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It corresponds to the character forming a good-enough memory of the venue to be able to draw a map afterwards. I can draw sketch-maps, from memory, of a venue I've visited. I can draw sketch-maps from the description the GM is giving me right now. Drawing sketch-maps from the memory of a...

My preference is to show the on-graph-paper maps to the players, but if they want to draw their own, they have to use plain paper. I have an old essay cum rant that touches on this: Why Game Masters Should Give Players Exact Distances The usual argument, in a rpg, against giving players exact...

I voted Monster Manual, in large part because it was both my first AD&D purchase and one of my first RPG purchases of any sort. The DMG is interesting, but not my fave - and it also had the downside of my having had to wait for it to be published, after I already had the MM and PHB. (I'm not...

Is there any way to escape star (*) characters so that they show up as stars, rather than being 'helpfully' transformed into italic or bold BB markup? Other than surrounding them with ?

I prefer a system where character skill is more important than player skill, and where the player-skill element is more a matter of skill in manipulating the crunchy mechanics than in having real-world skill in the task the character is attempting. But I'm aware of the imperfect trade-offs and...

I can confirm that. I was there as one of the impure Simulationist GMs. And there were arguments about whether or not randomizers could improve fidelity to the game world's own internal logic and causality. I contributed to some of them, on the side of "Yes, they can." There was a consensus...

As you say: "That's one philosophy, but not mine." Or rather there's another trade-off. Yes it's nice when player cleverness aligns with what the character would do, and when players can make choices for their character's actions at a more detailed and less abstract level. But this is often not...

Hiding the tell in the "blahs" has its own drawbacks. Among other things it tests player-skill instead of character-skill. As a player who is playing (and who spent the character-resources to have) a highly noticing character, I'd want the reward of my character being highly noticing. As a GM...

Overall, I use traps very sparingly. They're a hassle for NPCs & monsters to set up, so they won't without believing they have a good reason to, and they're a hassle for me as a GM, so I won't go looking for reasons why the NPCs & monsters might set them up. Also, my NPCs and monsters mostly...

What do you mean by "tells"? They might be signs that "everyone sees automatically, the GM shouldn't require a roll." They might be signs that "characters with good perception scores may spot, even if not actively looking." They might be signs that "only characters who actively look for them...

I prefer to ban them completely. If you need an auto success/fail rule to hit/miss, that's the rules and the dice telling you that the GM should just hand out a "don't bother rolling the dice" result. Right now I'm leaving criticals in place for my 3.5e game where I'm trying to keep the house...

My "Brotherhood of Rangers" game is a "restricted gestalt" one: PCs must be ranger-gestalts with only one other class. It works very well, enough so that I'd try the concept again with a different class, given the appropriate campaign idea. E.g. a "Dungeoneering in the Megadungeon" game where...

Re 'joke' characters, I've done a few tongue-in-cheek things as NPCs, so my touchstone for joke or joke-adjacent PCs is "Would this character fit in my game setting if I created it as an NPC?"

As a GM I dodge the issue through a combination of having racially cosmopolitan nations and strict enforcement of "approved PC races only." In one game where I specifically wanted mostly-human PCs, I had a rule that to play an non-human PC, the player first had to bribe the GM by creating a...

I prefer to have magic-augmented economies in my game-worlds. Magic-augmented food production in particular, but also other forms of magical augmentation, often running below the level of broken-out detail in the rules for regular official magic. Instead, it's things like having various peasant...

I don't play 5e, but in earlier editions I preferred to start characters at 4th level (or even higher). So if I did ever abandon my stronghold position of "3.5e is peak D&D" and ran 5e, I'd do the same there. So you could say that PCs in the games I run technically go from level 1 to level 4...

And as I posted previously: "Implementing this causes complexity to creep into the initially simple system." It might be a net benefit, but there's very much a tradeoff if the initial choice of a slot system was for the sake of its simplicity.

LFQW very much did exist in 1e AD&D. I know because I was there. It was mitigated by making low-level wizards extra wimpy so that fighters and wizards were roughly 'balanced' at mid-level rather than at 1st level, and so that the disparity at high level wasn't quite so bad. 3.x did make things...

The weakness of slot-based encumbrance is dealing with small items - items where there is a desire and powerful intuition for allowing a slot to hold more than one of them. Implementing this causes complexity to creep into the initially simple system.

The reason why there are so many solutions is that people don't find the existing solutions satisfactory - even when there are already tons of them to choose from - and so they create yet another solution in an attempt to fix the problems they see.