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You joke, but in many ways it is true. Every class has been levelled in terms of the combat pillar and the combat pillar only. So, published adventures tend to focus on it because all groups bring the same basic capability to the table. Tactics and cosmetics may differ, but general...

No because non-magical approaches typically exist. Social magic, especially in 1e, could be a great shortcut, but it wasn't non-magical character weren't locked out in the same way.

This is a undead horse I constantly beat. The areas where magic generally has primacy in D&D are detecting things, surviving hostile environments, and transportation. Many adventures simply can't be undertaken successfully if the group does not have access to enough power in these areas...

We had meat shields as the first adopted moniker, Heal stations as the second. Wiz-bangs. The poor Thief rarely got the attention.

Depends on how recent the apocalypse is. During the apocalypse: 0 - 1 generations: primary consideration: living until tomorrow Recent post apocalypse: 1 - 5 generations: primary consideration: scrabbling for necessities to rebuild; scrapping with next village Old apocalypse: 4 - 10...

Wow. A 12 year old necromancy with a similar name to a current thread.

You can have a slow incremental loss where society slowly withdraws and crumbles bit by bit over the generations possibly slow enough to be effectively invisible to humans. No disaster people can point to as the start, but if people head out into the wilderness around their point of light...

I tend to run D&D as a society escaping a Dark Age. Civilization has returned. The core is safe; the frontiers are large. Much that was known is lost and the landscape changed. Challenge and opportunity abound along the frontier as people push against the wild and the wild pushes back. The...

3.0 really was the first edition which went out of its way to give item creation into the hands of the players. 2e was actually harder to make items than 1e. I understand the urge. Tales of incredibly stingy DMs where nth level groups might have a few potions or scrolls between them were...

Artefacts, crazy bits of extradimensional sections of dungeons, ancient huts with chicken legs that run around the forest, and magic items that potentially can be recreated, but are frankly easier to find (even if finding them requires extraordinary ability). In older editions of D&D, the...

Yeah. It's one of the areas where 3.5 had me pulling my hair out. It was driven home to me when the PCs found a really nice magic item (Mirror of Mental Prowess) -- and promptly sold it and split the cash so they could fill out their "must-have" items instead. For me, D&D is best when the...

My days of running multiple campaigns a week in different systems appears to be generally over as well. But D&D would have been a terrible choice for the X-Files style modern day DHS agents game I've been running for seven! years now.

I'm abit of an outlier in that when I decide to run something, I pick from a large pool of games. I pick the system that best supports the game experience I want from the new game in term of campaign feel, length, genre, and power level. D&D is one of my go-to games for some subset of game...

In essence ,this thread reminds me of the "big tent" threads like this one The D&D Experience (or, All Roads lead to Rome) and this one Mearls' Legends and Lore (or, "All Roads Lead to Rome, Redux") which attempted to identify those bits that make D&D feel like D&D. Not that the discussion...

So... pick a different tool or just keep using the ones you've already adopted then. ETA I'm almost certainly not going to adopt the consent tool as presented. I can see where it might provide value to some games and situations.

One of my favorite memories from a campaign in the early '80s was the group (between 5th - 7th levels) did something that triggered a roll on the astral/ethereal wandering encounter chart and got a high-level M-U result. When it became obvious the situation was going to end badly, the group...

I run my most of my campaigns as a despot. Which means it is even more important I get and maintain player consent!

It gives a people a tool to determine if they want to participate or not. No one save myself gets to veto whether I run a campaign. They get to decide whether or not to participate in what I run. If I'm asking for input into campaign structure or content, it's because I want to understand the...

I don't see I treating roleplaying as an inherently dangerous. If a player doesn't consent to how the game is going -- for whatever reason -- you no longer have a player. You can either get consent beforehand with forewarning or hope consent in granted in the moment. It's up to you. This...

When I GM, you need my consent to sit at the table when I run a game and I need your consent to run you as a player. Now, you can get my consent only through a brief interview process already. I've certainly withheld it in the past and will continue to provide revocable consent to players I...