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You can have traps provide interesting choices without resorting to pixel-ing or chronic searching. You just provide information that can be acted on. Describe hints and clues to the existence of traps and allow players to interact with the environment. Tomb of Horrors isn't a great example as...

Long term means that the effect becomes an element that adds to the game experience that it changes the parameters of your normal baseline that causes a non-trivial means of mitigation. It is the consequences of the game result and the difficulty in overcoming them. There is no difference...

Not sure I understand, but my interpretation is that you are making a comparison between being cowardly and sneak thief vs. being heroic and facing evil. I think being heroic and being smart are not mutually exclusive. If you are facing a bunch of evil cultists and instead of charging headlong...

I would rather remove raise dead from the game. But some games attach long term side effects from being raised from the dead which makes it more of a consequence. I agree that raise dead should have some significant consequence. That being said. Getting your character killed is something of a...

Charm Person, Monster, etc... return it to its original form. A long term effect with a save frequency based on the intelligence of the creature (once per day for high int, once per month for low int). It is a shame that its only 1 hour? So much lost opportunity for tragic disaster.

Deadly is indeed challenging. When the game is more deadly, more thought, care, and strategy needs to be considered in order to succeed. With games like B/X and OSR games, which have death at zero hit points, save or die poisons, and minimal hit points, you have to approach the game from beyond...

Meh, if you can't deal with your players upending your campaign, why are you running it in the first place? The players come first. They are more important than your cannon or your precious NPCs. If your players can't or are discouraged from completely destroying your campaign then you are...

Looking at the game from a big picture view. I'd say 5e is definitely one of the less challenging versions of the game. Mainly because of the stakes of choice in 5e seem to have been purposefully reduced. I attribute this to a number of factors: Ubiquity of magic and spells. Magic is easily...

We're playing it by ear. Trying to stay safe and keep our weekly game going. Anyone in my group who feels unsafe traveling to the game is free to stay at home. We'll put them up on a laptop. I think just being cognizant of your own personal health and keeping some boundaries and distance is...

I don't have too many nerfs. I do rein in uses of some spells to more reasonable levels, though (more about interpretation). For example: Thaumaturgy can cause an unlocked door to fling open. This means a normal locked household door. This doesn't apply to heavy, stuck dungeon doors. Mage...

The rules include the reaction table for when the DM does not know the typical reaction of the monsters. The "many monsters instantly attack" applies to set piece or placed encounters that are usually lairs. In these situations, monsters will attack to defend their lairs. When rolling random...

I normally run max hit points at first level. I am also playing sporadically in another B/X game with the same rule. Otherwise, I run my games RAW. As I mentioned, RAW implies using the Reaction table which results in a lot more variety in encounter context than straight-up fights. By RAW, 90%...

I play such a system because sometimes I want the challenge. The struggle vs. adversity. Other times I want a more causal game of kicking butt, and 5e works well for that. Conan, Fafhrd, Elric would probably be name level characters in OD&D terms. In old school D&D you don't start as Conan...

A common house rule in Labyrinth Lord / B/X is max hit points at 1st level. I'm an experienced DM in OSR games... my guess is that the DM just decided to have the wild man attack with surprise. In which case that sucks. But the rules make that situation extremely unlikely. In B/X (from which...

If I remember, race as class was introduced in B/X. OD&D had separate race and class, however I think dwarves and halflings were limited to fighter only and elves had a weird thing where they can switch between fighter and magic user on a session by session basis?

5e is a good game, but it's not going to give you an old school experience. I've tried, and the conclusion that I reached is that it is simply much better to start with an old school game and tweak it to your needs than it is to try to strip down 5e. You end up with the worst of both worlds...

I've never played OD&D. The closest I ever got was a Swords & Wizardry Whitebox game I joined in on, online. Also I ran a Delving Deeper one-shot (which is a much closer clone to OD&D... S&W takes some luxuries with the rules system). I do run a ton of B/X and equivalent retro-clones. I...

@Reynard I totally agree with you on downtime. Having downtime activities and actions can really make a sandbox campaign come alive. Especially, when downtime activities can be used to inject exposition or provide information about the world. Downtime can also create hooks and interactions...

The need for sleep and time for a Long Rest are distinct by rules anyway. Default rules is a Long Rest is a period of time at least 8 hours. If an Elf Trances for 4 hours, they still need 8 hours of downtime in order to take a Long Rest. So, when extending Long Rest times, the time for a Long...

Your Hexcrawling: Wilderness Survival and Encounters product is very instrumental and inspirational in helping me figure out my own procedure. Thank you for publishing it. I highly recommend it.