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I think your mindset is correct. If the PCs face this guy in a fair fight, it should be hopeless. They should either die, realize that it's hopeless and retreat, or find a way to make the fight unfair in their favor (and it would have to be a big deal, not just a way to get permanent combat...

It's not false accounting; I have no reason to believe that there's anything shady or non-GAAP going on with Hasbro's or WotC's books. It may be, however, short-sighted management. If it's the case that the product line will suffer in the long term from getting rid of these employees, then the...

I'm inclined to go with the folks who say to run it as-is. A level 22 versus a party of level 13 PCs should be able to destroy them handily, but not in one round. Make it clear in-game how scary this guy is. He's way out of their league. It would take a miracle for them to beat him in a fair...

While this isn't quite the same as actual WotC employees being laid off, it looks like Stephen Radney-MacFarland has also lost his freelance gig writing the Save My Game column. I remember listening to a recent episode of The Tome Show where SRM was interviewed, and I remember thinking, "Wow...

I agree with this. I personally work for a large, publicly-traded company, and I found it very enlightening a few years ago when senior management described having three groups whose interests the company needed to keep in mind: customers, employees and shareholders. That's a very useful way to...

Um, sure, go ahead.

4e has the Grabbed condition, which can be imposed either by a Grab attack (basically an unarmed Strenth versus versus Fortitude attack) or by certain powers that have "... and the target is Grabbed..." as part of the Hit line. Escaping a grab can be done via a move action, with an Athletics or...

Sigh. This is sad. Folks have been talking in this thread about WotC doing these Christmas layoffs every year; I seem to remember some unpleasant discussion in 2010 with people predicting the layoffs, but that there actually weren't any layoffs at Christmas 2010. Am I misremembering? That...

I build interesting encounters. I do a good job of making the environment matter, building/choosing monsters that work well together and/or with that environment, add wrinkles like traps or puzzles to combat, etc. Sadly, I mainly run pre-published material these days, but I still tweak...

Rechan I agree with you that the players will want to do something other than character generation at Session Zero. That's why we played a one-shot game with pre-existing characters, wrapping up the careers of their previous characters. I suppose another option would have been to have pre-gens...

I wrote a blog post today in which I talked about the RPG podcasts I listen to (and a couple I've even been a guest on). Commenters on the post have started chiming in with other podcasts to check out, and I'm sure there are even more I'm not aware of. So, I thought I'd bring the question to...

It's important to me. If it's absent, I'll compensate so that I can still enjoy the game.

I will say that I've run at least one adventure where the party had to leave their weapons someplace for safekeeping for a while and were not forced to fight or anything like that. So, it doesn't ALWAYS mean "read up on the improvised weapon rules." But yeah, usually. :-)

Well, the earlier adventures in the campaign were written well before Monster Manual 3 came out. Basically, you just need to update the monster damage expressions to post-MM3 values as you would with any pre-MM3 monsters. I've personally also tweaked a lot of monsters along the way. Certain...

I'd XP Hussar if I could - huzzah for folks putting their MapTool files out there!

Well, I haven't run a ton of different published adventures so far, so I can't opine on too many. War of the Burning Sky has been fun, but I wouldn't recommend it to a new DM. The math needs to be updated to post-MM3 levels, and it's a massive 1-30 campaign. I'm going to be running Madness at...

I recently started a new campaign and put up a blog post about the experience. I'd like to hear how other people handle the beginning of a new campaigns. In the past, since the folks I've played with all use the 4th Edition Character Builder software, everyone has created their characters on...

Out of curiosity, what did you find to be "appallingly bad" in Heroes of the Feywild? I had issues with Heroes of Shadow, but I've personally been very pleased with Heroes of the Feywild and I don't recall seeing significant complaints about it so far.

-Icebergs (probably not applicable if this is for ZEITGEIST, though) -Unpredictable currents

If you don't enjoy the game and want to get the most possible money out of selling your books, then yes, sell them sooner rather than later. If you enjoy the game and think you'll keep playing it in the future, then keep your books. If you're unsure, I'd suggest erring on the side of keeping...