Recent content by Agback

Did they do so? I seem to recall that neither original D&D, D&D, nor BD&D ever mentioned the term "roleplaying game", and that Dragon magazine avoided it for a long time. It was "The Dungeons & Dragons game".

What's th differnce between having no classes in a games system and having one class?

Perhaps not, but I wasn't likely to mistake it for a Ferrari in the first place.

I've never had a memorable encounter with a dragon as a PC, but I've delivered a few as GM. 1) First, there was Chlorophane, the oldest and most formidable dragon in the World of Isles, the bane of the oneiros Persiflex. The PCs were on a quest for the Sword With No Name to be a bride-price...

I started with a moment from a movie and half a line from Keats. Then I worked out to one feature of the big picture, and then back down to a handful of details, then out to the big picture again, then back in to another handful of details. HOW I BUILT GEHENNUM My friends at university and I...

That large a group is tough. Each person's share of your attention is going to be pretty small, so there will be a big danger of having people's attention wander in the long intervals between their having input. If this results in their missing things, or need to have situations explained, your...

Hear! Hear! 'Exotic' means 'foreign', 'outlandish' in the literal senses, not the figurative ones. It is the opposite of indigenous, not of commonplace. Wheat and cows are exotic to America, unlike maize and turkeys.

They'd revoke my D&D gamer licence if they knew That I dislike dungeons, think monsters are way overused, and despise killing things and taking their stuff as a substitute for having adventures.

D&D is far too complicated. Statting NPCs is too much work, and then trying to keep track of what tactics they might use given their class abilities, feats, items, prepared spells and other options is a nightmare, especially when there is any sizeable number of them. That is the most important...

Imagine that i had just quoted all that Bene Gesserit stuff about beginnings out of Dune. You can probably remember it better than I can. Beginnings are important. Beginnings are when you set teh hook. Always start out showing the players what they want to play this game for. Screw them later...

Walpurgis U. is so geeky… G'day To set the stage, I am about to start a GURPS campaign set in a weird university in 1933. This university (Walpurgis University) is somewhere in the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts, in a town that is a shadow of Northampton Mass. in the way that...

<nitpick>Messina was a Greek city in that it had a Greek population. But it was in Sicily.

Or in other words "making your character so bad at one thing that you wreck adventures by screwing up some scenes, in order to make you character so good at something else that you wreck adventures by screwing over other scenes."

On average. the dextrous monk will last one fourteenth of a round longer than the strong monk, not a whole round longer. There is about one chance in fourteen fights that the dextrous monk will last an extra turn and get an extra attack. You cannot treat that as a certainty of getting an extra...

Not wasted. It frees up skill points for other skills. Which is what eth dextrous monk's DEX bonus is doing at that point. True. But a strength-based monk build still enjoys those advantages. And when those advantages get him to strategic points on the battlefield he hits more often and harder...