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Unfortunately what "good" means is often hard to know and can run the risk of becoming a tautology. Certainly, but I think game companies are always trying to crack the much larger base of players to get them to buy books, which is one reason for splatbooks. While White Wolf was most famous...

Yeah, you need to have enough things to do so it feels like there are tangible and important actions to take that aren't just repetitive, but not so many that the game bogs down in meaningless character sheet searching, which is one of the banes of higher level play. Oh I agree, effective PC...

Those are some very good examples. Also, if the puzzle is written in a somewhat abstract way that involves rolling skill checks. I've used puzzles that involved checks and player deduction. For example I recently did a puzzle lock that had the Towers of Hanoi but allowed the PCs to interact with...

True, though they're not really big sellers the way that I think companies wanted splatbooks to be since nearly everybody might buy a splatbook but only folks who GM tend to buy adventures. I certainly agree about the downsides of rules lawyering but in many ways, the rules specificity was an...

Yes, and of course game companies do need things to sell. I totally understand the desire to provide a very comprehensive set of rules, but, like anything else, it can go too far and become abused. Not enough rules? It's left to the DM and DMs vary. Too many rules? The rules lawyers and power...

For some players more choices that "left or right down the hallway" is about as much as they can/want to handle. Three or four plot hooks is too much for them. I've seen choice cycling, where they start looking at option A, then B, then C, then back to A. This can happen for a variety of...

Yes, definitely. I think the skill challenge is a better replacement for a straight out puzzle, or else the DM should allow for different methods of some sort to achieve the goal, with the puzzle being one obstacle. The puzzle could be one way, but there may be others, such as a sequence of...

This is a very important point. A group that has some plot followers and some sandboxers is going to have a recipe for discontent as the poor DM tries to keep both happy. That's pretty sandboxy!

For a while there WotC marketing hype was hardcore about creating that "shared experience" and whatnot. It was kind of sad in a lot of ways---trying to catch lightning in a bottle again, I guess, or the numerous attempts at "remaking" Woodstock. You could run them as narrative plot if the DM...

Sandboxing certainly requires quite a bit of the DM and players both. If they don't have it---be it lack of experience, inclination, or time---it's not a good match for that particular group. IMO a lot of the bad rep of railroading comes from the propensity to think that there "needs" to be a...

The sandbox style is indeed held up as the holy grail by a certain type of grognard, but for many groups I'm not sure it is. I've run a much more sandbox-y game and played in several. I like it a lot but it really needs to be run by a DM and players for whom it is a good match. One of my...

Absolutely. I've been GMing for a long time too and I totally agree that I've never felt I've stopped learning. It's not easy to learn how to do, although there are a whole lot of resources now that can really help, such as a number of really good YouTube channels. I don't know that playing is a...

It's certainly one of those "know your table" things, but I really dislike "roll on this chart... who knows what's going to happen?" abilities or ones that induce a lot of friendly fire, especially when they're the core of a build's play. Were I in the DM's chair, I'd certainly thumbs down a...

That's true, but many designers write adventures with an eye towards "DM proofing" the story, which often leads right toward the Chattanooga Choo Choo.

Agreed, and to add to that, what "a manageable few" means will differ. To me there's a range of sweet spots between "essentially no choices, or at least no interesting ones" and "so many choices I can't keep them all straight." This is going to be quite group-dependent as well and also depends...

The problem I have with it is not that I can't wrap my head around the concept, although I'm not sure I like it a ton, but I'm skeptical of the implementation. Having to roll on tables and do a bunch of damage to the rest of the party is frequently a source of irritation to other players.

Well one justification for these legendary characters to have divine descent is simply for them to be high level, hence the level limit, which I think would do the job pretty well. For instance, PCs in a heroic type campaign would be levels 11-20 while other characters would be levels 1-10 (and...

Herc seemed to have some decided ill-fortune working on him due to Hera's ire. One thing that's very characteristic of Greek heroes is that they have some kind of nearly-supernatural fatal flaw working on them. That's not RAW of course, because 5E really doesn't have a way to build flaws in, but...

There really aren't bloodline feats, but a lot of the character races kind of are bloodlines, as are some of the classes. Half elf, half orc, aasimar, and tiefling certainly qualify as bloodlines of humanity that are shifted due to intermixing. You could fairly easily posit the other races are...

Having some kind of divine descent is characteristic of many mythological heroes (and villains) and the stories focus on them, not on "mere" humans and is a very good accounting of being able to be high level. In my view the easiest way to handle this is to turn down the non-divine blooded...