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A big question is how common the threats are? People tend to defend against catastrophic losses only if they feel they're likely to happen. For a real world example, after the big St Louis flood of 1993 receded, millions of dollars were spent building homes and commercial property in land that...

Agreed (white on Safari). On the other hand, on my monitors at home I just can't read the normal skin with the contrast that's there, so at least white lets me read enworld.

When DMing, I have my laptop to the side of the screen, running my timetracker (Mystara calendar), with DM notes and XP tracker spreadsheet. The last is a nice touch, because I can give instantaneous XP whenever we end the session, instead of having to calc. When playing, I have my laptop...

Well, sort of. You can do certain things: change a computed value which ends up with an untyped bonus. Give yourself extra feats. Add money, gear, etc. You can give yourself powers you don't have the prereqs for. But you can't create new powers and have them computable. You can create...

I'm playing a 4e game with all the added splats, and running a Rules Cyclopedia game.

We've had this problem to some degree with both of the campaigns I'm currently in. First thing we do is just call out to everyone and state the obvious: "Hey guys, I notice we're having a lot of trouble meeting regularly. Is this campaign not doing it for people? Or are we having scheduling...

I can understand that in print, but the advantage of digital was supposed to be that the content could be more timely.

Resurrecting this thread. I just released my first one to my group. No responses yet on whether they liked it, but I'm hoping it gets some interest. We play every other week, so I'm going to release these on the off weeks, to spice up the game. Eventually, I hope to expand it to include some...

That's exactly why it makes me feel better about their direction. Wizards promised tons of stuff which they couldn't deliver. Now they're sharing info without promising anything. That tells me they're being a lot more realistic about their capabilities, which makes me feel better that they'll...

Agreed, this is very good news. I also liked the emphasis on campaign management tools they mentioned, since that's one of my current big problems. If they can find a way to organize so much information, including info they did not publish, I'll fall at their feet.

The box idea is good when you have a project, a goal in mind and are researching and accumulating ideas on what to do with it. That's how Twyla Tharp uses them. My case is a bit different. I have a large corpus of information that could be used in different ways on many different projects...

There's an explosion of RPG material out right now. Between freely distributable adventures, purchased PDFs, subscription services like DungeonADay.com and DDI, and the large backlog of print I've included over the years (including Shadis, Polyhedron, and Dungeon), I realized that I have tons...

Take Athletics. As the majority of the responses here have indicated, Acrobatics is almost always going to be considered by DMs to be more risky and less useful than athletics, because it doesn't spell out anything in the PHB and they don't like the overlap with Athletics. I've had a hard...

For me, the DDI isn't worth the money right now. I don't DM 4e, so none of the prep tools are useful to me. Neither is Dungeon. My DM doesn't allow anything from Dragon, or from any of the newer books except on a case by case basis, so both the Compendium and magazine are of very limited use...

I think an assumption that's been left unstated here is that a DM should enjoy the prep work, and that enjoyment helps mitigate the fact that the DM does more prep work than players. In order for that to work, the players have to agree to participate in a game that the DM will enjoy preparing...

I had the Sprint variant of that. Yeah, it sucked. Newer ones have bigger screens with higher res and better web browsers, so they might work out better. But for my purposes, I still prefer having a bigger screen, or a few big pieces of paper, over using my iPhone.

I use a Macbook Air as part of my screen when DMing. It has an XP tracker so I can give instant XP at the end of the sessions, a Mystara calendar app so I can keep track of what time of day and season it is, and a set of hyperlinked notes (using DevonThink) I use for additional prep or...

The question is, what would you do? The linear presentation of information is something that is well understood. It's straightforward to put together a document, and publish it in a format that is widely supported (well or less well) on a lot of platforms. Things like search, bookmarks, and...

It sounds like you haven't used it for this purpose. Think about how you would use XML and XSLT (and presumably XSL:FO for printed output) to produce chapter 2 of the 4e PHB. You need to reproduce the printed layout exactly, including the text wrap around images, high-quality typesetting, etc...

We're still playing 4e because it has inertia, and we have not yet hit consensus on playing a different game, though we've started talking about it. As far as it feeling like Mentzer, we also have one of those games running, and none of us think they have the same feel.