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With only one exception in the last 40 years, every campaign I have begun I have approached as if it will last forever. With the aforementioned exception, every campaign I began has ended more or less with a whimper. Players have drifted in and out with school, jobs, interest in playing RPG's...

My game worlds - even if they are taken from published settings - have as much history as I want and need them to. They are NOT stagnant. Almost always they will have multiple civilizations that no longer exist for one reason or another. Civilizations that do exist for the PC's to see will...

3d6 in order.

I've done it with every campaign I've run as DM. Even if I used published rules and published settings as the basis for those games, the FINAL rules, the FINAL setting has always been MY creation, modified only by the interaction with the PC's.

I'd break it down into four often inter-related aspects: 1. Good communication. Poor or complete lack of communication is 90+% of the issues people have in D&D. The DM doesn't say what they want or expect. Players don't either and can't GUESS accurately at the DM's positions. Whether it's...

Well, for several months now I've been planning that my next PC be a dwarf cleric named Rabbi Stone. Mostly just for fitting with an atypical accent. I'm not intending to play him for comedy as such, but he'll SOUND like Mel Brooks/Billy Crystal/Gene Wilder as a dwarf cleric. Maybe even a...

Anyone who makes policy or takes punitive action without fact-checking things, or basing decisions on social media rumors and the mere existence of accusations, etc. is not helping themselves nor anyone else. The way to deal with any such event as the OP is the same as it always has been...

I would say that what would have happened would still be VERY close to what did happen. Assuming the property were buried in lawsuits and nonsense for a decade or two, I think it quite likely that the guys at Wizards, being fans of D&D - and that being what led them to want to RESCUE it from...

3.5, certainly at the time of its release, did NOT make everybody happy. What Monte wrote about the backlash some time after 3.5 was that, yes, an update/revision to the 3E rules was always part of the plan, but not nearly that soon. However, the bean counters jumped the gun on it when 3E...

Another anecdote just occurred to me that may also help explain my attitude about, "everybody learns the rules." The guy who actually introduced me to D&D back in '75 was someone who definitely read rules. Any game that he played he KNEW the rules. D&D was no exception. It probably is no...

There will always be those in this hobby who just don't get it; people who don't have properly developed concepts regarding appropriate behavior (in public OR private), courtesy, decorum, etc. They flew "under the radar" for a LONG time, with such actions being overlooked or tolerated when they...

ALL rules are house rules. The ones that are printed in books are just the ones that everybody starts with and have no greater "authority" than what the DM and players agree to give them. Whether a particular edition has ever said it in so many words or not, the printed rules are subject to...

It doesn't filter out casual players because, as I said, the point is all players are (or should be) entering the game accepting the obvious fact that there are hundreds of pages of rules to the game. They can't just show up week after week after week with no clue how to actually play. They...

As important as it is to the GM that ANY player get all the rules right. Nobody gets a pass on learning the rules. As a player, even if your character is not a spellcaster you should be learning ALL the rules a player should know regarding spellcasting. As a player you don't have to know the...

With 860 trees per acre I don't think you're missing ANY tree. Ever.

Any class can suffice. It ain't what you play - it's how you play it.

Boxed text (assuming it's being done correctly/sensibly) is nothing more than the DM would do themselves anyway - an introductory description of an area or event that PC's will be able to take in PRIOR to players asking for particular details or further information. This should be information...

Fix 3.5? E6.

If players go outside the envelope I can almost always come up with something on the fly to keep moving things forward or even getting them back inside the perimeter. I've never had need to make up handouts on the fly and that would be something I'd want to be able to spend time on anyway...

It's D&D. It doesn't have to make sense. Also, 90% of everything is crap.