Recent content by Benjamin Olson

They didn't (except in the sense that there is a few months time skip between each season). With season 2 taking place in October-November of '84 (with a Winter Ball sequence in December) and season 3 taking place in the Summer of '85 the space between seasons 2 and 3 where this is set is (I...

I've run Lost Mines 3 and a half times, and working on getting together a group for yet another time. I think it is the best published campaign for 5e, especially with Icespire Peak available in the same region for the same level with lots of highly modular pieces to insert to the table's...

I also wouldn't want a module written by William Shakespeare. Trying to improvise or expand anything in Iambic pentameter seems like a nightmare, I suspect his adventures would be very railroady, and of course the name attached would make it so famous and revered that I'd feel obligated to give...

Oh, so if I try to use a book as what it purports to be rather than what "anyone who even casually read" it automatically knows I'm a chump who hasn't seen the true brilliance of it. Well that's just a different way a product can be bad in my book. If that's what they're selling thay should come...

Were they all hired to write "big dumb campaign" books? But yeah, I doubt WotC is actually retiring the format entirely, but I wouldn't be surprised if its getting a serious rethink. I assume a lot of the value to WotC is less the campaign books being directly profitable and more that campaign...

I guess the fundamental problem is that I view characters as characters, I only care about their backstory as relevant to their role in the shared narrative, and I often find character backstory, whether written by a player, randomly generated, created through some sort of lifepath minigame, or...

I've played Star Trek Adventures. In terms of core gameplay I think it's a wonderful system. The basic 2d20 resolution mechanic, applying focuses and such, does a great job of elegantly giving characters the feel of having skills for manifold different strange tasks that come up in Star Trek...

Well my own hope would be that it means the days of the WotC "big dumb campaign book" are just over, because they're frankly poor products. But really what it probably comes down to is that, having had a particularly poor product with Hoard of the Dragon Queen, the 5e campaign book mostly...

So my basic problem with elaborate character backstory creation, which is why I tend to not enjoy lifepath systems and heavy-handed character creation prompts, is that at the outset I really don't know this character I haven't played yet, and whatever is created at the outset rarely really jives...

They're never just going to straight adapt some Star Wars novel from the 90s. First off because of continuity issues with the sequel trilogy. Secondly because the novels basically all revolve around the cast of the original trilogy and there are serious practical limitations on that. It's also...

I think the worst problem with licensed games is that the license periodically gets pulled and sold off to some other company and a game dies not because it's time has come, but because some suit who doesn't understand or care about ttrpgs hears a pitch they like. It's bad enough to have...

Well sure, it's D&D. Literally anything can be played if you want to put in the work to make it playable and everyone at the table agrees. The issues are that a) WotC is leaving the work of supporting this previously popular option up to the players for no real compelling reason, b) defaults...

It's all a matter of setting. Forgotten Realms, and generally most modern "official" campaigns and settings, are so aggressively cosmopolitan that a hybrid person isn't remotely unusual (and so cutting the half-elves and half-orcs was a ridiculous move for 5.5 because they were not just a...

Aside from the storyteller being dubious, so much of what this anecdote really means comes down to exactly what was said many years ago (if it really happened at all) that I wouldn't really trust anyone's testimony based on a single meeting. Did TSR folks actually say that their primary goal...

That's simplifying for combat, but it's just making the prep point decision-making much, much harder. But whatever. I despise the "you should only be able to do like five things and magically forget how to use all the other abilities you've learned for the day" school of ttrpg design, and view...