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Yeah, anachronistic or otherwise out-of-place puzzles bother me too so I do try to stick to puzzles that could reasonably have been created (and solved) by a denizen of my world.

Hey all, I'm just wondering if anyone knows of any resources for helping fill out the mundane details of a medieval town or city. Something that runs over the basics of what all cities would have (access to fresh water, a town watch, etc) and perhaps also some kind of charts for rolling up...

I'd say the problem lies with intelligence being a rolled stat, not with RPGs in general. In my system PCs are as smart as the players want to play them to be. It avoids all these issues of intelligent players rping blockheads or blockheads rping geniuses.

If the assassin was in the PC's party with the specific intent of assassinating them in their sleep, how did he not notice the PC disappearing into the woods for an extended period of time to hide his tent?

I would echo the other's sentiments. What is most important here is whether or not your players are having fun. If they are having fun proposing wacky rule changes and outlandish character designs, they are making your job as DM easier if anything, because they are not sitting back passively...

Haha the sentient road story is awesome. My own is the Ranger of the party spots Cave Bear tracks on the road and convinces everyone to track it to its lair, hoping to get himself a new, tough-as battle companion. After resolving that, mangled corpses in the cave leads players to investigate...

Hey Graham... do I know this genius? =p

Any world that has a history of thousands upon thousands of years doesn't need to explain itself. Literally anything could happen in a timespan like that; all you need to do is establish for the characters that they are exploring something ancient and abandoned and forgotten and they know that...

How about durability rules for weapons and armour and other equipment? It's a pain in the ass to bookkeep and worse, do players really want to be in a situation where the weapon they rely on not only to make their character useful in combat, but to make their character 'cool' in a role-play...

I pretty much only read Penny Arcade - Space Beans, Red Racers and Team Liquid - StarCraft 2 and Brood War Pro Gaming News as far as gaming goes. Well and this site of course =p

Yes, agreed with this philosophy completely. When I'm designing a typical adventure/campaign, generally I start with the overall setting/situation, insert one or more villains with specific goals and plans to achieve them which will be accomplished if the PCs do not act appropriately. Then the...

Always carry enough healing potions to pick up the cleric's slack if he's the one to drop first, and spread them around the party members. My group got effed in the a last night when they realized that all 9 of their backup healing potions were in packs on the pack horse in the middle of a...

I generally try to make most adventures and encounters difficult enough that TPK is at least a possibility even if the players are working together perfectly; if they are bickering among themselves TPKs become practically inevitable. Nothing unites a group of players and characters like abject...

Here's another fun door opening puzzle. The players locate 6 gemstones or keystones throughout the dungeon, and come across a door upon which is a 4x4 grid of sockets for the gemstones to be placed in. Placing a single gemstone into a socket does nothing. However, when a second gemstone is...

Well, normally when I run adventures the PCs are under severe time constraints that preclude them going back to town or taking an 8 hour rest mid-mission. When I ran this puzzle with my gaming group, it was an aside; they had discovered an old abandoned Dwarven ruin in the back of a Cave Bear's...

whups... I was going through your old DM advice thread which was mostly all from 2002 I guess while reading current posts here at the same time and I guess I got mixed up and replied to this ancient thread not realizing it wasn't a current one lol

Well I found a few hobby shops in Shanghai and Guangzhou that had DDM but the price and selection wasn't any better than you could get on ebay and wouldn't put me in touch with their suppliers. I know that there's a factory in Guangzhou somewhere that makes these things but I can't find any...

chain mail in our homebrew rules has damage reduction 2 vs bludgeoning, 1 vs piercing, and 4 vs slashing =p The problem I had when trying to homebrew automatic weapons was the sheer amount of dice rolling you'd need to avoid just hand-waving it. Either you just hand wave and have the weapon...

Seeing as how I actually live in China, I think I'll do some serious research and see if I can figure out what's become of the factories that are producing these things.

As a real life grappler I have a lot of sympathy to its potential effectiveness. The other way to go is the standard 2 handed great sword if I roll a high strength character, or bastard sword/katana if I roll up a lower strength guy (and dip a bit into rogue for sneak attack to make up the...