Recent content by bmfrosty

I love that someone is doing a nicer open source version of 5e, even if I will never use it. I hope that they use LaTeX or CSS for Paged Media or something that's more github friendly than what Gonnerman did with Basic Fantasy.

Ah. My recollection was incorrect. I had thought that the saves didn't move until cyclopedia. My peeve is when I'm building a character and I have to hunt them down at all. Telling the DM what you rolled and relying on them is a way to do things. When I DM, my attention is pretty split, and...

It feels like every time I go to reference an old D&D book with class descriptions, it's quite a hunt for those saving throws. I once tried to convince the BFRPG guy to put them with the characters, and he said he liked them separated because that's the way the old books did it. Seemed like a...

Interestingly, I did find a PDF of it, and while some of the box set bits (like the DM screen/card box and cardboard figures) are a bit funky to deal with, the cards themselves are fine if you go into 2 page mode and fiddle with the left/right alignment directly. Of specific note, the Rule Book...

I mostly like that all player rolls are roll high and the percentile Thief skills are now d6. As a whole it's way more consistent and coherent across the board without really changing the math much at all. I'm in a barrowmaze group using labyrinth lord, and every time we have a new player...

Old school essentials. I would want to use the Fighter, Thief, Cleric, Magician, and core rules from dolmenwood, but it would just confuse the players.

Sorry for the really late quote here. There are so many takes on how one wants to see OSR D&D. I think everyone has one. I have one, and every time I work on it, I change my mind. That and I have little to no interest in publishing a book. It's always interesting to see alternative takes on...

Dungeon Crawl Classics pretty much.

The build metagame happens when the player can direct the build. The optimization happens when people are able to collaborate. The internet is very good for collaboration.

I feel like the fuckery was one of those we need to cut everything by 10% types of fuckery and whoever was arguing to keep him didn't manage to make their case well enough. It still sucks.

Lol. Not what I dislike them for. I like them for saving D&D from being by random house directly and having died a quiet death, but I dislike them for turning the build metagame of D&D up to 11.

This makes sense. It frustrates the hell out of me, but it makes sense from a strategy perspective for them. They want things to lean into the idea that there's just one D&D and not 17 of them. And a bunch of retro clones. And Pathfinder. And Tunnels & Trolls (from a historical perspective)...

That's the thing though. I want to just go on and play a character. If builds and power creep are a thing and the table is talking about how to build the biggest DPS build, I kind of have to care about it. I could deal with power creep better if it wasn't part of the build process. I've...

I'm reading Game Wizards right now. I picked up on a humble bundle that's still going - Humble Book Bundle: All About Gaming by MIT Press - the bundle is more video game focused, but also has Zones of Control which is more focused on war gaming.

This is such a complicated subject. As much as I don't love WotC, it was probably the best outcome from the trajectory TSR was on. What other steward would have absorbed 30M in debt? TSR was a hive of toxicity, infighting, and poor business decisions. I keep reading different histories, and...