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I'd be inclined to say that it would have to do with two things: (1) What gameplay preference/aesthetic they're able to enjoy by playing in the capacity of GM that they're not enjoying when playing in the capacity as a player (or that they're not enjoying when they run some other game that they...

I've been reading that thread with some interest on and off in between grinding through email for work. (Music festival season is busy season.) Riffing a bit on some of @pemerton's subsequent posts in this thread, for those who aren't familiar with the term, neo-trad is described in reasonable...

My guiding principle is that I as GM am a facilitator of an enjoyable and fun gameplay experience (by the standards of hobby gaming) for myself and for the other players, according to my aesthetics of play and their aesthetics of play. Everyone is responsible for this to some lesser or greater...

Solidly entertaining. I'd have given it a 7.5, but it's good enough to squeak in at 8 if I have to round to a whole number (which I do).

At least it's not Alf in Pog form.

@TwoSix No, I don't think any of the posts critical of @Celebrim's positions are over the top. Celebrim comes across as trying to assert their personal beliefs - not even necessarily personal gameplay experiences! - as something approaching settled fact. (That may not be what they intend, but...

From Sigil and Beyond: "A fool, especially one who got himself into the mess when he should have known better." (I still have all my old Planescape stuff.)

Better yet, Fruitopia!

I dunno, out of all of those complaints about 5e the only thing I concur is a genuine flaw in the implementation as such is how 5e handles non-proficient saving throws; to my mind, it causes it to be both out of line with every other single edition of D&D, when you take 4e's "NADs" into account...

Fighters (when they're a distinct martial profession/class/category) are, to my mind, masters of arms and armour, and of combat tactics and techniques. Ideally, player character fighters ought to have features that mechanically instantiate this concept or theme. As such, I'm of the mind that...

So, apropos of resource management, I've recently started into playing Horizon Zero Dawn, and it does feature extensive foraging and crafting - and yes, tracking individual arrows. An interesting thing about HZD is the only thing you have to keep track of (at least by the point in the game I've...

I don't know about Chainmail, but I know there are wargames where you roll what amounts to a saving throw against your own defensive rating to avoid taking hits - e.g. naval combat defences in World in Flames, for instance; in that game, as with old-school AC, a lower defence rating is better...

How about having what amounts to two different poisons: poison that does extra damage when you fail a saving throw (if you want it to be a consistent threat across levels, make the damage a fraction of your maximum hit points instead of a fixed damage expression), or half as much on a...

I'm inclined to say that if you're only having fun for half an hour of a three-hour TTRPG session, something has gone very wrong? Not for nothing, I think, are TTRPGs part of the "hobby game" niche. Hobbies generally can include model assembly, gardening, cross-stitch, and so on, none of which...

I much prefer italics for that sort of thing, myself (although I've been known to overuse that, too). But italics aren't possible on Facebook (and I'm not sure about Twitter), so capitialising letters it is! I suppose at least he's not using CamelCase, which I've seen more than one rant devolve...

I haven't read up on Dark Sun in ages, but it comes across as (or as if it could easily be) Permian-Triassic Boundary, the game setting. And that might be one way to take it - a world doomed to nearly-total devastation, until the forces driving same finally go away (*), when it can finally...

Mechanically speaking, a 5e light cleric and a wizard both casting fireball is not quite the same as a light cleric and wizard each having their own fireball-like spell, with few meaningful differences between the two. (Within the fiction, of course, there's no reason to believe the two...

I voted that stat blocks should be as long as they need to be; realistically, however, only the most legendary of legendary monsters should go over a page - and even then I'd prefer that they be "multi-phase" monsters (like the spoilered enemy below) so each phase fits in a stat block that is no...

Not a D&D story, but apropos of this, I was in a gaming circle that played a lot of Here I Stand (the card-driven Reformation Era game) for a spell several years back. Anyway, my brother, the Anglican priest, would always want to play the combined Protestants/English side. (We usually had four...