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I remember OTorg was okay, but there were many times I felt like my mind was sliding across the surface of the rules, with modifiers and Possibilities usage and and and... (we were playtesters for the magic supplement, and the arcane (in every sense of the word!!) spell-building mechanics). To...

What if, while the hospital is mostly closed, one wing of it, or an outlying building, is converted to a senior-care facility, for those sick enough that they aren't expected to live long... plenty of despair to feed on, and if the sick (and often, but not always, senile) old codgers see...

Manipulator psychologists make great villains! The idea that s/he's puppeting BCV works great, especially since BCV is both a 'recent' immigrant (not much time conscious in the new country) and to modern life in general (computers? cell phones!? - he's not even a 'Boomer,' ha!). Strong potential...

The NORAD base was the site of a secret project involving mystic forces, including a deal with certain fey entities and/or local spirits to provide camouflage/cover by fast-growing plants over military sites (missile silos, radars, etc.) - enhancing the tension between wilderness and...

This is the key question. Are they just playing for the most pluses, without paying attention to description or narration? Are they just using basic mechanics because they don't see the opportunities for options other than simple hit points? Are they just going for the 'smackdown win' rather...

The issue of non-muted mics is so real. After running for months with my MMO guild, which has very strict rules about keeping quiet during fights & fight explanations/planning, having my tabletop group hanging around with rustling paper bags, mouthfuls of food (up to and including corn chips)...

The few times I've played evil player characters (our group rarely plays games with official alignments, and all-but-never plays villains), I've gone the cold-hearted selfish route, rather than puppy-kicking. The goal is power and wealth, and the members of your party are the most convenient and...

I started playing D&D a couple of years before introducing it to my dorm floor in 1978. That same year I converted to Christianity (changing from no religious background at all); I swam in both subcultures (and still do to some extent). I personally never ran across anyone who bought into the...

I'm no SJW, but I've never cared for sexual assault scenes, in books, films, TV, and certainly not at the game table. Intellectually, I understand some people aren't bothered by it, but on a gut level, I don't get how someone would think it's a good entertaining idea to do this without at least...

Last year I had a chance to play Artemis Bridge Simulator, which does some very similar things. It being a LAN game, each station had constant real-time interaction - but unless each station actually did their job, the whole team would fail. I only played as the engineer, but there were always...

The core of our group has gamed together since the end of the 1970s (yeah, most of us are that old); a quick estimate of total RPG experience puts us in a similar range to the OP

Oh yes, I remember the Battletech pods at the long-gone WOTC store in the U District (Seattle)! It actually worked the other way around for me - the pods got me interested in the RPG for a little while. And my son was just old enough to join us in the occasional mass trip to the pods. Sidebar...

I think for us the two things that really caught our eye (other than the IP, of course!) were Hero Points and difficulty bidding. It was the first game we came across that had hero points, even if they existed somewhere before, and we've incorporated the concept in almost every campaign since...

I started in high school, 1975, when my brother's friend brought D&D back from boot camp – he didn't have the complete rules, just some copied tables & notes. We bought the little box of booklets, and introduced the game to our friends – we had been wargamers for years, so it was an easy shift...

Our group had a marvelous time with this one! We played every single published movie-based adventure and went on to do a few homebrews. I still remember meetings some of the makers at the game convention (Origins, iirc?) when they introduced the game, clad in tuxedos (of course!).

I prefer physical dice, but I haven't run into problems the times people have used them. In fact, the last time I was playing at a table the person using an app rolled three or four critical failures in a row. So cheating wasn't the problem! To be honest, I'm not convinced apps are random the...

For me, a character sheet should have what I need to play the character - no more, no less. A character sheet is a tool for playing the character and should serve that task efficiency and as completely as possible. A small space for an image is nice, though I see that as more of a tool for the...

I like the SW system; I've found it works well for casual one-shots like convention games. Easy to run, easy to teach, and fast-moving. And yeah, swingy is spot on. The problem I run into is when you try to do a climactic boss fight, it boils down to just cycling turns until one of the players...

...um...trying to get back on topic... The OP touches on something that has crossed my mind recently as well. I remember back in the '80s thinking that we were unlikely to see very good fantasy or 'comic-book' films until we had a generation of people who had grown up immersed in both the...

Interesting thoughts around familiarity versus change (dare I call it innovation?). My experience ran thus: I started with the three little booklets (plus Greyhawk, etc.) back the '70's. By the time they came out with any further edition, I had already branched out to other games (Traveller...