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I dunno, man. Does anybody still play 3.0 as opposed to 3.5, PF, or other 3.x+ derivatives (meant as an honest question, not as rhetoric)? The mistake Wizards made with Essentials (in my view) was marketing it as a supplement rather than an upgrade. Yes, there would have been much butthurt...

Eh, I still think they could appeal to the 4e audience by taking what is core to 4e, keeping it, and cutting down the fat and slowness and huge number of powers and whatnot. Essentials did not go far enough. Make a new 4e, 4e-er than 4e. Performing a fourier transform, if you will. I really...

So far we've been using Obsidian Portal wikis, but once I get out of college I'm looking to set up a little ftp server in my apartment, with players having accounts on the machine and proper permission-setting so they can't see my notes, but will have access to certain resources on the machine...

Part of the reason save-or-die worked as well as it did in older editions was that, as someone mentioned upthread, the chance for a high-level opponents to save went up as HD increased. This is something which 3e did very wrong (I've played B/X, 1e, and 3.x; can't speak for 4e or 2e) - good...

Part of the reason save-or-die worked as well as it did in older editions was that, as someone mentioned upthread, the chance for a high-level opponents to save went up as HD increased. This is something which 3e did very wrong (I've played B/X, 1e, and 3.x; can't speak for 4e or 2e) - good...

My ACKS campaign has had 12 PC deaths in the 16 sessions we've played since mid-June, in addition to 17 henchman deaths. It's gotten to the point where we have a page on our Obsidian Portal to keep track of the casualties. Here's the list as it stands currently: Slain PCs: * Yolanda, Joe's...

No such thing as too young to be Old School. (Says the 20-something former 3.x player turned ACKS DM. Grognardling? NeoGrognard? Not sure there's a name for the likes of me.)

This happens all the time in my ACKS game. "Hey, I'm 20 XP short of a level." "Well, try to earn some domain XP I guess. And then don't die next adventure."

Burnout, straight-up. We've got about seven players in a loose cloud, and 4-5 of us GM something every year, but usually it's either a semester or half a semester campaign, at which point that particular GM gets tired and burnt, and someone else launches something else (usually in a different...

I kind of did a class unlock this way. I'm running ACKS, and recently participated in the kickstarter for their first supplement, which had extra classes. I didn't just want to open it up to players, because that way lies madness, so instead I watched for signs that might earn players access...

Oh-ho! We finished a Trailblazer campaign like this not three months ago. Slew a total of eight dragons ranging from an adult green up to an old red. Character motivations ranged widely; we had a couple guys who were of the "save the humans" position, some who were after the treasure, and I...

Necromancer / Frog God have a line of smallish sandboxes; I don't know if they're any good since I haven't read them, but I've heard mainly good things. Also Bat in the Attic and Trollsmyth have some pretty good advice on rolling your own; I don't have the link to the Trollsmyth post presently...

Sounds like fun, man. I'm not familiar with the books you cite, but my gut says to go for it. Rolling your own comprehensive rules document can be a lot of work, but it was worth it when I did it to combine parts of Trailblazer and Pathfinder.

Yeah, I'm not understanding how Traveller is different from this. In Mongoose Traveller, for example, you have 2d6 + skill + ability score +- difficulty mod >= 8 for success. It would be trivial, and mathematically equivalent, to shift the difficulty modifier across the inequality.

I think that, applied in this context, the point of the xk is not "there should be a single standard" (as perhaps the OP would construe it), but "all attempts to create a single standard here will necessarily fail." This, I think, may be true because people (particularly people like gamers)...

This. Stay light on your feet. No plan survives contact with the PCs. Make stuff up, or better yet let the players make stuff up for you. Use their crazy ideas as-is sometimes, and invert them sometimes. My players were convinced there was a morlock lair on the fourth level of the dungeon...

Not sure this is really helpful, but I am happy to report that this is totally doable. I did it in Traveller (eesh, a year and a half ago now). I launched with a Farscape opening, with the PCs escaping from an imperial prison ship. They did a bunch of wandering around looking to make enough...

Yeah, we did this once. It was OK; you end up with mathematically slightly more centered outcomes (I think? It's late at night; I'll look at it again in the morning), but the real problem is player attention and reactiveness. If you're DMing normally, you can write down / cache each PC's AC...

Huh... I don't remember seeing any mention of them in Morrowind. Perhaps it was buried in one of the drier parts of the lore. Aha, further digging shows it to have appeared in Varieties of Faith describing Tiber Septim. Curious indeed.

Definitely my dad's D&D stories from when he was in college ("And so right as we were stealing the treasure, including a ring of invisibility for my assassin, the lich arrived and fireballed everyone, and we all died. The end.")