Yeah, logical volumes has a teeny bit of overhead, same with RAID. both together means you can run older things but things that have a lot of textures loading you will see some drop.

So many.

Curse of Strahd in 3.5: Who knew Con damage to a mostly spell caster group could be dangerous not just once but 4 times. In comparison both fights were Strahd were a f**ing walk in the park.

More of a test game than an actual campaign: We were testing if a CR appropriate group of goblins with levels vs a group of players would play out for the players: Well as it turns out I suck at calculating CR so our first fight was 5 players vs 5 goblins level 15 (Same as players) plus 10 starting goblins. We adjusted it for a correct CR and it was still a massacre. Ambush is a HELL of an advantage.

Anything goes campaign. Well turns out anything goes for the DM too so Level 3 half colossal half minotaur barbarian opponent with a posse of gobs with a ballista safely away means players die every other round or so.

Logical volumes. it slows down IO on this setup but i don’t run IO intensive games. It allow me to just repartition and add drives as needed.

How techy are you and what level of handheld are you willing to get them? Retropie comes with a built in shutdown timer and you can set up cron jobs remotely to shut down after a time or even at certain times. Down side: You need to know how to set them up AND you are not going to get a machine that runs the latest and greatest.

You could go all out and get them a steam deck and set up crons but that’s strictly local to the machine.

Kineticists. Those are called Kineticists and there’s a reason they aren’t allowed in most campaigns.

Map out the dungeons. On the map they form three arrows pointing to a place in the middle of the most dangerous desolate Level 23 dragon infested place. But if you make it a circle instead at the center is the BBEG’s place which is actually this wood carver hut in the woods NEAR the imperial city and it turns out he’s been making realistic looking wood golems the whole time and replacing key figures in the kingdom because they are loyal to him, the plot to get rid of heroes is just insurance.

Do you mean rolling random encounters while traveling or Rolling encounters randomly within a dungeon?

Random encounters were originally put in to add spice to long travel and make it feel like actual long time to travel and dangerous. Nowadays with modern story telling you can continue using it if you want but if you have a story base campaign they mostly just interrupt the flow.

If you want to use them for Additional XP and gold from time to time to adjust your players level gently and/or because you havent quite prepped the next area and you want to stall til next week then go nuts but see them for what they are, a purposeful time filler and making your players scared to go throught the forest.

If you mean within a dungeon then go nuts if you arent planning your dungeon fight by fight and you like the challenge of your monsters being random so your players have a more even chance, go nuts.