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Does your world have beggars in the streets? Passer-bys in cities? Guards at the gate? Peasants on the fields? Cobblers, tailors, pottery merchants? Fishermen and bakers? Children playing in a side alley, cats and dogs taking naps in the sun? Birds hunting insects? What purpose do they serve...

"Exploit" has a rather negative cannotation in the computer gameing scene. I don't have a problem with fighters having powers - I run Bot9S, and all the PCs are melee fighters, and have been since oh, 2001 - I have a problem with fighter powers being treated like spell slots. I consider the...

Exactly. For actually running a game with more details than some fluff for dungeon crawls, for running a game that deals with social interaction, cultures, politics and cities, the 4E FRCS fails completely. Not that the 3E books were perfect - for details on cultures I often have to make it up...

That thought that unless something is a challenge it shouldn't be there has everything to do with sandbox play, or rather the opposite of sandbox play. The essence of sandbox play is that things are there not because they serve a game role (aka xp/challenge source, which they can and often do as...

Trying to solve player/out of character problems by character/in character actions never works well. Try to "teach" a minmaxer that the DM always wins if he wants to win, and the minmaxer will "learn" one thing: He needs to minmax more to beat the DM. You know what I'd have learned from your...

So far I saw nothing in 4E's core game that I'd really need in my game. Grid combat doesn't interest me, especially not with shift this and that all over the place. Combat encounter after combat encounter is not how I play the game - going nova once per day/session (or less) suits me more. The...

Vengeful spirit blames a PC Jailed for something they didn't do - this time Fleeing the country on a ship

Great pic! What skin did you use for the beholder?

Some more pictures, detailing why the party quit the employment of a certain noble family: A thief gets surprised Meeting nobles for a mission "No, I have no idea how the woman in the alley next to me died..." No one mentioned drow when we were hired! A bloody message - Head in a box

Here are my tips for time-efficient DMing: MinMaxing as a DM or how to be a lazy DM and still have success I spend about an hour preparation time per session, including typing up the campaign chronicle.

Cut the combats down, increase the XP for completing the real objective. Focus on the objective, and allow lots of ways to bypass combat altogether. I don't run published adventures because they simply have far, far too much combat, and not enough plot and intrigue, and interesting non-combat...

Hm... big confrontation, and V turns into a lich?

I would say the DM runs the world, the players run the central characters, but both "sides" predominantly play characters in the game, interacting with each other in numerous ways. If those ways are mostly limited to "try to kill the other", and effectively end up "DM brings monsters, players...

The problem I see with "more fantastic" is that people tend to mistake "fantastic" for "interesting" when it comes to characterization. It's easy to fall into the trap of "it can use a special power, so it's interesting" when designing an NPC, and end up with a boring clichee instead of a character.

Exactly.

MMOG experiences. The first time you meet the red dragon is memorable, gets screen shotted, and all. The 6th time you meet it is just another battle. If you can expect every animal to have some magic power, then the only suspense left is what kind of magic it has.

The more "fantastic" elements you use, the more mundane they become.

As far as 3E is concerned - I don't really see it as Pemerton does. I don't see this monolith 3E that somehow has all that stuff as core. 3E for me stands for d20, which means a lot of possible options, from which I pick and choose what I use for my game. Core 3E for me is that flexibility, not...

Unless of course it's your one weakness, being vulnerable to a few mortal men - but then, the whole party having the same weakness, and the next party having all the same weakness stretches this idea very thin - and isn't exactly a good story anymore.

I have to point out that I do not consider a world where the PCs are the prophecised ogre slayers, then the prophecised Umber Hulk Slayers, then become the prophecised Ork Raider slayers, all while being knocked around by the town guard, as that convincing. Good concept for one campaign, but I'd...