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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 1933712" data-attributes="member: 697">My players' regret can be summed up in one, simple sentence:"DON'T TOUCH THE ALTAR!"Two party members died at the hands of an evil altar in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Half the party almost drowned in an ancient sahuagin temple when they fiddled with an altar. The other half almost died when they couldn't leave a sacrad, sacrificial pool in the same temple alone. When I ran Tomb of Horrors, we lost PCs to the fake good chapel before the entire party got into a shoving match trying to push each other through the item stripping archway. (All of them except for the magic-user died at the tilting passage, BTW.)My own regret is not being more attuned to the group's social dynamics. I'm better now, but there's been a few times when the players have gotten into arguments that I could've cleared up by stepping in.My biggest success has been in taking a much more active role in speeding up the game. If the players get tied up over something, I have no qualms over saying "Don't worry about that yet" and plowing on the with the action. For instance, if they're worried about carrying a big, heavy treasure out of a dungeon, I'm not afraid to just tell them I'm going to fast forward over the trip back to town, rather than check for random encounters or throw anything else at them that might require them to worry about their speed. It's meta-gamey, but we get a lot more done and have a lot more fun.</blockquote>

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