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Ooh, this sounds like fun! SONGS: Is it too obvious to suggest Rock Lobster (B-52s)? Beast of Burden (Rolling Stones) - not sure how "monstrous" this would be, but maybe they stampede? Lady in Black (Uriah Heep), a ghostly apparition that when she appears might bring weal, or woe, or...

Not all traps have to be deadly. The best traps IMO are those that aren't deadly but cause the PCs serious headaches now or later: party-splitting traps, severe-delay or resource-consuming traps, traps that alert the inhabitants to the PCs' presence, and the like. In fact, I can think of one...

Characters getting into the habit of looking in every spot isn't bad design philosophy in the slightest: if it's what the characters would do in reality then it's what they should be doing in the setting. As for the other things, I don't subscribe to the "gotchas are bad" take that seems so...

Even from a game-play perspective, a tell isn't always necessary; sometimes the point isn't the choices to be made as to what to do about the trap but more what to do after the trap has been set off. One of my favourite traps is the one-way chute trap where the first (or first few, if not in...

That's a pretty solid review, though I have some issues with the reviewer's preferences (some even relate to the thread topic!): --- not all traps and secret doors should have a "tell" or clue that they exist, as hiding them is supposed to be the point --- the reviewer complains about noting...

Yes, that's the buildup and foreshadowing piece I'm talking about. Your end-stage save-the-world adventure isn't going to include that stuff properly unless it builds in the whole campaign that came before it (i.e. it's a whole adventure path rather than just one adventure), meaning it's left...

A few things to this: 1 - most "If we don't stop X, the world as we know it will end" style adventures are - or work much better when - bespoke to the specific setting and campaign they appear in. The best a generic adventure of that style can hope to do is give some DMs some ideas that can...

It would be an interesting exercise sometime to throw various combinations of parties (or even individual characters) of the same level but from different editions into a pit and let 'em fight it out, using a system-agnostic initiative system. For example, and assuming initial core release...

Or maybe some thing in the setting just aren't meant to be defeated, or even fought for that matter. Deities*, for example, shouldn't be defeatable by anyone who isn't also a deity. And if you want the PCs to become deities two things need to happen: the game needs clear guidance for how...

Or just makes them considerably more challenging. You still design for higher levels so DMs have the means to build these high-level villains and NPCs, you just make it clear that PC play isn't expected or intended to get to those levels and that if you try to push play beyond level [10? 12...

There's a thread in TTRPG-General right now about what makes a module easy to run and so far this one's violating pretty much every best-practice that's been suggested there.

Agreed, that's too flat. That said, and this is where lack of granularity rears its ugly head, I prefer there always be a tiny chance of success or failure no matter what. Here, that rube should have a 1% or even just 0.1% chance of bluffing Asmodeus - but the system as written doesn't allow...

If the red wavy lines obscure the map to the point of unreadability it might be one of the 1e-era SOLO modules (there's a BSOLO, two MSOLOs, and an XSOLO), which came with a special glass that when you looked through it removed the red so as to reveal the map as you explored the dungeon as both...

The level playing field ends the moment the first dice are rolled. It also depends, though, on how lethal the game is likely to be particularly at low levels. In a reasonably lethal game the odds are you're going to get to repeat the rolling-up process, maybe several times, and try out a...

I don't think this matters. Whatever codification this all leads to is probably going to turn Appendix E on its head anyway by boosting the xp value for some creatures and reducing it for others, so if something leads to numbers different than what App-E shows, don't sweat it. Alien physiology...

The answer, of course, is to have levels that give nothing but added hit points and maybe an incremental save bonus. Yes, the dreaded "dead level". Feature, not bug. Or, failing that, make it a ten-level game instead of twenty and abandon the high-level super-hero end of it. The problem is...

Forever or permanent imbalance caused by factors other than luck is generally bad. Temporary pendulum-style imbalance, or long-term imbalance caused by sheer luck, is generally fine.

Given some of the things Crawford posted as Sage Advice over time, I've no idea how he sees/plays the game. Silly them.

Could they be assuming initiative is rerolled every round? 'Cause yes, without that this does seem somewhat underwhelming. The one use I can see for it is that it gives you the opportunity to flee before combat even begins, without provoking any of the bad stuff fleeing otherwise causes.

Quotes often heard at the game table, from both movie and TV: "Why do I feel like we've picked up another pathetic lifeform?" - originally from Phantom Menace (Obi-Wan), now heard whenever the party rescues a prisoner or acquires another NPC. "Wipe them out. All of them." - Phantom Menace...