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Drawbacks have their place, but I believe that the Berserker Frenzy drawback is a bad one, while ability penalties offsetting bonuses in other areas is a good one. To elaborate--one has a baseline; for instance, in earlier editions of D&D, the human is the standard by which attributes are...

I think the move to 3.5 was a bad move. 3rd edition, any version, is the edition I am probably most frustrated by. It is, in a lot of ways, the most "complete" edition, with a mechanic for anything you want to do.. But it's fundamentally at war with itself, with built in flaws to encourage...

Introduced with B/X. In mass of years, it would be 1st edition AD&D, if number of total hours played, probably 3.5. Favorite edition definitely 1st edition AD&D.

If you said, Fighting Man, you need to read your source material. "He was a splendid specimen of manhood, standing a good two inches over six feet, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with the carriage of the trained fighting man." " As I gazed upon it I felt a spell of overpowering...

Not really. Henchmen/Retainers had XP progressions, but they aren't typical NPC's, but secondary player characters, and can take over as a primary pc as needed or desired by the player. So if a class isn't allowed as a PC, they're not allowed to be a henchman.

I am convinced the term "NPC class" was a way to disclaim responsibility if such a class wrecked your game. It decreased pressure on DM's to allow players to use them compared to what would have happened if they had been introduced as new PC classes. After all, there's not much point giving XP...

I'd say a lot of the lack of challenge aspect comes from 5e's simplicity. It's has a shallow learning curve, and it's fairly easy to build a character to the expected level of power. Compare this with 3rd edition, where one could easily inadvertantly build a crippled character who couldn't...

D&D has gotten progressively simpler over the decades: 5e is the simplest, from in front of the dm screen and behind it. It has a simple resolution method, easily applicable to nearly every situation---as a player, you have a handful of flavorful actions on your character sheet that grant the...

Movie Conan makes a great Barbarian. Book Conan makes a better Champion fighter, though honestly I'd love a Barbarian subclass that actually fit Conan. While Conan's a rogue, he's not a Rogue. He's just a solo character a few levels higher than the recommended level of whatever adventure he's...

This is very interesting, and I appreciate this look back at the design decisions that gave rise to 3rd edition. But it does raise one question. Why was healing optional? By which I mean, nothing in the class required the cleric to expend some of his power on healing. A cleric did not...

Probably not 5e...the other systems are too abstract to make it really fun-and too many options are provided the negate non-combat challenges. I've run a session of 5e that involved essentially no combat, and I pretty much had to invent new rules to do so. But in another system, I'd be happy to.

Try the thing system. You can easily change the thing to stones or encrumbrance points or whatever you wish. It works like this: You can carry a number of "things" equal to your strength score. Carrying more than that incurs encumbrance penalties. For every increment of 5 over your strength...

I've been gradually amassing all the OD&D and AD&D material that I lusted for as a child and teen but couldn't have. Along the way I fell back in love with the editions I grew up on.

I play with grown ups...but nobody is really looking for purple descriptions, so my game is approximately 90's PG-13. So by today's standards, Hard R.

Have to go with Charisma--the real life superpower. This is causing me to think about how one really can't increase constitution without ancillary increases to physical strength (and vice versa--minus, uh, chemical enhancements). But physical strength winds up being really important for health.

This right here. The passing fancies of the moment will often lead you astray when attempting write timelessly--write what you believe to be true (yes, even in the context of writing D&D adventures), and let the idle outrages of the moment be just that--momentary.

Been a while since I've run a 5e game. I tried a lot of things; some were dials, some were house rules. 1) proficiency dice rather than a flat bonus 2) I instituted a level of success for every 5 points one beat the DC of an action; for instance in combat you got to roll another die of damange...

I think 4e was the first rpg system I ever grew "bored" with. I've abandoned others out of frustration, but never boredom. Interestingly enough, systems that frustrated me I will re-visit, but I don't have any desire to revisit systems that bored or annoyed me. With 4e, there was a certain...

Looking at the interior art, it appears they're drawing a lot of inspiration by the art and costume design from the movies...especially with the elves. I think the problem is...everything is using that as their template these days, which means that rather than having a unique, Tolkien-ian feel...

OSR games tend to fit the expected playstyle better than more modern games: fighters fight, clerics back them up, and keep the team going, thieves are sneaky, and magic-users drop fireballs. A plethora of tiny changes, seemingly unconnected, eventually built up a system where fighters no longer...