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To me, monologuing is a genre convention. Villains are supposed to monologue, often revealing important pieces of information in the process and the heroes argue back. This is like encouraging swinging from chandeliers or sliding down bannisters while holding a turkey leg in one hand and a sword...

Mostly I play with people who are good at that, but there are players who seem to be not able to separate their PC from themselves well or oscillate between doing it and not. Absolutely, or they misinterpreted it. One player I know seems to have an uncanny ability to get some crucial bit of...

I mostly agree, though I've played with groups that handle a lot of player choice better than others. One group I have run for is OK when presented with a few fairly definable options and a relatively strong narrative arc but starts to have trouble when there are too many or when they have to...

Oh, totally. I definitely prefer to let the players make choices, some of which might well be substantially altering of the DM's plans. I don't think that's the only reason to suggest that a player's expressed course of action might be problematic, though, or to take actions that keep the...

The end of Fallout 3 was like that too. My PC had gotten to 100% Rad Resistance between items and perks. He could literally not care about rads! Yet, evidently, not so.

Agreed. I marked myself as rare, but I had a hard time deciding how I should rate myself. I tend to be a bit more directive to keep the pace going, although it may sacrifice some player autonomy in the process. Player autonomy is good but there are times when allowing too much of it can be a...

I use them to show things off screen for the most part, for instance to show what's happening with a villain that the PCs don't see but where I want the players to know about something. This means that they can't specifically affect it and thus it does not undermine the PCs. One needs to be OK...

I have confidence in the TSR upper management of that time to have tried to milk a computer division dry (as they seemed to want to) and destroy it.

Yeah, well part of that is the fact that 5E has a "hole" for a non-caster leader type. It's possible to build one, but you have to work at it, for instance combining Battlemaster Fighter and Mastermind Rogue along with feats. Of course I'm aware of them but I don't think they've ever really...

Not all fighters would be great tacticians. I can see many of them not being more than a great personal scale fighter. A Valor Bard, however, might be a good way of representing someone focused on being an officer or leader. (Not that D&D has really ever done much past individual figure small...

He plays a pretty mean bass, too. :cool:

Eew, ick, eew. I have a notable degree of fish phobia, so even fictional fish are kind of gross. But if you like them, knock yourself out, not in my campaign though!

In my home campaign, I thought this through a good bit. I decided that goblins (including hobgoblins and bugbears) were not inherently evil, but that that was primarily a cultural thing. I had, however, decided they were a fae race, which meant they did have certain inherent tendencies, in...

Those are really good ideas, and a nice differentiation from Lawful Evil, which focuses on conquest, hierarchy, and submission, whereas CE focuses on destruction.

Absolutely. If you're talking about a group that wants a fairly serious game, that kind of manic casual gamer is going to be a source of much frustration. Vice versa, a really serious tactician type (or "real roleplayer" for that matter) in a more casual game is going to be frustrating.

A whole lot of folks have long abandoned the XP system for varieties like milestone advancement or the like---I've not been tracking XP too closely for decades as I recall---so I don't know that's the reason for it or that it's even all that much more common.The new XP system doesn't say you...

Yes, the DMG 1E has a long description of the negative consequences of changing alignment. I think it was getting at the notion of the difficulties one experiences when dealing with a serious crisis of faith or conscience, but, like a lot of things in Ye Olde Days, it got a whole lot of punitive...

As a friend of mine described his cat once, I think "beneath good and evil" captures that. However, I'm not sure that's what True Neutral is. TN requires a choice whereas most animals don't actually make a choice. 4E added the idea of "Unaligned" as being a reasonable alignment for sentient...

The problem is that with serious raiding guilds, the fact that the did what he did screwed them all over. (I've heard that the Leeerroy Jenkins story was staged, too, not sure I know the truth.) In many respects, it's like a player in a TTRPG who seriously violates the norms of the table. If...

I think he's a canonical example of Chaotic Stupid, but there are folks who think that Chaotic Neutral <-> Chaotic Stupid. There are several alignments that don't fit on the chart that nevertheless exist, Chaotic Stupid and Lawful Stupid being canonical examples. My favorite is "Evil Good"...