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Oh, I'd put Descent into Avernus way, way, way below those. :) Funnily enough, I've run both Tyranny and Dragon Heist three times each. The last time I ran Dragon Heist was really memorable - I was adding so much to all the faction stuff that we almost didn't get back to the main plot. Cheers...

You're really picky. :) The books from Wizards I would term as "great" are the 5E Player's Handbook, the 5E Monster Manual, and Xanathar's Guide to Everything. Adventure-wise, Curse of Strahd. (Tyranny may be in my top 5 adventures of all time, but I know that's not universal). There are...

"Rail ready"? :) Hehe. The amount of player buy-in differs from adventure to adventure, but there's no doubt that you need a minimum level of buy-in for ANY published adventure. "We're not going anywhere near the Caves of Chaos! We're off to join up with the Black Baron!" Whenever you get to a...

No. You are not. I'm running Vecna: Eve of Ruin at the moment and while we're having fun, and the individual sections generally play well, there is no doubt that it lacks vision. And this is not something I felt in the early years of 5E. The first few years of 5E adventures didn't always work...

Smite is at its most effective against solo foes. The more foes there are, the more slots need to be expended. I've run a lot of Tier 3 and above combat, and one way of challenging players is to use monsters from Kobold Press. Which tend to hit harder and be more offensively focused than most...

Very little. There were a few things of the mass of Dragon content that became official content, but even looking at the early years of the magazine, it wasn't a big percentage. We tend to remember the big things that DID become part of the game, but overall most of the content in The Dragon...

Glass Cannon. ;) A lot of the terms I'm coming up with are too specific (e.g. sniper).

Except Chaosium almost went bankrupt and had to be saved by a large injection of cash from Stafford and Peterson. They're doing a LOT better now, but Chaosium almost disappeared under mismanagement.

Session 19 - Monday, March 4, 2024. We take up this session in the middle of Chapter 7. The heroes were in the mind flayer stronghold of Illithinoch, having dealt with a few cult fanatics and actually peacefully interacting with other inhabitants. Their next explorations took them to an old...

I found it a fantastically frustrating adventure. There's a lot of very good dungeon design, but a lot that doesn't do well at building the greater picture. And that feels utterly out of place in the last couple of chapters. Cheers, Merric

I wasn't listening to their hype except in this one instance - it caught my attention that The Shattered Obelisk was being billed as a big revelation to a mystery throughout 5E (that I'd never noticed). I was astonished by the lack of revelation. Cheers, Merric

Calling it a "subplot" is giving it far too much credit. There was no plot of any sort associated with the obelisks over the run of 5E adventures. Every so often, an Obelisk is mentioned. In Rime of the Frostmaiden, we get this: And in The Shattered Obelisk... nothing new is added to the...

Not Mentioned At All. And yeah, Shattered Obelisk specifically calls out Vecna in the text describing the Obelisks. Cheers, Merric

Have you see the state of the video game industry at the moment? Mass layoffs and studio closures. HUGE amounts of money being spent on stuff that doesn't get even close to making the money back. Recent analysis of the marketplace shows that 60% of play time went to 6+ year old games. The...

Well, with my DMing, probably even with murder hobos! I've run it both in 3E and 5E. Never with AD&D. The party in the 3E version (which I adapted from the original source) actually managed to bypass a lot of the adventure, but it was based on their good play rather than the adventure structure...

Very wise. My feeling is the adventures that are straight up dungeon crawls that don't rely heavily on traps will probably come off relatively well. I DMed all of Ghosts of Saltmarsh and quite a bit of Tales from the Yawning Portal, and the two adventures I thought the Wizards designers were...

Back in 2005, on the occasion of my 33rd birthday, I ran a session of White Plume Mountain using AD&D rules for my friends, and this unusual interaction of the haste spell came into play. The full report is here, but I excerpt the relevant text: Ben then decides to even the odds with a haste...

Honestly, being a brand new concept with a lot of creative people getting involved had a large part to do with it. And then the D&D designs got better as well. You look at folks like Stephen Abrams, Jon Everson and Ray Feist at Midkemia Press - they loved OD&D, but threw out the magic system...

The removal of paralysis by Cure Light Wounds got added by Moldvay in B/X D&D. No durations nor removal spells for paralysis exist in OD&D nor Holmes Basic D&D. Cheers, Merric