I gave my 8 players a Condorcet poll for which game I should run next. Their main gripe was a Condorcet poll sounded complicated (it wasn't).
Kevin Crawford's "Without Number" games swept the podium (Stars, Cities, Worlds) knocking D&D to fourth place.
The real big table might be a factor. Combat is just so much faster.
Oh, I don't let the fickle dice tell me when to give a hint or twenty. Nat 1's come aplenty when you gate-keep crucial information on a die roll.
Only thing that worked was jettisoning the players who torpedoed campaigns for whatever reason.
Nah. Basic was way deadlier.
You can be the first type, and some players will still see you as the second.
Like, they attack the king's castle for no reason and are upset the guards don't lie down and die, then refuse to surrender when things are entirely hopeless and they're offered mercy. Such a mean DM!
This is just another way to out yourself, gamer.
Had me until your last sentence.
It's always going to be mixed, to some degree. The challenge is making it work anyway.
Yes, and Noon to 3:00 PM can blow a hole in your free time in a way that something running 7:00-10:00 PM doesn't.
I put about 6-10 hours a week into RPG's (DM'ing/playing/prepping) but would never want to play every Saturday afternoon. That would totally crimp my other interests.
Just want to point out Gygax had 2 sons, who are quite different people. I believe you are referring to Ernie Gygax.
Luke Gygax, by all accounts I've heard, is a great fellow.
Gygax also elevated Jean Wells in the company before the subsequent management basically made her a secretary. Wells had a decent working relationship with Gygax, which you can see if you read in Dragon magazine "Sage Advice" column from the mid 80's. Gygax should have listened to Wells more often than he did, but he did try to empower her to make the game more friendly to women.
Still, his legacy towards women in gaming is mixed at best. In the 80's, TSR games which Gygax was less involved in tended to do better with women, notably Star Frontiers, but also "Basic D&D" which did not include rules making it disadvantageous to play a female character, unlike Gygax's Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which capped female strength below male strength for each race. And I think telling a new D&D player their character would be a lousy fighter is pretty rough.
Yes, there was a pattern in Gygax's creations of evil female power that went beyond the dragon example. Most notably drow were the only evil elves, and the only matriarchal (he would have said "female dominated") ones. This pattern wasn't his invention — it's as old as Snow White, Cinderella, and the rest — but even in his own time, others (for example, Tom Moldvay) created more inclusive games.
It's even better when the DM for you!
This can happen with new players who are native English speakers too, as D&D has a fair deal of vocabulary not everyone knows. Words like charisma and melee really got popularized by D&D.
Deep cut here: When I was a kid (ages past) and first heard friends talk about D&D, I thought there was a lens to keep you on the border. And without it, you might go straight Into The Unknown.
They had trouble with simultaneous releases when they put out 4e, there were some troublesome proofreading/quality issues. So with 5e, they put out the pieces one at a time, allowing each title to have its own turn to be the urgent, top priority.
I started running 5e before the release of the Monster Manual 5e, using the smattering of monsters in the back of the PH. It was limiting, but fun in its way.