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If you get a chance, hop on over to Wizard's site and check out James Wyatt's Dungeoncraft articles. I believe that his early articles are still free and the latter ones are part of DDI. He does an excellent job of explaining how he goes about creating a DnD campaign. Methods, ideas, etc. In...

I would consider doing a "Night of the Living Dead' sort of thing. Actually, you can use any monster type to make the campaign work, not just undead. You start with a basic town and have the PCs goal to be something along the lines of get everyone alive to safety and then free the town of...

Agreed! Hopefully, it was just the result of lighting and it will actually look better in real life. I did like the gold dragon though.

Agreed! There is a problem that I have with this concept, and perhaps you can explain it to me. Setting aside strategy and tactics for a moment, outcomes in this game are determined by a roll of the die. As we all know, and as we all have probably experienced, dice in this game will run hot...

Ravenloft, is one of the few campaign settings that can really exist beyond the rules. Ravenloft is how you tell the story. The descriptions that you use. The images that you evoke. I think it certainly can be done in 4e. I can see the Mists and the Dark Powers being used to explain a lot of...

Partly true. While they can, and, often times do, produce similar outcomes, they will often produce dissimilar outcomes as well. My feeling is, I would rather have the PCs make that determination. To start, I do not plan out adventures, I just create opportunities for my players to find...

Added to what RC and Imaro said above... All I can do is give them the opportunity to do great things.

This is not the case. This is. It is the PCs decision to make the choice. Not mine. I let the players determine if the risk is worth the reward.

This. I can accept certain levels of idiosyncratic rules so long as the system achieves what it is set out to do.

It matters in that the PCs determine what level their challenges are, not me. I just provide them the opportunity to be challenged. By virtue of its' existence, the PCs become the determining factor in whether or not they wish to face this particular challenge, and when. Without its' existence...

They are relevant in that they challenge the initial assumption that the dragon (lich, whatever) only exists to be killed. That is hardly the case. The dragon (etc.) is an option, nothing more, something that the PCs can use how they wish. My job is only to provide them the options, it is the...

I think that you have set this up to fail. (Not intentionally, but by the nature of being the one to define the sides of the argument.) You have not accounted for two things. One, challenge level appropriate may not be the design goal. Two, and more importantly, there are more reasons to use a...

Control the information. As players advance from novice to expert, they retain information from previous characters and campaigns. They learn how strong a creature is and what sort of powers it has. While novices, they act naturally to what we describe. As an expert, they tend to act more off...

It really does not matter if we would buy the books or not. The thing is WotC/Paizo have a vision for what they want DnD/Pathfinder to look like. They want to control the look and feel of their respective games. Allowing a 3pp the ability to add material that some find objectionable could cause...

Which is why I leave it entirely to the players now. All I give them is the challenge rating of the encounter and what the group earned in total for roleplaying. It is up to them to make the determination as to how the split goes. Generally, they choose to do it by the book and divide up...

I can't speak for CharlesRyan, but in my campaigns we play a three hour session every other week. Each session contains one to two encounters. The experience difference between a player who is there versus a player who is not is, really, not that much. In addition, the power difference between...

No. Assuming, of course, that there was still a great deal of backwards compatibility. I own a near complete set of 3.5 books. (And BECMI, 1e, & 2e) Had WotC just done a fix to the base 3.5 rules, it would not have invalidated what I already own. A new system does that*. Which leads me to ask...

Maybe Chris Youngs is actually a subtle genius? I mean, he wrote an editorial about how the players in his campaign made a series of dumb decisions because they did not know what a wraith could do. So, he made a dumb decision, to use a term that he did not know the meaning of, in order to make...

I have always wondered about this as well. I always felt that WotC's style to adventure writing was kind of all over the place. It is almost like they were trying to please everybody which, in turn, pleases nobody. With Paizo and Goodman I always knew what I was getting. Their style seemed more...

This is the feeling I am getting around these parts. I know a lot of the people who had purchased 4e books and are now either going back to an older edition or going to a different game system entirely. When 4e first came out the two FLGS I visit were very excited about how many new and old...