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As a DM I play the scenes out in my head when my mind idles. I do a few passes of what is going to happen until I have it all straight in my head. Then I cut and paste stat blocks and I wing it from there.

I’ve never really used downtime as a defined mechanic. One if my players resized some armour and another did a load of sparing but most of the time they’re not interested in down time.

Yeah, but they can also exist independently. All part of the multi dimensional weirdness. I don’t pretend to understand how it works in my game.

I had the party discuss plans with the village bosses- my players are not very tactical and would have marched off in straight line on foot hoping to run into the camp without ever thinking about whee it might be. Locals could give them tips on the terrain and such. I also had a tinker in town...

I turned them into Aurak draconians and had the whole rise of Tiamat actually the rise of Tiamat AND Takhisis from Krynn. And I had none of that travelling for weeks on end, either.

It would not be for me because it’s a bit fiddly. But gaminess is not a problem: after all it is a game. I ran into similar problem. I solved it by saying that after every 2 encounters the PCs get the normal benefits of a short rest. After every 6 sessions you get the benefit of a long rest...

Crikey. That’s a lot of house rules. I only really three or four in the games I run. That must have been some piece of work to do.

Why not scoop their brain out and put it in a construct?

I’ve always loved using Hags but I don’t like curses in the same was as I don’t like diseases. Hobbling a PC is never fun. But I let them curse npcs all the time. Cursing npcs is a great plot point. Which is all it needs to be.

Yeah, that’d do it 👍

I give Int or Dex bonus to Initiative. At level 1 PCs get 2x Max hit die + Con. After every 2 encounters the PCs get the benefits of a short rest. After every 6 they get the benefits of a long rest. Absent players get full xp.

In older editions there were a lot of save or die situations. Poison would kill you stone dead, paralysis and petrification were all basically instant death. This is just an example of that. Your house rule is better for modern games, though.

Yeah but you would not unbalance the game if you had dwarf stats for Carrot is the point I meant to make. The only real difference is that he would be a really tall character with dwarf stats.

Over 30 years of playing I’ve DM’d for four stable groups (more than six months or so) and two or three adhoc groups at uni. The longest is my current group (ex pats from the previously mentioned groups) with over three years continuous play time.

I wouldn’t have a problem with it. It’s just a name change. Pretty much what was going on with Carrot from disk world. He was a dwarf.

I’d say be open and honest with him. Turning a fun distraction from the day to day grind into part of the day to day grind is not good.

If the DM is making what sounds like demands on the players time when it is inappropriate it is important to be open and honest from the outset and say ‘that’s not what I want from a game’. Is the new DM new to the group?

What I do is say the PCs get the benefits of a short rest every 2 encounters and the benefits of a long rest after six encounters. It's a bit gamey but it works in practice.

Who wants to role play dying of a disease?

I like being able to make the things I have in my imagination kinda come true.