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There are a few monsters in the FF and MM2 that use different dice to express a lower than 1 in 6 chance to be surprised. Drow are surprised 1 in 8, Duergar 1 in 10 and Svirfneblin 1 in 12. Advantage/Disadvantage is mathematically equivalent across different dice. I honestly never find...

The only time I feel tempted to fudge is when letting the dice stand would seem to retard the players' learning. Like if they have a good reason to think there's a secret door in the area and search for it, but the dice say they don't find anything. But I still resist the urge to fudge. We all...

I don't, although I can see the value of doing that. I think most dungeon maps would benefit from having more information on them. The only reason to keep maps blank apart from the number key I can think of would be to facilitate restocking/re-using them.

I am currently running the TOEE with 1e. My experience with Gygaxian modules has been that levelling does slow as the campaign goes on, but not as much as you might think. Early levels are slower in practice than on paper because of high character attrition and later levels are faster because...

The problem of over-cautious play tends to work itself out as the players play more and realize that the advantage gained is usually insignificant. They don't want the game to be slow and boring; they're just testing the waters from inexperience right now. They will play faster as the game...

After more playtesting I've found that it works great at low levels but it becomes confusing when negative ACs start showing up. At that point it's probably more trouble than it's worth. I imagine it would work better in a Basic or OD&D game where accuracy is "bounded" for longer.

Item saving throws. Also adjust wands so they don't recharge (or roll to destroy every time they're used), rust monsters/oozes/puddings/slimes so they affect magic items, etc. I think it's good for the game for there to be some unexpected turnover in the players' magic items. You as the DM don't...

This is a great (if overlong) review! You might check out bryce0lynch's reviews for his favorite OSR modules here: http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?page_id=844

One contributing factor is that Morrus needessly moves all homebrew/fan creation stuff into separate forums.

I mean everyone playing to find out what happens, including the DM (as opposed to the DM writing the story beforehand). I think the adventure design procedures in Moldvay's Basic D&D are the best yet written but would need to be expanded and recontextualized for 5e. Most new DMs today have a...

Too much emphasis on designing rules that automagically match what DMs would naturally do without reading the books. Sometimes the natural thing DMs tend to do without rules support is bad. I've played adventures written by new DMs. They're not good. The natural adventure mode for new DMs is...

That's actually what it says in the DM rules, pretty much. These are rules to estimate encounter difficulty, NOT rules for generating encounters. A subtle but important distinction. 5e doesn't really have any encounter generation rules. It just says do what you need to for the story and the...

Check out The Sanctuary Ruin and Ironwood Gorge. Really solid modules with a classic feel. Ironwood Gorge is similar to Keep on the Borderlands but with a much more interesting keep. When I ran these I also stuck Hammers of the God inside Ironwood Gorge (if you read the latter module you'll...

You can interact with one object or feature of the environment for free on your turn, so it wouldn't take your action to flip the table.

Well you have a decision point between a handful of maneuvers whenever you have combat focus and it's your turn or one of your triggers just went off. That's pretty complex. That would be fun in a high stakes "boss" combat but tedious in a low stakes "trash" combat. Unfortunately because these...

This class looks like it would be cool at first and then tedious as it slows down combat. Remember that the casters are complex classes, but only some of the time. They need to conserve their daily resources so during attritional "trash" combats they're actually low complexity. A class with...

If you want to track encumbrance by coinweight I recommend using a spreadsheet. Here's mine for an AD&D game. It's got the character info on there and may be confusing, but if you look at the macros you should be able to see how it works. Red = HP, blue = magic, yellow = encumbrance. The first...

I would look for a different copy. I bought one a couple years ago for 1 cent (plus a few bucks the seller folded into the shipping fee). 2e books are inexpensive, or at least they were last time I checked. I'm not a huge fan of it. Too much fluff of dubious utility for my taste. I also don't...

I think pure dungeon-crawling is done better by the early editions of the game. There are many reasons for this but a big one is gp=xp, the old rule where recovering treasure gave you xp immediately. Suddenly a lot of treasure that used to be boring isn't because it ties right into xp. Traps...

Well dungeons suck right now because you're a newbie DM struggling with basic processes like mapping. My biggest piece of advice is to build your game bottom up --learn how to run a good dungeon, then add a story around it. Find out what it takes for a decontextualized dungeon to be fun, get...