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I have done milestone leveling and grew unhappy with it because it did seem to be arbitrarily associated with the hoop the PCs had to jump through (especially when running published adventures!) I think I’ll try something more finer grained in future. XP for accomplishments (major and minor)...

I guess some DMs like to be the giant watchmaker in the sky. Set the sandbox in motion and let the chips fall where they may. The prep effort, though, just seems immense…

It took me 4 years of DMing to finally feel comfortable enough with running the game that I could put aside published adventures and continue with something of my own devising. What turned out to be a liberating feeling would have been terrifying at an earlier point.

What I don’t understand is why people expect DMs to be stellar from session 1. DMing is a hard skill to learn and takes a lot of practice. Getting to a point where you feel comfortable enough to just roll with the players whims takes time. Beginner DMs need simple linear adventures to get...

My group wanted to go on adventures and they were happy to go chasing the plot hooks I dangled in front of them. Does that mean I railroaded them? Probably, according to some here, but instead I think I provided the fun they wanted.

Hmm how about the wizards can see spells growing fainter in their spellbooks? The wizards could make a check (the DC getting harder the fainter it gets) to read the faint writing? That would nicely foreshadow things and cause a sense of urgency? Seems like lower level spells would go first as...

I used to be a big supporter of those but the lack of being able to wiki-edit the first post to build an index in the forum update, and my growing disdain for WotC adventures (I haven’t bought one in a while) made me give up.

Unfortunately that all sounds par for the course for WotC adventures. My approach, these days, is to use the adventure as inspiration for an interesting story and assume that the adventure as written is unrunnable. Now, with my story in mind, I’m much better prepared to run the adventure for my...

My guess is Eberron. I don’t know why, but it’s been a few years.

Seems like the perfect case for spoiler tags surely?

So how do I square that with the earlier comment from another poster that their VO work had really dropped off?! ;)

Also, there’s been this pandemic? We’ve all been doing less over the past 15 months!

I can see that. I tried to watch Colville run a game and his style really didn’t work for me at all!

Love all that, but to my mind the beta stories are the PC stories. Each PC should get a chance to resolve their conflict, with the rest of the party, before they finally engage with the alpha story. The minor stories are the adventures and junior bosses along the way to the alpha and beta stories.

Bounded accuracy and advantage/disadvantage. And it’s great for zero to hero adventures.

I want to try something else, 7th Sea, for example. But getting my head around the mechanics of action resolution in that game is hard. I’ve been listening to an excellent podcast (The Writer’s Room) that uses the system, but I still can’t say I understand it! :) So that’s a big hurdle. There’s...

Well I imagine they will be well compensated for their VO work for the show now that Amazon is involved and the executive producer credits will be interesting.

I get alignment for monsters, it’s a good starting point for their motivation. But what purpose does it serve for players. For clerics and paladins, sure I can see that veering from Good might cause their gods to question their devotion (or whatever alignment the god cares about) but for most...

Seems like a very smart play by the CR team. Showcase an apparently stellar GM, use “Matt as a player” as an additional hook, and give their channel some content while the core group regroups and Matt has some time to get a starting scenario (and initial big bad threat) worked out for campaign...

Don’t start big, just think of a simple adventure that can be run as one-shot with pre-gen characters. A simple fetch quest would do. This is teaching them the game so don’t overthink it. If they enjoy it and want more then you can think about making characters and a longer story.