Recent content by CandyLaser

My recommendations: Old School Essentials comes up a lot here, and indeed it is a very good, clean presentation of BX play. Just play BECMI, or pick up the Rules Cyclopedia if you want (almost) all of the rules in one book. Why reinvent the wheel? Take a look at the work of Kevin Crawford...

I played a fair bit of V:TM back in the day (1e and 2e) and ran a game of V5 just before the pandemic. I'd agree with your assessment; in fact, I'd say that V5's mechanics do a much better job at delivering on the horror element of the game than any prior edition.

This year's Gen Con is a little odd because some publishers from overseas won't be attending thanks to our current political situation - Rowan, Rook, and Decard aren't going to be there, and I think Pelgrane is missing the con as well. They typically run a good number of games using their systems.

I'm interested to see how they handle the mixed enemy pool situation for superheroes as well. One thought I had, similar to @Ruin Explorer 's suggestion of having the encounter change at various grit thresholds, would be to take a page from 2LM's earlier game, Household. In Household you play...

I wouldn't say it's good, exactly, but Once and Future King inspired a long-running desire to do a sci-fi take on the Arthur story. I've thought about doing it in a Battletech-ish setting, with possession of a mech being the rough equivalent to the arms and armor a knight would have possessed in...

A handful of other classes get AoE or multi-target at-wills - swordmages, artificers, battleminds, monks, and sorcerers get AoEs and rangers, fighters and barbarians have multi-target attacks.

I'm not @pemerton , but I've heard others express the idea that the fighter is the martial controller before. Fighters in 4e got a lot of powers that overlapped with controller abilities, including forced movement and imposing action-denying conditions. Other defenders could do this, but not to...

May I introduce you to World Wide Wrestling? I've not played the second edition, but I enjoyed the first quite a bit.

When 4e was just coming out, I ran a bunch of "Dungeon Delve" events at Gen Con with what was then called the RPGA. These were relatively short two-hour sessions that were essentially just three combats back to back, designed to show off the combat system, and there were prizes for getting...

Can't speak to the market, but Good Society is a Jane Austen RPG and is fairly well known. There's also a FATE World of Adventure called Romance in the Air which takes Austen as an inspiration, but in a more action-heavy setting. Regency Cthulhu name checks Austen on the cover, but I wouldn't...

A suggestion: rather than make firearms more complex, just make them better if you want them to be a significant feature of the campaign. I tried to go down the route you're exploring when I did a 5e pirates campaign, and the result was that no one ended up using firearms; they simply weren't...

The rules in the quickstart for TA aren't quite the same as the rules in the final game - I believe the quickstart is the Delta Test, which was also the final public playtest for the game. In the full rules, you're basically just counting 3s.

In my experience, the silicone dice are also quite bouncy. I don't know if I'd say they're unusable, but they're right on the borderline. I've tested a bunch of sets at Gen Con over the past few years. I think you can manage if you're rolling them on a surface that'll mute the bounciness. I...

Frosthaven is sadly a very bad game to learn from; the rulebook is geared toward people who've already played Gloomhaven and understand the basic mechanics. You might try looking for a Gloomhaven tutorial? The digital version of GH might work as well. For games in general, I typically am the one...

There's at least two families of games in the Gumshoe space, IMO - you have maximalist implementations, like Trail of Cthulhu, Night's Black Agents, and Mutant City Blues, with very large skill lists and special-case rules/subsystems. Night's Black Agents is probably the best exemplar here, with...