Chebucto Regional Softball Club

Like I said. Every game. Mine is usually a polymorph into a T rex off something

At least once per game, someone will want to drop some large animal on something / someone. Maybe its wildshape, maybe its conjure animals but its coming.

We played wtih a College of Eloquence bard for some high level play and he just couldn't fail some checks. He liked to roll and then get his 30 minimum.

Of course. It's the most logical solution

It helps to think about a longer campaign as a series of different story beats that are different lengths to tell their story. To keep a big campaign these stories are all happening at once and at overlaping togehter. There are hints of other parts within one story for a larger campaign. They are more fun to run and easier to manage since you only need to fill out the parts that your players are interested in interacting with.

I have found that I LOVE short campaigns. They are easy to create and you really don't have to balance anything. Have game breaking magic items avaiable, throw monsters way above their CR just to see what happens. You can focus on one idea and really get it working. I once did a siege campaign and had the players defending walls from an invading force. I had lots of ways for them to get out and engage with the enemies outside the walls. But they ended up shooting bows from behind the wall and dropping prone. Range really mattered on that one. It was fun and a little bit of a slog but worth doing

I love this analogue but especailly because in play the players start trying to plan on mission impossible and then ends with Yakkity Sax because something went wrong. Or my favorite is the completly finished heist without any problems and just before they leave they go YOLO and break everything on the way out

The best part of DnD is when something no one anticipated or planned occurs. The dice and the group brain can do some weird fun things

I would also suggest if you would like to practice these techniques is run a short campaign. Something with a set limit of a few sessions which also works well for seasonal or single themes. I ran 5 back to back short campaigns that lasted 4-8 sessions that last 1 or 2 levels that all had their own theme. This gets you all used to a session zero and getting everyone on one theme. All of you will feel less bad about killing, maiming and throwing the campain off the rails if you know it won't last years. These are good training wheels if you want to practice a type of DMing or do a specific type of game.

There was an older barbarian subclass that was immune to magic including beneficial magic. It was dumb and wonderful