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During my many years of gaming I've noticed two factors in particular that influences player involvement, both with the world and their characters: 1) Expectation of survival. If you have a high expectation of survival, then you dare to get involved. If you have a low expectation, then you...

Just increase some appropriate numbers on the monster's stat sheet...

Exactly. All that the min-maxer has won is either ruining the game for himself (too easy) or for the non-min-maxer (too hard)...

"Do their absolute best" sounds to me like min-maxing. In my experience, min-maxing usually leads to one-trick ponies. These can be defeated in two ways: either simply scale the opposition, as I wrote previosly in the thread, or by adding a greater variance of challenges. If suddenly a majority...

"Power creep" usually refers to combat ability. It's easy to for the DM to handle any given combat power creep, since he is in full control of the world - just compensate by increasing whatever monster property is necessary. Players hitting too well? Just add a bit to monster defense. Players...

The description linked to by the OP mentions "simple" in these two sentences: and I think it is a bit tenuous to draw too many conclusions from those two, but I assume that is what's referred to.

112. In a busy dirt road intersection a ring of toadstools has sprouted. Tiny footprints can be seen on their caps. 113. Garlands of flowers are hanging from a nearby tree. One of the garlands is shaped like a noose. 114. An unidentified woman clad purely in white has been seen walking the...

101. A man is hiding in the bushes, as a young fop is declaring his undying love to a fair maiden on a balcony. 102. Someone has been writing graffiti on house walls in the city, but instead of the common four-letter words, it seems to be geometrical drawings and partially concluded...

Exactly. Casting those fans who no longer fit your "vision" as trolls, and then employing scatological humiliation on them is so petty and vindictive that it is astounding. It's also arrogance in the same class as BP executives ("I want my life back"). That's why it definitely is a major...

Thinking about this: YouTube - A 4th Edition Interview with a Red Dragon (and his cronies) at 1:30. If not dragon dung, then what is it? .

When they used an apparently hefty initial advertising budget from Hasbro to commission a commercial where they dumped dragon dung on previous fans. I'm sure they now wish they had spent that money on something that could be reused down the line to promote the game in a positive manner...

I can testify to how tense and intense things can be in Starfox' campaign, and how having the luxury of caring about more than your character's survival can make things much more interesting. For example, the other night an NPC my character was interested in got lured into the embrace of what...

Anything with heavy preconditions enforces preplanned builds instead of characters organically grown as reaction to the world and in-world events. Pre-conditioned feats and feat chains are just as guilty as prestige classes and paragon paths. When I played 3.X, my favorite part of leveling...

Getting to solve the scenario your way is so worth it. The other week, in a home-brew I am playing in, the party's swordsman used sheer persistence to find the Big Bad ahead of time, which meant that we ran that encounter before the minor encounters that were supposed to lead up to it, and...

Earthdawn had this in spades. The good items in Earthdawn were called "thread items". These had several ranks of effects in them, so that the item could be improved over time. To unlock a new rank, you had to: *) Research a certain bit of the item's prehistory, and/or: *) Perform a certain...

My DM (Starfox on these boards) devised a simple system for 3.5 that: A) Emphasized the use of lower level spells over higher level spells. B) Got rid of the 15-min adventuring day. C) Limited the wizard's ability to "alpha-strike". It was simply a "spell level recharge system". After...

IMHO, fantasy literature handles it by simply *not* being reduced to merely "killing things and taking their stuff". Combat is used now and then as plot points, but it is rarely the main theme in the stories. Just watched some of the "Oh my Goddess" anime and read some of the manga. There you...

Very true. To me, the very core of pen-and-paper RPGs is both making meaningful decisions, and seeing the consequences of your actions, with the outcome serving as input for further decisions. When the consequences of your actions are just ticking down some hidden tally, whether it is a...

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Not all share that point of view, but you are not alone in it either... ;)