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Because we generally try to be a more understanding about people suffering from PTSD/mental illness these days.

It's a trait you can tag monsters with that basically says "any damage, they're dead." Couple variant ideas on handling splash damage, and cleaving through multiple minions based on HP thresholds. Doesn't have the specific 4e style set of minion damage suggestions/unique abilities that Flee...

Oh, and the “inspiration list” of media to consider is full of excellent books.

Picked this up last night after chatting with a KS backer I know about it a bit as well. Generally quite impressed, it's very 4e DMG-ish in all the best ways. -Starts off with the role of the GM, but in a much better fashion then the 2014 DMG does. Provides a pretty solid analogue of "GM's...

You know what's fun? Prepping with the players. Then you get to work together to figure out what NPCs actually matter and why, how they fit into the play space, what their key characteristics are, and have something actionable to pressure. So often as a player I've seen GMs either bemoan later...

There’s a vast gulf between “I have a monster manual and a couple of maps” and “I feel the need to have an entire pre-established line of rails / content or else I will explode” (the OP module / campaign question). I also refuse to consider “picking up a game’s core content (monster manual etc)”...

Quoting above from @pemerton and bolding for emphasis: I see this a lot on reddit. Tons of posts like "How much campaign do I need to plot? Can I write some of my campaign now and do more later? Wow it's really intimidating for me to think about pre-writing an entire detailed 1-12 campaign like...

For a game like, say, Delta Green - the published adventures can be very interesting and have done a ton of work in making tables of details to provide the players for teh central mystery at hand. Where you need to have a decent outline of a bunch of clues the players are expected to access to...

Why would you “Think about NPCs” beyond an instinct/drive/purpose, and a couple features to convey them? NPCs only matter insofar as the players interact with them or their actions (if a Front/Threat/etc). When we build a relationship web in Stonetop - it’s just name, why they’re important (my...

Just to ride off what I said in the prep thread, I've found it super helpful in playing Stonetop that it has a detailed world full of mysteries - but each mystery is clear it's just "ideas" underneath the header of "thing that exists" and it's up to your table to figure it out. Where I think...

My experience with a specific setting has been very different, but it’s one where the game links the playbooks deeply into the setting, has high level interesting mysteries, and spends the entire session 0 asking questions about the world and filling in details together . All 3 groups I’ve put...

I would encourage you to do most of that prep after the first session - beyond just having an idea of a starting condition/world state. That way you can encourage people to talk about what's interesting to them, define the world through their characters and initial choices, and then go prep...

DW and the games from it also have prep! It's just prepping "cool things to say" and ideas of potential dangers/complications/consequences/etc. For Stonetop if I know the players are going on an expedition (and you should very much be encouraging goal declarations between sessions if there's not...

No, the game would say “this is what an easy persuade check looks like, hard bluff, medium intimidate.”

Other games with set DCs do things like say “an easy check looks like X, most skilled people can do it. A hard check looks like y, only highly trained people with specific knowledge can do this routinely.” Etc. If you’re going to set DCs, make them mean something so that a DM can quickly...

Yeah, I was getting a little dig in with that line ;). I’m not saying TOR’s rules are perfect, but they’re clearly designed to create a game mode focused around a specific sort of social storytelling with clear markers and transparent success/failure metrics (which can be influenced by player...

The One Ring does something very much like this for significant social interactions (Councils), which are their own distinct Scene/game mode with rules laid out not unlike Combat and Expeditions. There’s some specifically social based constructs that make it unique from a 4e SC, although the...

@pemerton ’s post was not about prepping events (scenarios? Interesting things to say?), but pre-determined plot - points / story beats / etc, which players are expected to encounter to progress to the next chapter/whatever. If the dragon will attack the town because it doesn’t exist until the...

Does the event happen regardless of what the PCs do or do not do? Is it waiting in the wings until they arrive, and then precisely 3 days hence it happens? I actually like @DEFCON 1 's point last page which is that players don't really mind a "railroad" if what we mean is a tour along tracks...

My brief read was that the factions should be providing appropriate linked magic item rewards at certain levels of reputation or whatever the book calls it. Was that not what you found? On gold use: magic items are heavily cost inflated via the couple of vendors due to “travel distance and...