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Some time ago, I ran a short campaign (very) loosely based around Treasure Island. The PCs were a naturalist expedition to a mysterious island and shortly after their arrival to the island a mutiny left them stranded and the adventure became dodging the treasure hunting mutineers, uncovering...

Abilities that have a minor mechanical impact but are explicitly called out in a heritage or class writeup. Dwarven ability to know whether floor is sloped, that kind of thing

For what may be an interesting example about whether players would play non-human characters without mechanical effects, in the UK LARP Empire there are seven non-human options : Lineage - Empire https://www.profounddecisions.co.uk/empire-wiki/Orc The six lineages offer very minor mechanical...

Amusingly, I rolled something very similar to this for a currently running game and am playing a 4 STR fairy wizard. It's not been too much of a handicap so far and has been a source of a lot of amusement, but I really wouldn't want to try it on a non-full caster.

I've had some success with asking one of the players to give a summary of the last session and then following that up with a "opening crawl" giving some scene setting to get people back in the mood.

I'll occasionally round a couple of hitpoints down to dead, mostly for pacing reasons when a fight is already decided

Randomly generated scores can be interesting sometimes when you are after some inspiration for a character - if I've got a character in mind then I'd prefer to use an array - one +3 and one +2 after lineage modifications is probably sufficient. Random generation for a recent character gave...

I've found very small to be good - the most successful game I've run recently had 90% of the action take place on an island about 10 miles by 4. Limiting the scale meant a more focused experience.

They can do, particularly if you are making use of combat manouevers - if you open with Trip attack then the subsequent attacks will have to take that into account, or the use of the assorted critical feats that apply penalties may affect your attacks. Rolling out all your attacks in one go...

There are a couple of problem areas that can slow things down if you aren't prepared for them which are worth being aware of. 1) Summoned monsters - if your players are planning on using these ensure that they have their stat blocks available and understand them. Particularly if templated...

When I ran this, I made quite a few tweaks (mostly to allow it to be run in one long session) As for why the stone is wanted - using up all the stones would open up a planar gate at the heart of the town, allowing assorted devils to get out. This was part of a long term plan by the Architects...

Is speed dating a substitute for a commited relationship? This is what I'm seeing Encounters as. Something you can pop in and do on a whim with a low level of commitment that puts you in contact with like minded people. I don't think that the idea is that people play Encounters and only...

There really isn't any dicotomy here. Roleplaying your character (as in portraying their personality, goals and so on) is pretty much orthogonal to character optimisation. Whether my character has a +5 or +7 to hit has pretty much nothing to do with how likely they are to stand up and make a...

Hmm, depends. By having play begin with some change in status of the PCs, then they can both be new arrivals and embedded into the relationship map. For example, the game could start with (or shortly follow) a "coming of age" ritual of some sort, so while the shape of the relationship map...

I think there are some interesting edge cases here Its relatively common for a group to have a character creation session before play proper starts, building their characters together in order to achieve some desired starting condition. I imagine that you do something similar, if only to avoid...

If we're talking 3.5, then you can't make potions of death ward. Potions only go up to 3rd level spells and death ward is 4/5. You could make scrolls of it instead, but you are still looking at 350g+28 xp at minimum each. This protection only lasts 9 minutes, so if you are going to be...

No, I can believe that. I've seen a single *action* take 45 minutes to resolve in high level 3.5.

Theres an additional effect that causes the 15 minute day - arms racing with the DM. If the game rewards "pre-buffing" strongly, then the availablity and duration of those effects will go a long way to determine your activity pattern. Importantly, if you start relying on those buffs then your...

I think the point is that predictability actually helps with this. If the participants of the game want high risk, they can use the guidelines based on the predictability to build a high risk game. If they want low risk, they can do the converse. If your guidelines are not good, then it's far...

Here you go SignalGK: Online Traveller Resource :)