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Hm, yes OK. It can be fun, depends how it's handled. But I still think this kind of thing should 'compete' for adventure space within the combat pillar. If someone were writing an adventure with a guide of equal parts all three pillars, they shouldn't think "OK need more exploration, better...

I think we can come up with a better definition that gets at what many examples of fun exploration pillar play have in common. Obviously not everything you can do in D&D besides combat and social interaction is worth spending time on, so we want to exclude some things. The three pillars image...

I was looking at the explanation of the "three pillars" of D&D (5e PHB, p.8), and I was disappointed to find that exploration is not well-defined at all. "Exploration includes both the adventurers' movement through the world and their interactions with objects and situations that require their...

I'm generally a "kill the PCs and let the players sort it out" DM, but getting killed while running away is embarrassing as well as frustrating. Try not to punish running away, or your players won't try it anymore. It's similar to having trusted NPCs betray them. If you do that too often, they...

I think you're exaggerating a bit here. I think anyone at an "obese" BMI should be dieting with or without exercise, and anyone at an "overweight" BMI should be dieting + exercise. There's some research showing that if you're overweight and muscular, you don't have the same risk of...

Some very interesting posts in this thread, thanks everyone. I think I have decided that I don't really want an AP-style plotline. I just want a very simple goal to direct the sandboxing throughout, like putting together the Rod of Seven Parts or something like that. I'm also going to put more...

What kind of results are you looking for? If it's weight loss, diet is most important for that. Exercise has been shown repeatedly to not be effective for weight loss, probably because it makes people hungry so they just eat back the calories burned over their next couple of meals.

Every statement here is wrong. I'm sure the author could have discussed the women who contributed to early D&D without lying about old editions. In AD&D female human strength is capped at 17 (vs. 18 for non-Fighter human males). There is no "Beauty" attribute; reading the link provided as the...

Another problem with Skyrim is the incentives for sandboxing and for following the main quest are totally messed up. You get the best treasure for working on the main quest while the dungeons are full of random garbage. You can do a quest for the Jarl and get a sweet flaming heirloom axe, or you...

If you don't have one, why not? (Don't mean to sound too antagonistic; we all know the health benefits of exercise but so few of us do it regularly). I commute by bicycle, which is an hour to an hour and a half of cycling a day for me, depending on traffic and my energy levels. I also go to...

Can you say more about how these work?

I'm thinking about how to combine the sandbox and adventure path in a way that combines the best aspects of each (or at least the aspects I want of each). When I say sandbox, I have in mind an overland hexcrawl seeded with site-based adventures, region-based random encounters and civilized...

This is an OSR house rule, not an actual old D&D rule. Actually IIRC it was used in Dave Arneson's campaign back in the day but it never made it into any of the official D&D books. I tried it briefly but didn't like it much. Felt more like meta-game money laundering than "living it up".

I may post some more thoughts on the broader concept later, but to start: Anybody explicitly balance only certain plot-relevant encounters to party level? I.e. most encounters are in a status quo sandbox, not adjusted to party level, but main storyline encounters (or adventuring days/small...

That's cool but I would prefer if this sort of thing were set in place at the beginning of the game, so the players have the satisfaction of saving up for something rather than just waiting for the DM to make them an offer designed to remove a certain proportion of whatever gold they have. But...

This is a cool set of tables for determining local "politics & peculiarities". Very much in the style of the 1e DMG.

There's Call of Cthulhu and the Dreamlands. I've never used the Dreamlands sourcebook as such, but the CoC scenarios I've run with time/space travel were always a big hit.

The default 1e game basically is the West Marches, except with maps (AFAICT West Marches doesn't actually use maps, which is a bit lame)

Maybe try social encounters that are goal-oriented (e.g. PCs must get something they need through dealmaking or trickery) rather than drama-oriented (e.g. PCs are conciliators between two NPCs fighting)

Are we allowed to blame the group of people who were the designers of 5e? That's the group I was blaming.