snooggums

You take no damage, but are now trapped under 80 tons of rubble. Enjoy your slow death.

Limiting skills and abilities to only one class of a multiclass character at a time is going make them fall behind very quickly.

As a DM that is my only concern, love everything else!

DnD 5e does not have critical successes or failures on ability checks. Only attack rolls have critical successes and failures.

This is awesome!

These are magic!

When you make a ruling, explain your justification out loud. If you're targeting a random person, tell the players the stakes before you roll. "OK, evens the wyrm goes after Faust but on odds it'll go for Drena even though she's on the ground."

Saying what you are doing at all times is the absolute best thing you can do in my opinion, because it makes it clear to the players what your intents are and promotes honesty.

I would spice it up with an in game description, such as the dragon flicking his eyes between the two and saying "The wyrm flicks his eyes between the two characters. Evens for Faust and odds for Drena (rolls). The wyrm dives to the ground at Drena."

In my combats I will have monsters convey reasons for what they do, such as a melee character saying "A challenge!" when focusing on the fighter over the bard or "Out of the way!" if they take a swing at the Bard before focusing on the fighter. Goblins screaming in fear before disengaging if they survive a hit, or even a humanoid yelling "Fall back!" to make it clear why they are making a coordinated retreat and allow the players to end combat some other way than just killing everything they come across.

So it is possible to have reinforcements every single round? Yeah, that is a terrible rule.

I have used a d4+2 to determine how many rounds of combat will draw attention, but only for a single reinforcement. The floor of three rounds is because that is 18 seconds in DnD. Enough time for other enemies to wonder if someone is just having a spat and not worth checking out or for the enemies to realize they are going to die and think of calling reinforcements being worth it over being ridiculed or punished by higher ups.

Shouldn't play a game with random rolls if one doesn't like random rolls. Secret rolls don't add anything except suspicion.

As a DM if I decide something is going to happen then I don't bother rolling. Like if a character who is competent wants to do something and they have plenty of time they just succeed. If a monster is sneaking I might just compare their stealth to character perception if being stealthy doesn't have more of an impact that the characters finding out they were being followed. If it has a game play impact then I roll openly but don't say what it is for. That way there is no suspicion that I rolled low and decided that it should just pass instead when the reason for the roll is eventually revealed.

The main thing that kept me from switching to 4e was that it looked to be even more tedious to play combat than 3e. It had so many things to keep track of for me, even though I liked the idea itself.

Came back for 5e mainly because it was slimmed down and attempted to make combat more streamlined and faster to play. I did start doing customized low level creatures by adding an extra thing here or there so they have a bit more variety than the baseline. Especially by giving humanoids common equipment!

The gap under the door must be huge though for a phone to pass through.

It is flat on the floor looking up, only needs a centimeter or so gap for most phones taking a pic in selfie mode.

Social Justice Dungeon Master checking in.

Oh boy, playing RIFTS as my first go as a GM (aka DM) was how I learned to play by the rule of cool and come up with challenges/stories that weren't directly dependent on character power levels. So much fun to be had with a mix of MDC and SDC characters, dimension hopping, and I also loved reading the expansion books for the over the top flavor text and inspiration.

Tried out other games to reduce complexity but still kept at least one of the expansion books for inspiration.