ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]

“How do you spell that?”
“I dunno, how do you wanna spell it?”

If you really want the feeling of thac0 at your table you can just do AC - attack bonus to find the number you need to roll over, and bang your head against the table for the rest of the experience.

Mostly it’s just meant that it takes ages - usually time is a big enough price that no other punishment is needed. Their recent actions generated a group of ghosts though, so ghosts wandering through the room while they’re searching is now a thing.

My players like to save their worst rolls for perception checks to find secret doors. Even when they specifically know there’s a secret door and just need to work out how to open it, out comes a parade of 1s and 2s.

Ah yes, the Gazebo problem.

Einstein supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in mandatory Palestine, but envisioned it as a one state solution of Jews living equally with Arabs in Palestine, not a Jewish state being created in any form.

I used to think fudging Vs not fudging was a stylistic decision, but as I’ve played more I feel it’s a system issue. If you feel a need to fudge rolls, either to raise or lower the stakes, to force desired plot points or avoid unnarrative deaths, or to fix broken challenge ratings, you’re probably using the wrong system for you and your group.
Think about what issues you’re actually trying to avoid by fudging, and then look for systems that are structured to avoid those issues. If the rolls get in the way of your narrative, switch to a more narrative system. If you’re fighting against the system to build satisfying combat encounters, switch to something more tactical.

It’ll always take a couple of sessions to get used to a new system, but learning one is always a lot faster than continuing to waste time trying to force a system to do things it wasn’t made for.

Do not defame Parenti’s good name like that you filthy lib.

It’s always difficult finding the balance between in character and out of character knowledge. I recently had to explain to my players that their characters definitely knew about a major historical event in the setting, because while it happened 10,000 years ago it’s important to the origin of several gods, so is a widely known story.

Where do you want to start? The player mechanics are way outdated and overcomplicated for what it wants to be, the GM mechanics are functionally nonexistant, the lore is cliched at best and still incredibly bigoted in many areas, the better adventures are just rehashes of 2e and 3.x adventures and still need entire communities dedicated to making them runnable, it’s unbalanced until you get to about level 10 at which point it becomes unplayable, and without pirating it’s incredibly expensive.
Trying to strap every possible setting and mechanic onto a fantasy rule system was one of the issues 3.x ended up with, and 5e hasn’t been designed to solve that.