Recent content by Lanefan

I don't consider those sessions wasted in the slightest, for a string of reasons: --- having to introduce their character in-character - and thus by extension being forced to speak in character right away - can help give the player an idea of what might make that character tick and-or spark...

For me, it tends to come across as very strongly implying that a metric crapton of experience in one area (say, D&D) doesn't count for anything unless there's a certain level of corollary experiences in other adjacent areas (here, other RPGs) to back it up. And sorry, but I ain't buying that.

The same reason walking 10 miles is harder than walking 100 yards: success is guaranteed, but it takes more effort.

Factual history, such as who reigned when and what years the red comet appeared, should be fairly reliable in any society a) whose language has a written form and b) puts any value on recordkeeping. In a typical RPG setting, the longer-lived species would seem to make the best such...

I've often had that sort of disparity among players, and my answer has always been to just neutrally run whatever I was going to run anyway and let the players sort it out among themselves.

It was weekly for the first year or two, then very intermittent for a year or two, then weekly for a while, then twice weekly (too many players so they split up into two groups running on different nights) for most of the last six years. Typical evening sessions, so 4 hours or so each with some...

There's ways to make this highly believable in the fiction, however. One I used was that each of the PCs, being a neophyte looking to break into the adventuring gig, had independently heard that a famous adventuring Company was recruiting. The only buy-in I asked from the players was that...

Learning experience, after a certain point, is no longer the point. Familiarity and comfort is. A DM who has run 1000 sessions of D&D (let's get specific here and say it was all 5e 2014, run stock) might not have learned much more than the DM who has run but 100 sessions but is for sure going...

If her left arm was real instead of mechanical, that artificer would be one of the best Gnome portraits I've ever seen. As for how she's hammering the spear without it resting on the anvil: the cradle the spear-point goes through could be a super-magnet holding it in place.

Gotta disagree hard on that one. I've already ripped at least three really excellent character portraits from this thread (thanks, guys!) and maybe a dozen others I can use as setting illustrations, deity portraits, nd so forth. That's a far better batting average than I ever achieve wandering...

I get ideas of what to run, as in plot-story-adventure ideas, from non-D&D sources. I don't get any ideas as to how to run those things.

It isn't hard to learn how to do in theory. The very fact that it requires a lot of effort makes it hard to actually do in practice. Moving one rock across the road is easy. Moving 10,000 of them is hard.

I'm assuming here that each of these DMs is inviting me into a D&D game using an edition with which they're familiar? If yes, and if I only had time for one of these two games, I'd lean toward DM 1 if all else is equal; purely on the basis that a specialist is on average better and-or more...

Agreed. Personally, I see the path to DMing runs through first being a player in the system you intend to run. If nothing else, it flattens out the learning curve a bit when it comes to rules etc. in anything other than a very rules-light system. That said, IME and IMO something is lost as a...

For a very short period - maybe just a few years - this will be true, as only the megacorps will be able to afford the tech and personnel required to make and edit movie-length or series-length AI videos and have them be any good. After that, the tech will become much more commonplace and the...