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This isn't granting anything you couldn't just do already. You don't need a license to use game mechanics that you've rewritten with your own words. The main thing the shadowdark license offers that you cannot simply do license-less is to specifically replicate Monsters, Spells, and Magic...

The main system is also proprietary, largely. The Shadowdark license is pretty restrictive when it comes to what you're allowed to reproduce from the original source - only Monsters, Spells, and Magic items. No other game text is open content for 3pp licensed products. You cannot reproduce...

I don't think its possible to have a perfectly neutral game session in which a player never takes an action or asks a question which requires their referee to make a judgement call according to their own biases. You can mitigate it with rules heavy systems or extremely detailed modules. But...

Did you think of all of the physical details of every trap? Every creature? Every hazard? Every room? At some point the game will require you to Invent something about the fictional space in the moment, you cannot possibly prepare for all eventualities.

It's rarely so cut and dry as your example. Players tend to do strange, and often ingenious, things - you can never eliminate improvisation with prep. If you create, say, a concealed scything blade trap triggered by a tripwire, the PCs may try to disable it by cutting the wire. They also...

The best way to avoid arguments in an RPG is to settle on the genre expectations you want to stick with. The best way to ensure that your group sticks to its genre expectations is to have rules that support them.

This is exactly it. I see people ignoring this fact constantly when talking about Classic D&D - It was designed for and often played with huge parties!! 4d4 kobolds should be a trivial encounter, since you should have 6-10 PCs and a half dozen hirelings with you! Lots of those groups...

Hard agree with this. I just use the "Fatality Mode" to get around this problem, but yeah - having a living character who cannot act for potentially hours of real life time is Bad.

Every day I strive to be an even lazier GM than the day before.

The important thing isn't whether you use the wotc or the tsr era stat curves - it's about where between 3 and 18 the game assumes a PC to have as a baseline. In B/X, you use a roll-under for ability checks. If you have a 10, the average roll of 3d6, you'll have a 50% chance of success. In...

D&DBeyond tends to just make the play experience worse, IMO. It automates just enough things that players can get away with not knowing whats going on.

Just gotta wait for SRD 5.2 to come out so that fans can make/release tools that actually work.

I think GMs should disallow/ban more Player options and be even lazier about their games and I'm not kidding.

Ultimately, every individual group is going to need to decide for themselves what, if anything, from 5e they include into their 2024 games.

We dont even need levels 8-10. The game should be focused on where people actually prefer to play - levels 1-7 - and where the lengths of campaigns reach their natural conclusions.

Low level = 1-2 Mid level = 3-7 High Level = 8+

Read the spell text of Magic missile and the ability text for Evoker. I'm not going to type out the text.

Separate die for each missile. There is no saving throw made, so the new damage vs multiple targets rule doesn't apply. Magic missile effectively works the same as Scorching Ray, but without an attack roll. One roll of the die per spell - so one missile will do bonus damage. The same as...

The correct thing to do when presented with a strange edge case like this would have been to errata the rule, rather than double down on RAW over RAI for 10 years. Buts that's just me being salty about how crawford did things.

The only way to accommodate the lore of every D&D setting at once is to give no lore at all.