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While I agree with this, I'm also quite happy to anachronize to allow age-of-sail ships - even up to Trafalgar-era - in an otherwise medieval-or-earlier setting. Hell, I've already got ancient Greeks and war-of-the-roses English just across a sea from each other, it's not like anachronisms...

Oh, I do - it's the same person who tunes out the moment dialogue starts in an action movie and doesn't tune back in until the action resumes. I've DMed one or two of those in the past.

After 40 years of them I'm more than used to Spike players. :) The way to both engage them and deal with them is to become a bit more adversarial as DM: when Spike pushes the rules envelope, push back; when Spike finds a broken-but-legal rules exploit, shut it down and ban it*; and otherwise...

One possible unintended side effect of this is that the DM is often running a bunch of somewhat-intelligent adversaries at once, and having to be aware of all these openings-to-act all the time will a) add to the DM's cognitive workload and b) threaten to slow things down while she processes her...

There's a thread going on right now in D&D - Older Editions around how to determine monster xp values in 1e and it touches on many of the same points you raise here, which in sum amount to "what, on paper, makes a monster more or less challenging". And that's all this discussion can ever be and...

Players don't know that their PCs should sometimes run because they aren't given that advice in the PH. Instead, they're given the expectation that they should be able to beat or even curbstomp whatever the DM puts in front of them - the whole Big Damn Heroes piece - leading directly to those...

Meta-currencies in general have been mentioned as being a modern thing, or at least a modern trend; and re-rolls usually fall under that umbrella.

Setting: mid-to-high fantasy. Art: not cartoons. Cartoon art, particularly on book covers, screams "cheap, hokey, don't in any way take this product seriously".

30 is too many levels, period. Scale it back. A lot. :) This might be on to something. That said, I'm fine with death spirals. They force hard choices between burning resources and beginning/continuing to spiral or conserving resources in order to avoid the spiral.

Players who think a 1st-level party can handle two Ogres are also part of the problem, even more so after the first PC or two goes down and the Ogres have barely a scratch on 'em. "Cut your losses and run" used to be a standard piece in every player's toolbox. "Survival is job one" was...

Which is fine until-unless you need to mechanically resolve what's happening off-screen. I mean sure, you need to focus on what the PCs are doing; but you also need to know on a somewhat-ongoing basis whether the rest of the pirates are taking the prize ship, being rebuffed in their attempt, or...

A long-ago Dwarf of mine would very much beg to differ. He had a broom, and a 2-handed sword. Occasionally, if attacking from the air, he'd put the 2-hander under his arm like a lance and swoop in in a high-speed power-dive, intending to both skewer the target with the sword and (depending on...

No idea. So far I've managed to stay off the subscription-streamer bandwagon. It comes up on Starz on cable every now and then, which makes sense as they made the show in the first place.

Four season show, in fact; and yes, it's excellent. It's out on DVD but be warned, the DVDs are not great quality and seem to deteriorate fast (says he, who has gone through two sets now),

Nice list. Aging and Psionic Use are the only things I don't see. What do the numbers represent in the 4th column?

It can be made to work if NPC combatants are batched a little. Say there's a group of five pirates fighting seven defenders on the foredeck while the PCs storm the helm. For that foredeck combat, at the end of each round I'd probably just do one d20 for the pirates as a group, and another for...

I'm a bit harsher - if someone's humming and hawing for too long I'll jump to the next player, knock the indecisive player's character a few notches down the initiative order, and come back to that player then; on the basis that if the player is indecisive that means the character is also...

I had a character once do something almost just like this: she rigged up a harness that in effect tied her to the broom and also built in some cushioning. Why? Because she was about to go on a two-day-long flight across a small ocean and didn't want to fall off if she fell asleep in the air...

I see it as similar to riding a bike - yes it's a good idea to keep your hands on the handlebars but some people are good enough (or daring enough) to successfully ride "no hands".

Which is fine until the PCs try to assign values within their own treasury while dividing it. We used to use a system like this - we called it "high-low value" as each item had a high value (to buy) and a low value (to sell) - and it caused no end of headaches in treasury division because every...