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Availability. Not everyone can have a Broom when over the campaign there's only one ever randomly happens to come up for sale and another shows up in a dungeon somewhere. Never mind that in 1e at least, Brooms are fragile things - hit one with a Fireball and if its rider or carrier fails the...

Decades ago I threw together a homebrew system for ship-v-ship combat using ballistae, built around the idea that you'd be rolling to hit the target ship at all (with modifiers for distance, sea conditions, relative speed, etc.) and on a successful hit it would then be random just what part of...

I love those players! And after they burn the dungeon down they realize that all the sweet sweet treasure that dungeon contained has also gone up in smoke*. Problem at that point usually becomes self-solving. * - or, as with the party I'm running right now, buried: their go-to solution to a...

The hulls might have bounced them but massive ballista bolts would make a mess of any sails and-or rigging they hit (thus slowing the target so you could catch it and board it, or - if on the other side - give yourself a better chance to escape) And a direct hit on one or more people, or on...

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...