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I think exploration is a dumb name for this though. This (as a type of encounter) should be called tricks and traps. What most people want exploration to mean I think is encounters that have less intense stakes and arise more naturally from the game setting, which make the adventure feel more...

I love this stuff (as can be seen from the dungeon I contributed to this thread). I like that James acknowledges that recent editions have lost the vocabulary for this stuff. I agree that this has led to it becoming an implicit part of the game known only to experienced DMs. This is not...

The belief that there are inherent differences between races isn't necessarily racism: it's racialism. Racialism only becomes racism if you believe that these differences entail that one race is superior to another (I am neither a racialist nor a racist, but I've seen Henry Louis Gates make this...

Playtested once and disliked it greatly, and I dislike most of what I read in the packet, and I haven't read anything from the developers since Monte Cook left that excited me, so I conclude that it is probably not for me. @Mistwell is the most irritating 5e homer currently posting, IMO. You...

Dude what. I guess it would be more regular pornography, you know like the enormous amount available for free from some of the most popular websites in the world 24/7 on demand. What could possibly be your point here? Are you implying that there is a dearth of male-oriented erotic material...

My thoughts on Next's exploration rules are here. Carrying capacity in Next is too generous and I dislike how encumbrance doesn't affect exploration speed. DDN characters move so fast per minute in dungeon exploration that random encounters and light source management will almost never be a...

See Appendix C of the 1e DMG. Also: make weak encounters matter by making HP and resource attrition matter, and make tough encounters less likely to lead to a TPK by giving the players warnings and outs, like very powerful but rare magic items that the PCs will only want to use when they're...

Well if this is true and bears out at higher levels, I'll concede that it will be a nice bonus when it comes to using older adventures with Next. Although there will be a lot of basic mechanical conversion involved, swapping stats is easier and takes a lot less higher level system knowledge than...

Anybody have a list or resource for some class-independent optional special abilities usable with pre-3e editions? I would like to concentrate on the ones that let you do something you can't ordinarily do, or break the rules in some dramatic way, rather than the ones that just give you a slight...

The game you play when you want to play the current edition of D&D. DDN will be the cheap chain restaurant pizza of the RPG world. Nobody will think it's great, but most people will think it's good enough. I think you're overstating the similarity between Next and AD&D. I can't imagine this...

Let's say you want to convert a d6 into a d3. Do you roll (3) and then divide the result by two (2)? Or do you visualize the 6 results of the d6 roll, and separate it into three chunks of two (1 and 2=1; 3 and 4=2; 5 and 6=3), then roll and refer to this picture? I always do the second method...

James Wyatt coming across as arrogant and one true wayist, as usual. Re "this isn't fantasy it's science"...what about all of that scientific philology in LOTR? Would it be a more pure fantasy if Tolkien hadn't bothered developing such realistic fantasy languages? AFAICT they have no direct...

I do have all my teammates' emails but I don't know most of them very well. Maybe I'll try to set up a separate practice. I'll see how my less passing, more rebounding strategy works next game first. Probably a good idea--the other thing I'll say is to pass it to me high so i can just reach...

Well we call our own fouls in this league so it wouldn't be difficult to be cheap about that. However if you call fouls for no reason or otherwise be a whiny jerk you lose "spirit points" which affect your team's final standing as much as your win/loss record does. I am hesitant to risk our...

On a lark two friends and I decided to join a basketball rec league. We were matched up with 10 other people to make a team. We've played two games now and were blown out badly each time. I'm doing alright, mostly because I'm 6'4" so I can usually get some baskets just shooting over people. But...

This thread has inspired me to avoid people who are posting here because they've been permabanned from the WotC forums.

Haha no kidding. Well it makes more sense in that context. The line between a "killer dungeon" and a terrible dungeon can be quite thin...

To prove to them that you don't mind if they mess up your plans, mess up your own plans--give them hooks/quests/missions that are obviously in conflict and will lead to mutually exclusive resolutions. Occasionally develop something involving a throwaway NPC that the players know would never...

I like these two dragons and I think they're well-differentiated, with the black dragon being all about rot and decay and the green one being about the sort of constant psychopathic striving for control and expansion that makes me think of an ecosystem thrown out of whack by an invasive species...

Starfox, your post all makes sense to me, but the way I see it the reason that you had trouble with skill challenges is because you and your group approached noncombat scenes as challenges to be won or lost, with character success being associated with player pleasure and character failure being...