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It's never come up in my games. But then my style is to handwave away all the gritty lovely-filth realism of camping out in the wilderness with mundane medieval gear. The PCs are assumed to be competent, and so are able to deal with making and breaking camp as a matter of routine. So Tiny Hut...

As others have pointed out, sci-fi artifacts and elements in D&D and in fantasy in general has been a trope for a very long time. It's not a trope I particularly like, and it's one I leave out of my own settings and games. But I can't call it either a new intrusion or a wrong thing. It's a...

I expect to do that in my next campaign too. In my current Brotherhood of Rangers game, all the PCs have at least 6+Int per level because they're all ranger-gestalts. This also fixes the issue of those 2+Int classes having such short class-skill lists. Overall, this works for the Brotherhood of...

I found the cross-class skill penalty to be too severe for my tastes. Between that and the other issues I had, I ended up creating house rules that I later learned were very close to (but not identical with) the Pathfinder 1e changes in cross-class & multiclass skills. I was tempted to just...

The only Forgotten Realms product that I ever bought was Aurora's Whole Realms Catalogue. Just not interested in any of the other Forgotten Realms products.

The three most important things about 3.x that brought me back after drifting away from 1e & 2e were, in order of decreasing importance: 1. A skills system that was actually half-way decent. It needed some cleaning up, but it didn't completely suck the way earlier attempts at skills and...

I responded to the poll back when but didn't post a comment. So now I'll post that I found 2e to be a modest advance over AD&D 1e, and that at the time I saw the "Complete Whatever" spatbooks as muchkin-bait but in retrospect not that bad. But when 3e came out I immediately adopted it as my very...

1. A reveal that the supposed fantasy campaign is actually post-apocalypse, which is something I can sometimes admire from a distance but would never actually run. 2. A junkyard or cache of old tanks in an openly post-apocalypse game where tanks are advanced tech from the Before Times. The...

I'll add: I'm unfond of critical hit systems in general, and while I'm not quite annoyed enough by the 3.5e version to reflexively apply a house rule to nerf them (or outright eliminate them), I am toying with a rule that all crit multipliers are reduced by 1 (and since most weapons have a 2x...

I don't want them to get crits on undead, but I do want them to get their class damage bonuses (favored enemy and sneak attack). Critical hits are a matter of luck but those class bonuses are a matter of character skill and knowledge. I want that that sort of character skill and knowledge to...

I voted "no apocalypse" but it somewhat depends on how one defines "apocalypse." Is medieval Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire "post apocalyptic"? In my old Etan campaign, I had some big in-world changes, including all the gods dying, when I changed over the system from AD&D to TFT and...

Players will fight tooth and nail against changes that force their PCs into being the subjects of attrition play. They will try very hard to have their PCs be at their best as often as possible. Some GMs will use the natural passage of time along with various time-pressure strategies as an...

Frequent-rest games being common is reality. My claim is that they're common because players prefer them to the offered alternatives - and if that's reality too, then that's also hard to fight.

Players will fight this tooth and nail - and they won't be wrong to do so. As a player I would fight it tooth and nail - or more likely just walk away from the table. There are good reasons why frequent rests and the five-minute-day have become a thing. It's in the players' interest to seek to...

I've been both, at various time in the past. My current campaign is one where I plan things out, but I can see myself going for the ad-lib side in a future game.

My first though was that maybe the players are (perhaps unconsciously) offering broken-shell characters with grim dark backgrounds as sacrificial offerings to the DM, with the prayer that the DM will go easy when it comes to inflicting grimdark horrors on the characters in course of play. My...

I don't think "modern" vs "classic" is a useful division. More useful IMHO is the idea of innovations in game mechanics that have been successful and have gotten copied. Critical hits and fumbles, popular even though I personally dislike them. Character Disadvantages Point-based character...

Yes. Modern bowstrings wear out too. I guess my point is that both modern and D&D-land bowstrings fail - but they very very rarely fail in a "cool" "dramatic" "'This will be so much fun! And you are a killjoy munchkin to disagree!'" break-in-combat-on-a-fumble way. Instead they fail in a dull...

Why do you insist on assuming that bow-using adventurers are incompetent bumblers who don't routinely keep their bowstrings waxed?

I did bowhunting at times, so the strings did get dragged out into the Great Outdoors with its cold and wet. I think my strings weren't really better off than the typical adventurer's - unless the DM runs a 'gotcha' game where the PCs are considered to neglect and abuse their gear by default...