Do you guys have a power-gamer in your group? For some people that is what's fun about the game, finding all the tricks in the system. I'm wary about just negating someone's reason for playing with a blanket rule like that. But there's always a balance. Might not be able to pull it off every time, but there always is a balance! What i like, and what i focus on is more exploration than anything. And likewise, what i try to reward is good ideas. Especially when those ideas add to the world. So it's more a sliding scale of awesomeness, than exactly what your character would do in every situation. Not closely following the rules goes both ways, unfortunately. So while i don't like tracking the weight of every last thing and it only takes one death-save to recover while it still takes three to die, there are certain rules that just overbalance the game in the player's favor that i don't use. (Druids taking less than a second to transform, and being able to declare non-lethal damage after you've already killed an enemy both come to mind.) I amuse myself. Sometimes other people laugh, sometimes they go out of their way to tell me i'm not funny. Either way, there are jokes constantly. This one's tricky because it depends on the group. If the group has voices for their characters, odds are the npc's and monsters will too. Otherwise i default to trying for vivid descriptions. If you're looking for speed, your best bet is to actually avoid a lot of the bells and whistles. The API is capable of some genuinely impressive stuff. But from experience i can say that a lot of the scripts attempt to emulate video game functions, and you're better off ignoring most of it. Even maps can be a big slowdown. So unless your group never deviates from the story (which would be exceedingly dull), then you're likely to spend quite a bit of time looking at "mood pictures" and drawing basic shapes instead of full-fledged maps. Oh! And last question: When you say you want to use Elemental Evil, are you talking about the online pdf (with the broken Aaracokra in it) or the actual book?
