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I generally agree with this approach, and I've used it myself on more than one occasion. I think it needs to be used sparingly, however, because throwing around bonuses indiscriminately can lead pretty quickly into Magic Language territory. For example, if your group includes three...

I'm a bit conflicted by this. On the one hand, I generally agree with the proposition that it doesn't matter what a character supposedly is doing because the probabilities and results do not change. One of the flaws of "old D&D" is that different DMs often had radically different views on what...

I agree that length of campaign is a factor; the more sprawling your vision, the less likely that the players will want to stick to a single adventure archetype. My guess, however, is that 10-or-more-year campaigns aren't that common these days. And, even for a campaign that long, I'd still...

I have the buy-in conversation with my players for pretty much exactly this reason. I've been playing primarily with the same group of players since the early 80's but, unlike Rel's group, they have no interest at all in niche gaming. If I were to propose having them be cowboys ridding the...

A few threads have touched upon this topic recently, and I thought it might be worth its own discussion. How much, if any, explicit agreement between the GM and the players about the nature and goals of a campaign should exist before play starts? For example, I typically have detailed...

There are also people who believe that the game has not changed in a fundamental way, neither in rules nor in spirit, from its inception to the current edition. And to those people, the claim that the new thing is equivalent to the old thing in many ways seems obvious, and they can't figure out...

First of all, I totally agree with Oryan77: having your players arrested and beaten right off the bat is poor form. Save that for when they do something really egregious, like not paying for their share of the pizza or forgetting to bring their character sheets. Secondly, even with...

Why? It's difficult to respond to the objection without knowing the reasoning behind it. In my experience, good dungeon design is pretty much congruent with good adventure design generally. For every adventure, dungeon or otherwise, that I design, I try to come up with a Theme and a Mystery...

I completely agree with this as well. As far as I'm concerned, what you've described is a big DM fail. If the DM wants to run the players through a skill challenge, the DM needs to give the players information sufficient to determine not only that they're in a skill challenge but also what the...

I agree completely with Hussar on this. If everyone at the table is interested in RPing a particular scene or interacting with an NPC, that's great and is to be encouraged. More often in my experience, however, only one or two players are interested in doing that while the remainder of the...

I agree with Ariosto. (Did I really say that? Maybe I've had one too many gin and tonics. ;)) The whole idea of a big dungeon is to give the players lots of options to explore. That's not to say, of course, that linearity doesn't have a place in dungeon design: one of my favorite things to...

When I start a new campaign, I throw out lots of potential hooks for the players to follow. Those hooks usually involve a combination of political intrigue, rescue scenarios, find-the-Maguffin scenarios, etc. And most of the time the game ultimately revolves around those. At least one of the...

More stinky fish, please.

This. My gloss would be that you don't even need a whole lot of crazy accents or funny mannerisms to make this work, although it's great if you can pull that off. Mostly, what you need to do is to make sure that the entire campaign world is not hostile to the PCs, and to give them a chance to...

I've always kept up-to-date copies of PC character sheets for the reasons everyone has been describing above -- sometimes I refer to them when making an adventure, and sometimes the player loses or forgets to bring their character sheet to a session. My players generally are responsible for...

I agree with Hobo. It's much easier to go wrong assuming that the GM isn't responsible for providing the fun than the other way around. I think it's also true that the GM can't be charged with guaranteeing fun for everyone; the players, as free agents, always can choose to act in such a way as...

I definitely agree that demons and devils are iconic and deserve as much space is devoted to them in the various Monster Manuals in which they've appeared. With that said, I also historically haven't used them very much because, for myself, I often have trouble figuring out why they're there...

Wouldn't these players have the same objection to almost any sort of DM improvisation, though? Let's assume that I have a room in the dungeon that I know will contain something when the players get there, but I don't decide what that something is until the moment the players arrive. The gamist...

Thanks for the very thougtful response to my post. What I've quoted above, I think, is where we're diverging. You're assuming that, when I create a scenario, I have intentions about how a given scenario works such that I can retcon the scenario when I feel like it and change the conditions of...

I'm still not sure I understand your definition of "illusionism," so please enlighten me if I'm not getting it. The idea seems to describe a situation in which the DM has predetermined a result and nevertheless allows a player to believe that the player's actions somehow will affect that...