Yeah, in that case I think you did everything that could reasonably be expected of you.

I only implement restrictions when there’s actually a problem. Haven’t needed to in a long time

Some people, especially kids (no shade, I’m mostly talking about myself when I was younger) have difficulties focusing on the game when the distraction machine is in front of them, leading to DMs restricting or banning their use.

I think that was the right action, but you could have explained better. Instead of just “Ok, you stay at the tavern” something like “Ok, you can stay at the tavern if you really want to, but you do understand that will mean you’re sitting here bored all afternoon while the rest of us play, right?”

Everybody’s gotta learn some time

Mac and cheese for dinner is lame and lazy too, but also fucking delicious. TTRPGS are something your friends put together for you out of love, not necessarily some clinically perfect professional product. And to extend the metaphor, if you go to a dinner party and start bitching about your friend not plating the food like a Michelin star place, you’re an asshole.

There are lots of places that will print for you (eg https://www.shapeways.com/), but it’s cheaper and easier than ever to print your own right now! You can get a cheapo chinese printer for a hundred bucks, or an excellent Bambu for $250 (https://us.store.bambulab.com/products/a1-mini) Then you feed your model into something called a Slicer which will let you adjust all those parameters to your heart’s content (Flashprint is beginner friendly, Cura or Orcaslicer are more advanced options, all free) You’ll also need a roll of filament ($13-$20 for one roll, enough to print hundreds of minis) and then you just hit start and see how it goes! If your print fails, nbd, it’s like a fraction of a cent of plastic, just tweak and try again!

The material you want to use is called PLA, it’s cheap and easy to work with. Note that all the above prices are in USD, it’s likely more expensive to get shipped to Australia, but a lot of it comes straight from China so you never know. Feel free to message me with any questions or troubleshooting help

What is a “domain game”?

The secret to writing (or playing) characters that are smarter than you are is that you can take your time coming up with what they do. Maybe in-game your character has a razor wit and would have a snappy comeback for any situation. Out of game you’ve got a list of pre-prepared retorts you can bust out as needed.

So I guess that’s actually several questions, and they each have different answers.

Why does combat feature heavily in D&D? It doesn’t. Or at least, not necessarily. How much or little it features is dependent on your DM.

Ok, so why has it historically been featured heavily? Because of D&D’s lineage. The game evolved mechanically from wargames, where combat was the whole thing, and thematically from works like Conan the Barbarian and Tolkein, where fighting monsters featured prominently.

Why so many types of monsters, then, if works like The Hobbit only had a half dozen or so? Because The Hobbit is a single story, whereas D&D is a framework for creating lots of stories. Maybe one short campaign or a campaign arc has as many monsters as a Tolkein story, but then you go on to the next arc, the next campaign, and you need something new. You can obviously recycle lots; orc bandits are different from orc soldiers are different from orc cultists. But with (tens of?) thousands of games going on continuously, year after year, there’s always a demand for new content to slot in, and monster design is often a handy thing for DMs to outsource. Hence, there are a lot of kinds of monster because there is demand for them.

Are you asking why there are so many kinds of monsters, or why monsters appear so frequently in the campaigns you’ve played in?

That doesn’t work for 40k, to my understanding. It’s a miniatures combat game

Looking good! Those pirates have a pretty sweet setup!

That’s kind of important to the story though.

Mhhh…I believe in the right tool for the right job. So there isn’t really an ideal system, for instance, just the best system for what I’m trying to accomplish in a given game.

Sometimes that can be fun, but only if everyone at the table is onboard for a wild tangent. If the other players are bored as shit while the special snowflake starts a unicorn breeding operation, it’s time to use that No. And you, the DM, are included in that too; if your players want to drag you off to write every book in the library and that’s not fun for you, you have the right to say “hey maybe you should play the game I made for you instead.”

You decide that if an when the players make it a priority with their choices.

Addendum to the “Are you sure you want to do that” bullet: if a player ever does something that seems nonsensical to you, ask them what they expect to achieve by doing that. Understanding their motivation is often what resolves the miscommunication and/or allows you to steer them towards a better way to do what they’re trying to do.

I read once that the earliest edition(s?) didn’t have Rogue as a separate class, that everyone would be searching for traps and such. And when Rogue was added with the explicit ability to detect traps, it caused a crises because suddenly that implied that no one else had that ability.

It’s the cats you gotta worry about.