Spirit" rule where dead players can offers bonuses to other players'...

I still run my games this way. I never really understood why until the E6 post spelled it out for me. Anyway, my gripe with D&D and Raise Dead has little to do with mechanics, it has more to do with the fluff. I always felt that raising the dead is something that should be a lot more than "pay...

This thread is tempting me to arm wrestle every baker I can find.

While you make a good point that there can be good in-game reasons for doing so, in my experience "class dipping" reeks of power gaming and that is the reason people do it. It is a rare person that takes 1 level of seven classes and doesn't do it to game the system. Additionally, I find it to...

He's wearing a large collar with "PUPPY" stitched onto the side, and in the distance a little girl in a cute dress is running towards him with a leash.

I hesitate to move to a new edition of D&D. 3.5 works well enough for all of its flaws, and more importantly there are other game systems. Game systems which are far easier to learn, have less complicated yet still effective mechanics, and still allow for great character customization. I'm...

Not every stat should be useful in every situation, but since so much of the rules of D&D focus on beating up the other guy, every stat should have some bearing on how combat plays out. If everything matters, then this provides players with choices - if done well, these will be hard choices...

87) During a prolonged, difficult war against Horrible Evil Empire, it becomes known that the holy men of your empire has finally found the means to resurrect the ancient hero of legend that first defeated the Evil, many eons ago. This hero is indeed The Last Hope, as the world is nearing its...

A long time ago, some of my gaming buddies ran some games like this. It was a GI-Joe inspired type of D&D game where there was an elite, largely autonomous organization with maybe 15-20 "agents" in it. Players were given the mission briefing and could then pick and chose whichever character they...

I find it funny that people are arguing that simply giving an NPC a +10 to a skill is more arbitrary than deciding to make that NPC level X. Adding levels to an NPC isn't any less arbitrary. It just gives you the warm, fuzzy feeling of justification for a large bonus in a strict RAW style of...

Except that, quite frankly, bears don't know that this has happened. They don't run kingdoms or have long historical traditions. They're born; what they have is what they have. That is their experience. They aren't aware of what happened 50, 500, or 5,000 years ago (a lot like most people, but...

Having lived in rural and semi-rural areas for almost all of my life, I can say that this is true. Where I live right now we don't have any wolf packs, but we do have the occasional bear, and a good amount of coyotes, foxes, raccoons, and other assorted critters. You'll rarely ever see any of...

Perhaps a better solution would be to make healing of any sort (be they spells, potions, or the 4th Ed. Voodoo) unnecessary as a whole. Something nice to have, but not mandatory. This can be done simply by giving players a larger pool of HP to start with, and have lower amounts of damage. Have...

Thank you for the input, everyone! I have some time to read and draw up some plans, all of these recommendations will help a lot.

I'm having some old friends visiting at the end of next month, and I'd like to run a short game to test the Savage Worlds system. I was originally going to run it in a low-ish magic fantasy setting, but after having played through Thief: The Metal Age I thought it would be more fun to try...

Try this experiment. Ask two friends to come over. Put them in your bathroom and ask them to talk to eachother at a normal level. Close the door. Stand next to the door and listen. As they talk to eachother, try to listen. Do you hear conversation? If not, I highly recommend seeing an ear...

I've never been fond of the Vancian style of spell casting. It doesn't capture the fantasy feel (for me), especially at low levels. Cantrips-at-will don't help. The spell memorization mechanic is also odd, though that can often be fixed simply by not using the word memorization and instead using...

This doesn't sound like a problem to me. It sounds like an opportunity for the characters to do some investigative and social work.

I've never really been all that fond of elves. So I decided to torture them a bit. The short of it: The Elvish empire was at war with the dwarves and the minotaurs, but it was discovered that elves had a weakness: They had an exceptional addiction to a common smoking weed. So the dwarves and...