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If you offer three doors that all lead to the same quantum encounter, what happens when a PC peeks behind them with a divination? Well if there's nothing actually there, they cannot be permitted to do that — forcing any DM who didn't anticipate this to throw up a last-minute, BS anti-divination...

I'll go ahead and pull an excerpt from my own house-rules doc to provide what I hope can serve as an example.

That's how I handle it. (As I mention a couple of times in the comments on Dan's blog.)

Ever since I first heard about how alignment entered D&D — in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, the players organized themselves into Team Good and Team Evil and competed for treasure and territory; Gygax decided to use Law and Chaos in his Greyhawk campaign instead, because he was a Moorcock...

Having nonhuman main characters is a genre convention in fantasy that we owe to Baum, Burroughs, Lewis, Tolkien, Anderson, Moorcock, Brooks, &al., &al., &al.…

I've never left the hobby for any length of time, but 3.5 made me return to playing OD&D.

OP, have you seen the finale episode of David the Gnome? Holy gutpunching tearjerkers, Batman, I did not ask for these feels — not now, and certainly not as a Nick Jr watching tyke.

I started to lose interest when Chewie died at Sernpidal, and finally lost interest completely when Anakin Solo bought it fighting the Vong.

Tinkers, chemists, and inventors. It's an archetype that goes back at least to the ancient world (think Dædalus) but also suits antediluvian sword & sorcery settings. In D&D terms, the first alchemist class appeared in issue #2 of The Dragon, and there was a "techno" class in the Arduin...

Okay, fair enough.

If we're talking about old-school as a play-style — which, to folks who spend a lot of time discussing the history and categorization of RPGs, is not just some floating term with a definition that rests in the eye of the beholder, but rather a term of art with a pretty clear definition — it's...

Switch to group initiative. It's not like weakening the value of the Dex stat will be bad for game balance overall…

To me, the whole entire point of an RPG is that it can use something like simulation to subvert the structure of a story. Why do we want the rules of an RPG to help us accurately model "what would happen"? Because sometimes, narrative logic defies logic-logic and harms suspension of disbelief...

That only makes things more baffling. I can't think of a single mechanic, procedure, or tradition that is so ubiquitous as to constitute a hobby-/industry-wide blind spot. "Playing a character in a fictional milieu," maybe?

This is where I land. There are no game mechanics that the hobby as a whole should remove from consideration. Some game-designer somewhere could eventually find anything useful. The OP's question is frankly bizarre to me. It's like asking, "what instruments should musicians just not use anymore...

Less than zero. I'm actively opposed to the notion of the "shared experience." Chiefly because my opinion of modules — even the vaunted TSR "classics" — is nadir-low and dropping all the time. I ascribe to the aphorism, "Running someone else's dungeon is like wearing someone else's pants."

Oof. I've got one of those in my regular group. Always lays first claim to every single magic item the party finds. Always tries to justify it with the old, "I was brave enough to pick it up / swing it around / put it on / say the command word and risk a curse before casting identify, so of...

My fundamental approach is (1) "everyone is a fighter"; so (2) you can let fighters do things they normally can't, like magic and thieving (and add magic items to the game to fill the gaps); and then, radically, (3) nix the ability scores because they're kind of pointless in a classless D&D.

One fun house rule along these lines that you see floating around the blogosphere: you have to kill the very undead that took your levels in order to get them back.

This is actually an enormous pet peeve of mine. Fae, fay, fairy, faery, and faerie are all perfectly fine nouns we can use to describe that particular class of supernatural beings (or in the case of the forms that end in "-ry," the realm that they come from) — all cognates, all Latinate...