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6+1 HD monster with the equivalent of an extraordinary ability. 5+1 HD monster with the equivalent of an extraordinary ability. 7+1 HD monster with the equivalent of two special abilities. 6+1 HD monster with the equivalent of an extraordinary ability. 4+1 HD monster The real big problem is...

Wait what? So two encounters per level?

Oh this whole post is worth it just for the Caillois' classification terminology, which I've somehow managed to avoid in all my study of games and sent me down a rabbit hole. I disagree with Caillois fundamentally on certain points, but it's still worthwhile reading. Notably, I'd think if he'd...

There was a thread going around recently about "Did you play AD&D RAW?" and my answer was summarized as, "Well, we tried most of the time but generally there are enough different readings of the rules that two different groups could both claim to be RAW and yet use different rules." So in my...

I think it is important to stay grounded in the reality of the thing and this post is a really good reset to the discussion. One of the great difficulties of TTRPGs is that many of the things that are exciting are exciting because of the aesthetic of Sensation and that's an aesthetic that is...

Problems like this are one reason I don't think it's practical to abstract things to "supply". To continue the "Oregon Trail" analogy, the game doesn't attempt to bundle everything into a single resource, but has a small but reasonable number of categories of items representing the things...

Well, at some level it is always seat of the pants arbitrary. There is always going to be some subjectiveness to it when you allow designers to free form any sort of design that they can imagine. There is no way to give firm guidelines to infinite variety. But there is still value I think...

I'm not denying the existence of players with complex aesthetics of play. In fact, the existence of complex aesthetics of play was and remains one of my biggest attacks on GNS theory with its assumption that only one aesthetic can be fulfilled and they are in mutual competition to each other...

In general, yes. I could always imagine exceptions. If it's effectively permanent duration and hard to treat (a curse that is hard to break) that might be an EAXPB to me (-8 strength until you can find a 14th level caster to cast remove curse is "maimed to death"). But if it is merely long...

I think it's a highly relevant response to the statement: "I think attempting to hew too close to realism is going to be counterproductive to achieve the goal of finding ways to make hardship on expedition dramatic and fun gameplay." UPDATE: To see why, consider the history of RPGs. RPGs...

It very much depends on how the participants define fun. A player with primary (or sole) aesthetics of Fantasy is fulfilled by lots of moments focused on their imaged self-representative triumphing in style and often by the meta of their fellows showing emotional fulfillment with their triumph...

I6 Ravenloft is still in many ways the gold standard, a height of combining aesthetics and usability to which we have not regularly (or ever) achieved since. I have a few quibbles with the module, most notably that the recommended levels on the module are about 2 lower than they should be for...

@ilgatto : Generally speaking, "motionless" and "helpless" are not the same thing in D&D. Or at least, the 3e designers who were trying much as you are to bring forward and codify the 1e rules (but with the intention of bringing them into a more modern framework) had that distinction. In game...

Gamma World 3e

"Oregon Trail" definitely needs to be only part of the gameplay loop. Oregon trail makes things interesting by having river crossings, resupply opportunities, and other fixed events along the way. When doing long overland travel I like to break it up with fixed encounters ("lairs") as well as...

So, perhaps not surprisingly, since Star Wars generally seems to occur in a universe where outer space has air and gravity, there has been very little mention of exposure to a vacuum in published Star Wars material. But I play a bit grittier of a Star Wars game than most, and while I've played...

There are a ton. The Great Pendragon Campaign Beyond the Witchlight Tomb of Annihilation Chronicles of the Dragonlance A thoroughly revised "Skull & Shackles" Two-Headed Serpent A full Ravenloft campaign based on thoroughly revised and expanded "Curse of Strahd" My own "Return of the Ice...

I've always hated the term "adventurer" because the word actually means "tourist" and is most closely translated as "danger tourist" or "extreme tourist" today, though at the time the word was coined there wasn't a need for an adjective because all tourism was considered dangerous and extreme...

It's the Crypt Thing and it's in the class of "mobile traps" that we see in a lot of AD&D monsters. How dangerous it is depends entirely on how the DM sets up the random teleportation. It could literally be anything from a minor annoyance to a die no save death trap depending on what the...

Page 174, 1e AD&D DMG. See also this blogpost about it that you might appreciate: AD&D Monster Levels and XP UPDATE Personally I believe it was a mistake to cap at Monster level X. If you look at my thread about revising the dragons, you'll note that I believe I have monsters listed up to...