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Session 8 (a short one) Off to Kill Orcs and Find Agatha the Banshee We got to sleep the night away without incident. In the morning, we prepared ourselves, and I was able to learn two new spells, Rope Trick and Blur. We also decided that Gerald would be best suited to wield the Staff of...

I like this approach. It is a little something, but not as grand as advantage, which as others have said, would step on the toes of classes and monsters that gain advantage from others when an ally is within 5'.

Nice list. I love #3 (3) Move, shoot, move again to full cover. Split move is one of the best improvements in 5e over prior D&D editions. Changing monsters is also great, especially for the elites/leaders of the pack. Something I like to do as much as possible is to have monsters call for...

Session 7 We continued forward through another door where a stairway led up to the east and the caves above, but there was another door directly opposite the door we entered. We went into that room to smell the pungent odor of alchemy. There was a large table with ingredients and a pot on a...

Player that questions DM decisions and breaks the narrative that the DM presents. (And rules lawyers!!)

Session 6 After Gerald tended to Brace’s wounds and restored his health with divine magic, we set off for the hidden tunnel that Pip had told us about. Heinrick tried to make it seem as if we were leaving town, but he laid it on a bit thick. I think Toblin, the Inn Keeper, could tell we were...

I'm late to this thread and only read a few pages of it, but here's my take. I'm not what most would call a powergamer, although one of my favorite aspects of D&D is making choices for my PC when it levels up. I define "more powerful" as granting my PC more interesting and potentially useful...

Don't get disheartened yet. Play with it more and see how it goes. Build your adventures using story, narrative logic, and integrate combat, exploration and interaction and it will be a fun game. Make all aspects of the game part of the challenge and your players will enjoy it. Also, lower...

My pleasure. Thanks for reading. I've been keeping journals for some of the campaigns I run and some of the ones I play in. I love to read them over to help me remember what's going on and we used them for our group to keep informed too, but I love when others read and comment on them...

I agree. That's why I usually use 2nd wind like feature and counterspells, etc. But having a little extra offense scares the PCs...maybe not too many fireballs though. In the playtest, the dragon lair gave a lair action that regenerated hit points for the dragon. That really dragged the...

This got me thinking. If people really want to have 1 encounter days, they should make sure all the foes have some kind of nova power so they can match pcs for at least 3 rounds. That's why spellcasting monsters usually out perform their CR level. One thing I like to do is to give elite...

It doesn't have to be problematic. Just try to use a little variety so that the players don't know which encounters are supposed to be the really big, tactical ones, and which ones are just ones that need to be avoided or finished quickly. The key to keeping the PCs from going nova, is to...

At first, I didn't like 1 hour rests. But after playing/DMing with them for a few years, I like them. There is definitely a tension and deliberateness to taking them. When rests were too short (4e 5 min rests) they became "standard operating procedure" after any moderately taxing encounter...

This is a really interesting thread. Thanks for starting it Warpiglet. I totally agree with balance in all aspects of the game. For my best games, and my total outlook, combat/mechanics (rollplaying) and roleplaying must be interwoven, just as I believe the best games I've run or played in...

More observations... Some of the discomfort that people experience with larger parties, overpowered PCs or optional rules, etc. comes from the Bounded Accuracy concept that WotC used to construct 5e. With 5e the number of combatants for or against makes a huge difference because it increases...

I'll throw in a few more of my own observations/ideas from DMing and playing 5e over the past 2+ years - neither for nor against any other perspectives offered by many of the interesting posts in this thread. What I find most enjoyable about 5e (and perhaps this was an intentional design...

I'd love to see (and if I had time, I'd try to make it myself), a complete listing of all feats and powers with a rough guideline as to how adding one or more to a monster would change the CR estimate. The DMG kind of goes there with some of its charts, but nothing is integrated or easy to use...

Yay! I got me Volo's Guide - an early x-mas present to myself.

Session 5 While we waited the day around the Stonehill Inn, a baker women came to visit Toblin. She told us about Hallia, the only other woman in town to stand up to the Red Brands. Heinrick noticed a little boy eying us, and he turned on the charm to teach the boy how to fight using two...

I did it in the middle of a very long campaign when I was getting a little burnt out as DM. I needed to shake it up and try a new genre so I had the party investigate a portal and then they got transported to a post-apocalyptic Earth setting. They were in a wrecked military compound in a...