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I'm not sure anyone is suggesting that it is.

Did that recently and I'm running the game now. I changed it to Get Bargle instead of Kill Bargle, with the goal of capturing him alive rather than killing him. I talk about some of it here.

I still think it's good enough, and the fact that it can be eyeballed is a point in its favor, not a criticism in my view.

I've done 5 sessions of one adventure I'm currently running and there have been 7 dead PCs and one captured. Don't give up hope!

That or Intelligence (Investigation) or any of the skills like Arcana, History, Nature, or Religion might be used to resolve a task to determine the level of threat a monster or NPC possesses. Like anything else, just tell the DM what you want to do (e.g. "determine whether this guy can kick our...

It's good enough in my view. No need to let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. Except they did do some things and it's in the monster and encounter design and CR system which, again, is good enough. In my opinion, we have that already.

Another way to think about it is that "story" is a byproduct. We play adventurers boldly confronting deadly perils in worlds of swords and sorcery, and whatever happens while doing that is "the story." A character dying along the way is just part of that "story." As it says in the PHB...

1. The "system" for determining difficulty of a challenge is close enough in my view for the average party with average players. It's not perfect, sure, but nothing will be because 2. The level of difficulty of an encounter can change the moment the players start making decisions that impact...

As long as you're adequately telegraphing the threat in a way the players understand so that they can make reasonably informed decisions, go nuts, I say.

I don't remember how that worked exactly as it's been a long time since I've cracked open that boxed set, but sure. :sneaky:

In some campaigns where it makes thematic sense, such as in my serial pulp action Eberron game, I just take death off the table unless the player decides it's the right time. If the rules would otherwise indicate you are dead, you are instead taken out of the current scene and come back in the...

If I'm running a one-shot adventure, there will be some pre-gen backups prepared ahead of time for players to grab and get back to playing. If I'm running a campaign, the players are asked to create a backup character (or possibly more than one). In some campaigns, they can swap the characters...

I do something similar except that question doesn't effectively occur until a player declares they are attempting to recall lore about something. In order to adjudicate that action, I need to have some kind of understanding about how they might have been exposed to this information, which the...

I'm fine with it. I play online, so they can do it without me even noticing, so I can't be given to care. What they don't know is if I changed elements of the adventure or monsters and how much. So yeah, go right ahead and look up those monsters and rely on what could be bad information. That's...

This strikes me more as an objection to players interfering with game pacing via conversations at the meta level than actual "metagaming." Arguably, these conversations can be thought of as representative of the tactical experience and teamwork the party has developed from past encounters and...

They're welcome in my games to say what their character thinks they know, and act on that information, but that's an assumption. Maybe they're right. But maybe they are horribly, disastrously wrong. That's their risk to take, and has the effect of curtailing the behavior without any of the policing.

UPDATE: Again the Thursday night group delved into kobold territory - two diviner wizards, a scout rogue, and a draconic sorcerer. The sorcerer is now the prisoner of the kobolds. The rest are trying to flee the surface ruins, but a number of kobolds have cut off their escape, and we ended on...

I prefer to leave it as "You establish what your characters think," which leaves it up to the player to decide if they think, for example, red dragons breathe fire. If they want to portray their character as not knowing this, they're free to do so. I also let players know in advance that I do...

Yep, that plus Forge of Fury are the ones to play in that book in my opinion.

D&D 3e: The Sunless Citadel D&D 4e: Glitterdust (Dungeon Magazine #211 by Will Doyle) D&D 5e: Lost Mine of Phandelver I don't have anything good to say about the adventures in any previous editions of D&D (and most adventures in the above editions), particularly AD&D 2e which was a low point...