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It sounds to me that you enjoy mystery and they enjoy mastery. Just don't play with them.

To stay within the rules, I would start by not letting them find any scroll to learn additional spells ever, limit magic items that cast spells in treasure, and not allowing any potentially useful option from supplementary books. Going into rules changes territory, I might instead require a...

Well I finally got around DMing Ravenloft as a one-shot, except that of course I failed to make it really finish in a single session so we'll need at least a second evening. To my defence, we had planned to have 4-5 hours for the game, but between being late to start and then having kids wanting...

Usually, I have half-orcs as a completely separate species from humans and orcs. Many reasons: the rape-oriented "traditional" background of half-orcs sucks big time on many levels half races are generally lame many players think of WoW-style orcs and want to play them, while others think...

Three things: - stark improvement in the layout/organization of the core books (mainly the DMG), explanation/presentation of the rules, and emphasis on how the game can be played to different playstyles by treating most things as optional - steps towards fulfilling the original promise of a...

Very good food for thoughts... Especially the "no attrition" remark, although we could actually talk about it, as it is in fact quite a complex topic... On one hand, I think focusing on the benefits of good exploration is totally a good idea, without the need to feature attrition costs such...

I love randomness. In recent years I have run almost always published adventures, but when I design homebrew adventures I like to roll random stuff in many places, from monsters/NPCs to dungeon/terrain features and so on. As a player, I have sometimes generated my own PCs randomly (in some...

Yes, for me in the past rolling was just for my own fun and perhaps to have more "individual" monsters, so there was Bob the Orc and Joe the Orc rather than just two orcs. Nowadays I mostly don't care enough, but I am not ruling out doing it again if it amuses me.

Read the fine print... "This story is a summary of posts on X". My guess is that this AI is picking up what most people are writing on that social network. The funniest bull***t may get retweeted a lot more than the real boring news.

I definitely let the players choose, unless we use pregens, in which case I use averages.

In the past I rolled, now I mostly use average.

I am not keen on moving away from the 2014 version of 5e, so I wouldn't want any major changes to any class, and I would prefer changes to be in the form of additional options (subclasses, feats, spells). That said, I only think the Sorcerer suffers from two things: (1) too few known spells for...

I'm not playing regularly, we play with long-time friends casually a bunch of times during the year, usually in conjunction with seasonal holidays like Christmas, Easter, Halloween, May 1st and a few times during the summer, more or less I'd say an average of once per couple of months. We...

I like the idea if you mean "iconic" in general fantasy literature, not so much if you mean "iconic" in D&D history alone, because in that case you end up with pretty much the same Wizards that most players come up with anyway, making the exercise a bit useless. Then I would strip the list to...

I usually keep most magic items, skipping only the boring ones (the flat +Xs). I adjust the magic items when their rules really don't fit the edition, but I certainly don't restrict myself to DMG-standard magic items, so even older-editions magic items with unusual properties are totally fine...

I see myself a lot in this. It's not actually that much the social interaction pillar that bothers me, because in fact every D&D edition I know has had very light rules for this. It's more the exploration pillar... I am thankful that 5e goes light on that as well, but already the DMG text on...

Yeah, that's what I was trying to say when I called it a "dysfunctional book design". Honestly I don't expect much to change because the whole D&D community is too married to the "core 3" tradition, but that structure doesn't allow much room for improvement. At least I would remove everything...

Well, there is fundamentally NO reason why spellcasting should be tied to an ability score at all costs. Other RPGs use a standalone "magic" score, or nothing at all. Character level already serves the purpose of creating difference in spellcasting power between characters. D&D uses ability...

Yes but they were insulting also to my 8yo kid (the sections on tracking monsters HP and making funny voices for NPCs). Having a book with both very trivial "first time" instructions mixed up in random places with otherwise much more complicated RAW instructions is disfunctional book design. At...

I think the 5e DMG is not well-conceived, but that has been also the case in past editions (with some notable exception... there is a specific DMG that now escapes me but which is often mentioned as a very well made one). Most importantly, there is always too little room in the DMGs dedicated...