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Maybe not insulting per se, but there's an overwhelming sense of someone talking down a very long academic nose to the uneducated masses at his feet, which doesn't exactly make one eager to listen. What there's also always been, and which early D&D provided an excellent avenue to harmlessly...

Because in any game someone, sometime, has to lose; and losing generally doesn't make people happy. The difference between RPGs and other games is that with an RPG you can lose and yet still keep playing, where with many other games losing means the game is over for you if not for everyone...

There's a huge difference between "winning all the time" because the game says I have to and "winning all the time" because of what I've done as a good player of said game. Never mind that it's not about winning all the time but about reducing the odds of losing - in other words, it's about...

Other than forcing the players to think, which IMO is a good thing. Getting what I want all the time would become boring within the first session. Constant motion also becomes boring after a while - it's the whole highs and lows thing again; sometimes things move quickly, sometimes they don't...

If you're running Eberron stock without too many tweaks and changes, then yes: there's enough setting material out there I can read (if I want to) to provide that sense of groundedness or permanence (still not sure of the right term for what I'm trying to express here) to feel like there's a...

I think the primary concern differs between players and DM. The players' primary concern is to overcome whatever obstacle is in their way at the moment. The DM's primary concern is to think about both what happens next if they do overcome it and what happens next if they don't; i.e., how to...

Good to hear this. My question then becomes, what can the character do in the fiction to get things to the point where if he fails on his attempted task, all that happens is that he fails and nothing else. Because if I'm playing that thief in character as someone who a) knows what he's doing...

If by a few years back you mean 1999, yes they did; and they threw out all responses from the demographic most likely to be in and-or run longer campaigns. My cynical take was then and still is now that they intentionally skewed the data to produce the results they wanted, so as to justify...

If they have a lot of time I'll sometimes ask up front, before they roll, how long they're giving it. There's no re-rolls in any case, unless there's a different approach taken (e.g. boots instead of lockpicks) or a material change in the fiction (e.g. daylight providing better vision than did...

More to the point, how often do bears wander into locked kitchens in the middle of the night?

That's just it - the way this is being presented, it sounds very much like the GM not only won't reward you for smart play but by the rules of the game, can't.

What, if anything, was Aedhros trying to achieve in any greater sense here? Or was he just being a pill, making the harbour official miserable for no good reason? I mean, this is the sort of shenanigans I sometimes have my characters get up to as well; but they're never "the real point"...

And if the roll represents your best attempt even after trying again for as long as you're willing or able to give it?

Sure. The first three on that list are entirely 100% related to the task being resolved - all good. The fourth is a more open question and almost certainly quite situation-dependent. In the specific instance of there being a sleeping cook in the kitchen, the two discrete resolutions (pick the...

My issue with that is that whenever heck in a handbasket isn't on the table the players always auto-succeed and get what they want. I want the far-more-realistic situation to be in play that there's no added complication, but they still can't get what they want; which is the very point of a...

What about Option C, which is to have them roll because if they fail they don't get what they want (in this case, that'd be entry to the house). This is what I just don't get: this incredible degree of objection to having the characters get stuck in place for even just a moment. Things don't...

If I write an adventure out fully, it's done well in advance of anyone playing it and I read it over and over again in hopes of catching those contradictions and omissions. I find that to be more an issue when running a published module; as if I wrote it I've in theory got the advantage of...

It was. Frustration can, however, sometimes also be and-or lead to good fun.

Sure, this is fine (though personally I'd include a small % chance the Ogre is at neither location but is in transit between the two or is somewhere else entirely). It's the pre-establishment of those 75-25 odds that matters; you've given the Ogre a couple of logical places to be and assigned...

Somewhat dependent on situation and-or intent. If the players are specifically trying to avoid the Ogre it's flat-out bad DMing to put it in front of the PCs no matter where they go. If the players don't know about the Ogre but go a different direction from where it's been placed, it's bad...