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Actually, it can be very simple: make it so that everything is a regular action. For instance, "two-weapon attack" itself might be an action. Redesign the benefits and the cost so that the choice between a single or a two weapon attack is not trivial. Bonus action spells become regular action...

I have a leather bag (which originally came with a bottle of rhum inside - it was a gift) where I keep all my RPG dice, which are all normal polyhedral dice, most of which are 20+ years old though occasionally I've bought a few more. I simply pull out any dice from that bag when I play, no...

Congratulations, have a good time!

Yeah I would say they are essentially fudging games, although on the other hand the DM may still roll dice and not fudge on those.

I definitely think that changing on the fly something in the story, map or encounters (compared to what you had originally planned) falls into the fudging category. An example could be, changing the location of something important because the PCs decided to go in a completely different...

Since a very long time, I don't bother anymore doing worldbuilding stuff that nobody cares about except the worldbuilder themselves, and I have much better things to spend time on, if I want to improve my games. I largely let deities stay undefined until something comes up within the game...

1) I ran it a long time ago and I remember it turned out to be quite a drag go through the dungeon. If you like old school slow dungeon crawling it'll be ok, otherwise if you prefer a faster pace, consider fast-forwarding the exploration of corridors and go straight into the rooms, and make...

That is normal paranoia, but their Wisdom/Insight is there to give them confidence. If a PC has a streak of excellent roll results on sensing lies and still chooses to disbelieve everyone even if registering as honest, they are probably just going to botch quests or waste resources by doing the...

The players always decide, the DM doesn't tell them what they believe or not, it tells them whether the NPC is lying or telling the truth (or that it's inconclusive), and that itself may or may not be true. The high NPC score is still their defence against attempts by PCs to figure it out...

Ideally neither, but rather a "web" of interconnecting quests running in parallel and crossing each other.

You do what suits you, of course. Among other things, I don't run anymore campaigns than span many years of characters lives, so nobody lasts long enough in my games to be even able to notice whether there is an underlying ecology or not.

I don't. I absolutely refuse to invest my time in that. To keep a general level of verisimilitude/plausibility is easy enough that it requires no plan, just a minimum of common sense. Beyond that IMXP few people care, and those who care are probably more interested in planning their own than...

A homebrew adventure is an experience shared by half a dozen people. A published adventure is an experience shared by tens of thousands of people.

A good tactic is to say "not this time, but let's try next campaign". If the player has a genuine long-time interest in playing the game, they will put their idea on hold and think of another character. If they choose not to play at all, it means they were interested only in their idea and not...

Frankly I do not even endorse having a "particular desire of lethality". To me it's a red flag for bad DMing. It reminds me of a teacher who has a desired level of pass/fail rate in their course, with no regards to whether the class at hand is made of great students or poor ones.

Why not? I've never been against retroactively changing a PC's characteristics. I am only strongly against the books entitling players to do so, even at a much smaller scale than class and archetype.

yes Yes Until Tasha. And it still interests me as long as it is pre-Tasha.

I've played and run many editions. I did not generally found the rules complexity too difficult to handle. Although 3ed complexity tended to become annoying at high levels, I think the reason was too many stacking bonuses and lingering effects rather than "stacking exceptions". 5ed has been a...

The more you have, the less you do: property steals your time away. As our family wealth grow, I am myself learning to spend less in physical stuff (not counting investments, of course) and more in hiring others to do errands I don't enjoy in my place, so that I have more time for what I do...

That's pretty much where group checks were useful.