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Must? No. Can? Sure.

If players are latching onto unrelated flavor... then don't give out unrelated flavor. Give them the answers they seek when they go asking around for it. Push the story forward. Players enjoy it when the idea they've come up with turns out to be the correct one. So give it to them.

That's a DM who has trained their players to act in that way... by being unable to create scenarios that don't involve trapping every floor tile and door, and making every NPC secretly against everything the PCs want to do. (General) you don't want your players spending ungodly amounts of time...

D&D math is always fungible based on actions, tactics, character building and encounter building. One DM's TPK is another DM's cakewalk, even with the "same math" for an encounter. Now maybe mellored's game would match your beliefs in this matter. I have no idea. But if it does, then yeah...

Yeah, the entire draw. ;-) Now yes, I am being quite jokey and facetious with that response, but in truth your draw in my opinion is going to suffer from several things. First off is that you have two items at the Amber Temple, which is logistically like the last location players are usually...

If you wish to use Keep On The Shadowfell because it was free, but also were afraid that you'd find it to not be a very good adventure... the web blog The Alexandrian went into a very detailed "remix" of this adventure, fixing and changing a whole bunch of things across the entire module to make...

Meh. As a DM I dealt with a 5E14 Bear Totem barbarian. It was a pain, but it was fine. I don't see this monk being any more of a problem than that. The only issue from my perspective would be niche protection... whether there's another party member also taking on the heavily-armored tanking...

There's a reason why the E6 version of D&D has its promotors. ;) One can't have 20 levels of a game where each level has noticeable progression before the identity of a character at 1st level versus them at 20th level has made them virtually unrecognizable.

As you'll see in my post that appeared right below yours where I was responding to someone else... I brought up the concept of the number line that runs between "board game" at one end and "free-form improvisation" at the other end, and that all manner of RPGs fall somewhere on that line. I...

Oh absolutely! I do not dispute the notion that many players enjoy RPGs (and D&D and its derivatives especially) as ostensibly just as board games with a bit of player imagination thrown in for flavor. RPGs sit on the number line between "board game" at one end and "free-form improvisation" at...

I absolutely get what you are saying, and believe that for many, many tables... using the dice to create drama is probably necessary. I just happen to believe that certain DMs can also create true drama for their players just off of their own whims and imaginations as the "All-Seeing Neutral...

Remove the rule from the Monk that says they cannot use armor to use their monk features, and remove the rule that gives a WIS-bonus to AC. That pretty much is it. Not hard at all. The only reason they put the rule in to add WIS to AC is to make up for the fact they aren't gaining any AC...

I happen to be one who has an OSR mentality usually, but uses it playing modern games. I agree wholeheartedly that rules are there to be used only after imagination fails. After all... the entire premise of the RPG is: Player describes and says what they wish to do, DM describes the result...

I think the elf speaking with the paladin alone first would be a good first tactic, especially because you could wrap this up nice and quick if your players really weren't interested in expanding this adventure by trying to track Vidorant down. If the paladin says 'No' though and you need to...

To me, magic is technology. So if the game is going to have the ability to allow spellcasters to cast spells at 7th, 8th, 9th levels of power... then there's really nothing that shouldn't be able to be accomplished via magic. Because to me it makes absolutely no sense to remove basic magic...

We never bother running other players' characters. My tables are made up of a lot of community theater people and thus there are always blocks of the year when one or two players might be gone on certain weeks due to rehearsals and such. So for those sessions the idea is that the character is...

With the Swarm rules. ;)

If only people could be happy with how their game ran while being lazy. ;)

I agree wholeheartedly. I think a lot of us players tend to forget about the possibility of using the Skill system as a de facto "change the world up" system. The fact is there's always a whole bunch of stuff that happens within "the world" that the PCs are living in that do not get translated...

Yeah, I've now run the Village of Barovia three different times (once as part of the original I6, twice with CoS)... and I'm interested in seeing how things might go without immediately going for the Ireena and Madam Eva plots and focusing on other things in the Valley instead.