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Parity in results (rather than creation method) is old school. You could more or less create NPCs however you liked but if it could have potentially been a PC - i.e. it was a PC-playable species - the resulting character either had to fit within PC-available parameters once it was finished or...

In the days before non-magical healing and-or ubquitous wands of CLW were a thing, the number of available healing spells-potions-devices in the party served the same function and at far lower complexity.

Indeed, it's a design flaw all the way along. Exactly, which means the designers have to either a) design as if parties will have max resources, or close, for nearly every battle because that's how the players are going to play, or b) make resource recovery much - as in, light-years - harder...

When 4e came in with its "bloodied" mechanic I had hopes that it was the start of a move within D&D design toward a (relatively speaking!) more simulative injury and healing system. Still waiting..........

To me, those seem like selling points of not-old-school games. Old-school to me is, by contrast: --- story-emergent, i.e. most if not all of the story only becomes apparent in hindsight (but note this does not equate to "mechanics first") --- GM accepts and does the bulk of the mechanical work...

Sad, but true. That said, if people like the game they're playing enough then they'll make the time - and keep on making the time - to play it.

Not necessarily. Someone chose within the run of play to make that combat happen, and then the combat gets turned over to the mechanics to sort out how it resolves. Same as if someone chooses in-game to climb a difficult wall - the player makes that choice and then it gets turned over to the...

In that case, don't mention or even allude to the roles anywhere in the final version; because you just know that if you do mention them people will take them to be straitjackets, similar to how alignment was mis-played in the TSR days or Leader was misinterpreted as "party boss" in 4e. In...

Disagree. The mechanics are bad specifically because they weren't designed to take the 5 minute adventuring day into account. Wise parties (i.e. smart players) are going to try for that five-minute day whenever they can, as it's the safest way to go, which means the designers need to recognize...

3rd level character with +3 plate isn't a problem if items can be destroyed; sure it'll keep the character safe for a while but sooner or later it'll inevitably go boom or get disenchanted somehow. And high-level characters with no magic soon enough restock themselves, as I've seen recently as...

Early returns on the irst dozen or so I can see (I have neither a reddit nor patreon account and don't really want either) look great! I've already yoinked one item outright and am scooping ideas for lots of others. A one-use magic item, I'd think, given that removing one's head tends to slay...

Agreed. In a pirate campaign I'd expect the ranked causes of death to be: 1. Combat 2. Drowning 3. everything else put together.

Some careful curation and pruning of the spell lists would be in order, for sure. Another option would be to run it as an E6 style game, where level advancement caps at a fairly low number after which you only pick up new abilities (feats etc.) at a slower pace. There's all kinds of design...

Solution: have the captain be a quasi-PC shared among all the players and let the players collectively make the captain's decisions, die rolls, etc. Other random thoughts on a pirate campaign: --- as @payn already noted, checking out the Black Sails TV series is a must! --- you can slip in a...

The root problem would seem to be one of trying to make the combat side of the game work equally well for a cautious 5-minute-workday party and a plow-ahead eight-battles-a-day party. Over the editions, the design focus has, unevenly, moved from favouring the former to favouring the latter. 1e...

True, it would need to be pinned for a few weeks.

Further, the randomizer doesn't (and shouldn't) care whether a given player is playing her Nature Cleric or her Fighter or her Magic-User at the time a party going shopping; it just spits out what it spits out and there's either something(s) useful there or there isn't. For adventure treasure...

In-character it makes a lot of sense that they'd go for the most practical items first. Hard to complain about that. And IME if they've got the spare cash they often will buy interesting items. If those items turn out to be useful, that's good; and if they don't they're still much lighter to...

That's fine with me, as I usually never know which characters will be in a given adventure anyway there's always going to be some extra unused items even if I try to curate ahead of time. That, and treasury is always divided to value here anyway; thus if there's (numbers conveniently set to...

You need to a) randomize what's available at any given time and b) limit the number; this to reflect the idea that what comes on the market isn't predictable and there isn't that much of it. Not sure how you hand out magic items in the adventures you run, but if you use any sort of random...