The World:
Sorry, I have been super busy at work. I will try to get some things posted over the weekend. I have a few rules I would like to discuss.
1 and 20
I want to play RAW for 1's and 20's. My understanding of this is explained below.
I would like to play that 1's are auto misses for attack rolls, but just a regular miss. So nothing necessarily bad happens if you roll a 1 on an attack other than you miss. In my opinion, basically losing you turn is bad enough. 20's are an auto critical hit on attack rolls.
for all other rolls 1's and 20's are just regular rolls. Add your modifier, and see if it is above or below the threshold you need to tie or beat. Depending on your modifier, for some low DC tasks you can't fail, and for some very high DC tasks you may have no chance of success.
Communication of DC's
For tasks where you have good information about how hard something might be, I will represent this by giving you the DC. For tasks where you have medium information, I will tell you if it looks very easy, easy, medium, hard, very hard, or nearly impossible, which should give you an idea of the DC to within about 5. I believe this scale only makes sense relative to a low level character with some combination of ability and proficiency in the task. Where you have little or no information, I will tell you your character has a hard time judging how difficult the task may be, with language like, "looks like it should be fairly simple," or "hard to judge, but it looks like it could be tricky."
Private Messaging
I have been wondering if it would be more fun or less fun to communicate something that only one character knows or notices via private message, and leave it up to the player if the character makes that thing known. Or if it's better to just state it openly, and let people play their characters as if they didn't know. I'm fine either way.
more to come...
One thing that I've done with Joe in our 1:1 game that I have liked (and submit only for consideration) is to suggest a course of action I would take if the DC didn't exceed a certain number, the idea being that my character should be able to get an approximate sense of how tough some things are before attempting them, like sneaking across a wooden floor. I do this proactively in the forum and then give a sense of what I would do if those conditions aren't met--It has helped to minimize the required back-and-forth, I think.
E.g. -- If I think I can cross the courtyard without being seen (i.e., I estimate it would be a DC 15 or greater perception check to spot me among the crowd), I cross the courtyard. Otherwise, I stay put until he makes his way into the house.