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Yeah. When I say not to provoke that jackhole, I'm not victim-blaming, here--whatever bad stuff happened after we drove past was entirely the jackhole's fault. My own approach when I get angry at some fellow driver is to back off. My wife has noted that the more upset I am by another driver...

I've seen at least one instance when someone who didn't like the way the person in front of him was driving passed that person and stopped. On a limited access highway. In the left lane. Don't be that jackhole, definitely, but it's probably not worth provoking that jackhole, either.

Yeah, and there's also the problem of making six or eight fights in a day make any kind of narrative sense. I think I might have run a gantlet that intense once, in somewhere over 300 sessions of 5e-ish games. I'm also perfectly happy to run a ten- or eleven-round combat that consumes an entire...

I mostly don't build encounters to any guidelines, no. I build them to be challenge to the PCs that'll A) do some work in the narrative and B) be worth playing out at the table. But even a combat that doesn't go more than three rounds is likely to be more than half an hour at my tables. Part of...

In principle, yes. In practice, I've never seen combat in any 5e-ish game I've been a part of run anything as quickly as you--and that's leaving aside any narrative concerns about the fights fitting into things.

What the system was built around (at least, according to the 2014 DMG) was "Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six or eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can handle...

No snark: It sounds as though you reinvented/repurposed the Mythic Monsters mechanic. I've found that works well for boss-type combats--I had a Mythic CR 30 dragon as the climactic fight in the last campaign I wrapped up, it worked well.

Yeah, an occasional gantlet works well both as a pacing thing and as a learning thing.

Shortening short rests balances things at least as well, IME, and add much less work in the sense of rebalancing spells (and other effects) clearly intended to last between short rests. I've never had any problem challenging the PCs in the 5e-ish games I've run--obviously, YMMV.

Seems to me as though the best approach is something along the lines of "some of both, with some variation." Design things for the role/s they're going to play in the game, run the game so sometimes the party can rest, sometimes they can't (I think here, the best thought is that the GM should be...

I've heard the advice often, but I've never done it. Probably because I am one of the folks who does hear it in my head as I'm composing it. I will acknowledge that working as long as I did recording audiobooks improved my dialogue immensely.

Yeah, sesquipedalianism never looks succinct, whatever the word count.

Their reaction sounds distressingly like the reaction some gamers have to safety tools. With a large stinking heap of sexism on top, of course.

I expect that writing professor--like most--also expressed the idea that before you can break the rules, you need to know them, ideally master them. That is plausibly more of a thing in some forms of writing than others: poetry, for instance.

Whether they literally read their stories aloud as they type, there are authors I'm pretty sure hear their language in their heads. When you record audiobooks, you can tell. Though in honesty, it's been long enough that I don't know if I can tell, reading silently, at least most of the...

It is important, when talking about the possibility of cats counting, to consider that we are talking about an animal that will carefully stalk and eagerly pounce upon a dustmop.

Not disagreeing, but again, that's a thing that might be at least less of a thing on the page.

The Dark Tower does have some real issues, I think being written piecemeal did it no favors--though I think watching the authorial voice evolve is a real pleasure. I do not think I've ever had any problem following any author's use of made-up words in fiction on the page; sometimes those words...

I've always understood that advice to be about sense, not repetitions--grammar errors will tend to jump out differently if you hear them than if you read them. I know that some authors shifted to unattributed dialogue after hearing how the dialogue tags jump out of audio (something that'll...