Recent content by borringman

The amusing thing to me is that, being old (I don't recommend it, BTW), I played D&D back in the 1980s and I don't know what OSR is. If you were born after the inventions of fire and the wheel and picked up an old PHB, you'll probably find it extremely limiting and idiosyncratic, and come up...

Not necessarily? OSR is inspired by O/AD&D, so over 90% of the time, OSR is going to be talking about D&D. D&D has by far the largest market share so that sounds obvious, but even if we lived in a world where it didn't, most OSR games would still be some variant of D&D. Yet, there are OSR...

"challenges". . .

Who's Nick Weapon? / what?

That's literally what the OGL fiasco was: a massive downgrade of the D&D experience for an unhinged cash grab. They were forced to backtrack, but there's the rub: it was only because their customers howled with outrage -- or more likely, the massive wave of unsubscriptions that followed --...

Lotta folks here naively assuming that what WotC does has nothing to do with they make. Seeing a lot of opinions that amount to, "I voted '1'. I'm not bothered by their decisions, because it doesn't affect the product(s) they offer." Except it does. Not that I'd be thrilled if they were...

Well it's an interesting contradiction, because in warfare, the ideal is to not have "tactical" combat at all, but to overwhelm one's opposition. For example, when American fighter pilots realized dogfighting the Japanese Zero was suicidal, they switched to power diving (American planes were...

Right. But I don't think you realize how utterly mind-blowing that is, to "sustain the already existing momentum". Games have momentum like a pile of bricks. Unless it's obscure (which, among TTRPGs, D&D is by far the least qualified), the sales peak of a new game is heavily front-loaded --...

Thing is, D&D enjoyed an explosion of popularity through a string of coincidences that WotC had absolutely nothing to do with, and are extremely unlikely to happen again. Don't get me wrong, 5E was doing fine on its own. But then Stranger Things came out of nowhere, COVID-19 came out of...

There's also sham AI. Think about it: The business model is, you're not allowed to peek inside the black box, but the guy selling it doesn't know what's in it anyway, in fact no one does, not even the people who built it, so don't bother asking. It just works somehow. This is exactly how...

It sounds more like you've had crappy DMs, and their crappiness has led you to build up resentment against realists, when there's nothing realistic about the situations you're describing. Just because a DM says they're being realistic, it could just mean they're a jerk. In fact, that's common...

One thing that grinds my gears is how often people assume my empathy ends at what directly affects me. OP's debunking aside, people still lost their livelihoods and they think a spin like this will make me go, "Oh, thank heavens! I'm not personally affected by these layoffs. Carry on then!"...

I see it as, you take what you can get. Especially with D&D, if we're going off the lowest common denominator to justify tossing out realism for everything else, then adventures might as well take place in wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey swirls of chaos where your armor can just as easily turn into a...

I actually wonder about that. Mail armor sounds very unpleasant; knew someone who tried and yeah the weight on your chest makes it hard to breathe. But a cuirass is rigid so maybe it wouldn't be that bad? Reports are that contrary to popular belief, plate armor can be comfortably worn for...

I was gonna say, if you watched Dark Dungeons and was motivated to try D&D to summon demons with it, you're going to be disappointed. I mean, I tried. I wound up summoning a rules lawyer instead. / The group unanimously agreed that summoning a demon would've been preferable. D&D: Not once.