Recent content by Lord Shark

Wilderness of Mirrors is also unusual in that the GM is supposed to provide only the premise of the mission, and during the planning phase the players fill in the obstacles between themselves and the goal -- which is quite different from the "try to guess the DM's mind" type of traditional...

A hour of valuable game time spent planning, and then suddenly rendered useless because someone biffed their Stealth roll and alerted every guard for miles around, is not fun.

Yeah, that's one of the problems with banning magic item stores, especially if you also insist on handing out randomly generated treasure: the party is inevitably going to accumulate a pile of magic items they've outgrown and/or have no use for -- which contributes to magic items feeling boring...

The only way this game is crunchier than D&D is if you ignore D&D's 100 pages of spells.

Yeah, the "problems" with guns come up when you start treating them like Wands of Instant Death and then feel you have to balance them with long reload times, expensive ammunition, etc., until they become useless and no fun. Meanwhile, in most fantasy media that includes guns, they're just a...

Excessive planning, excessive timidity in exploration (the "poke everything with a 10' pole" style of play), and combats that are just there for attrition and/or XP.

Yeah. In situations like this it's all too common for martial characters who don't have reach weapons to get stuck with no way to engage the monsters, leaving them with little to do beyond plink away with a javelin or bow.

If you're talking about magical effects that PCs can never have, note the casual mention of the monsters in the ziggurat being charmed to stay put. Charm monster is not a permanent effect in 1E, and it's not one of the spells that can be augmented by permanency. And even if it could be, every...

I don't play 5E, and nothing I've seen of the "fixes" makes it any more interesting. So no.

It's the trickle-down theory of RPGs.

One of the things I learned running 4E is that I'd rather have one 60-minute fight where there's a lot going on and everyone has opportunities to do cool stuff, instead of six 10-minute fights that are just rolling and marking off spells and HP.

If you're referring to the Pathfinder 2E playtest, that was free. Paizo also printed and sold a physical copy of the playtest rules, but that was aimed at collectors and completists; you did not have to buy it to participate in the playtest.

Not at all. I stopped playing in the late 3.5 era, and quit again in 2014 (unless you consider offshoots like 13th Age or Pathfinder to be D&D).

4E fighters can actually do respectable damage -- not as much as a barbarian or a ranger, maybe, but they're the hardest-hitting defenders in the game.

Note that many of the journalists who have been laid off by G/O in the past have gone on to set up creator-owned, subscription-based news sites -- e.g., the Deadspin refugees created Defector, Kotaku writers have created Aftermath, and some Jalopnik alumni now write at The Autopian. So if you...