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Welcome to EN World! It's great to hear about other folks running online games. As you might guess from my name, this is something I'm passionate about. My blog might be handy for you. Are the players in this game people you already know personally, or are they people you've met online...

I'll note that when I first started playing D&D about two years ago, I had seen a DM make minions in a published module into two-hit minions, which I thought was a great idea. I ran my minions that way for a few months, until I read an article by Chris Perkins in which he extolled the virtues of...

As others have said, you'll want to ask the stores directly. At my FLGS, I definitely have had plenty of younger players turn up. When I was running D&D Encounters last summer, I had some players who were probably as young as 8 or 10 (though they youngest players were there with a parent who...

I think this is handled in the DM's choice of powers. If it's something game-breaking for the level 12 character to have, then don't give it to them! Give them powers that are cool but not unreasonable for them to have access to.

I can see someone wanting to use a Wacom tablet, but not me. I'm a terrible enough artist that drawing with a mouse doesn't make things any worse!

I've been assuming we'll get the open play test on June 19 (last day of spring). In this sort of situation, I prefer to keep my expectations low and then be pleasantly surprised rather than have high hopes that are later dashed.

My worry was that the support posts and possibly the overhead bar might get bumped into, but if you've got a space where that won't be a problem then go for it!

Yes, I'm sure you'll have plenty of resolution! As for the mounting question, go with whatever works for you. I will say that I discovered that it's important to make sure that my rig doesn't get in my players' way (or my way, but that's less of a concern). I'm not a photographer, but from...

Well, when I use MapTool with a projector for in-person games, my players still use physical minis of their choice. And when I run games online, the players send me images that they want for their characters and I make them into MapTool tokens using TokenTool. It's quite easy, fortunately! As...

I said it doesn't matter. I'm currently running one adventure path game (at level 19 out of 30 so far) and having fun, but I'm the DM, not a player. I'm running another campaign (at level 8) that's a bunch of larger adventures stuck together. I have yet to play in a campaign that's gone more...

Out of curiosity, why are you using a separate laptop for the player view? Is it just so the players can move their own tokens rather than having to tell the DM via laser pointer where they want to go? I personally just open a second instance of MapTool on my DM laptop, connect to the DM's...

My projector is 800 by 600, and I've been very happy with it. I was worried at first, but it's been just fine. Now, the monsters are a little tough to make out at normal size, but what I generally do is click a button to blow the monster up to a very large size when I first introduce it, and...

Makes sense to me; I totally understand working with what you know. For what it's worth, though, I've found MapTool to be much simpler to use than OpenRPG. The issue I had with OpenRPG is that everything had to be pre-set to the right size and pre-loaded on the server before you could use it...

This is exactly what I've done for over a year and a half. My setup is portable, too, so I can take it to conventions and the local store to run games. I absolutely love it. It's not cheap, but compared to buying a bunch of monster minis, it wasn't too bad. I spent a total of $534.10 ($463.99...

What do folks think of the approach to martial classes taken in Heroes of the Fallen Lands / Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms (the Essentials books) for 4e? Martial classes worked differently than arcane and divine classes in those books (no daily powers, more focus on basic attacks with stance...

Interesting. I find that combat runs a bit faster in my online games because the math is pre-programmed. You click a die and get the attack roll and damage roll with all of the math included. However, I think the difference I'm seeing is that you appear to be just using text chat in MapTool; I...

Well, as you can guess from my name here, and especially if you've ever read my blog, you know that my answer is that playing online is awesome. Is it better than playing in-person? No, I don't think so. It's fun to get together in the same room as my friends, eat together, play a board game...

Well, it's confusing if you're used to older editions. I was specifically talking about introducing new players to the game. What you're describing is a good reason to get away from numbered spell levels altogether. If the wizard can cast spell X at 3rd level but the bard can't cast it until...

I'm guessing that WotC will go back to 0-9 because they're trying to appeal to players of earlier editions. That said, I think the "spell level = character level" system is much, much easier for new players to learn, and that's a good thing. If you don't want 20 levels of spells, then you can...

1. No PC greatly outshines any other most of the time. Everyone gets their moment to shine, yes, but you don't end up with an hour at the table where one PC is rocking the world and the rest feel ineffective, especially in combat. If PCs are unbalanced outside of combat, then the DM should keep...