Recent content by Edgar Ironpelt

My "Brotherhood of Rangers" game has a few NPCs with a reputation but that the PCs haven't met. Grandma Cuprate: An ancient female copper dragon. "Be nice to her. She's a friend of Captain Grey [the high-level head of the Brotherhood]" Kimio and Imi, an ogre-mage couple who, from the traces...

I prefer to avoid them as much as practical; there needs to be a Good Reason for a character ability to be limited by the resources in the character's gas tank. I believe that the resource-management game can pall and become UnFun much more rapidly than most GMs and even players realize, and...

1960. Eisenhower was still President. Some reckonings extend the Baby Boomers out to those born as late as 1965, but I don't agree with that. I count myself as being on the very tag end of the Baby Boom, and those born after me - even if only by a year or so - to be early Gen X. I'm also...

Most of the ones I have any interest in playing or running, with the possible exception of GURPS. D&D? I'm sticking with 3.5e as Peak D&D. Champions? 4ed - the Big Blue Book Runequest? 2nd edition. The Fantasy Trip? "Classic" rather than the new "Legacy" edition now being published by Steve...

No, you can get something you find to be just as good, if not better, without discrete skills. I cannot.

I'm not seeing those leftovers from the Satanic D&D Panic of my youth. What I mostly encounter on X concerning RPGs are people insisting that their Old School Way is the One True and Right Way to run and play RPGs.

I'm your opposite number: I LOVE skills and skill systems in RPGs. I do look askance at the skill-improvement mechanic you describe for Dragonbane. RuneQuest 2e had something similar, with similar problems. I see the "me too-ism" as a feature, rather than a bug; it's a bug when it's usually...

The hack I use is that even "natural" healing is frankly supernatural, because it is a magical world. Characters in an area where the normal background world-magic is suppressed would perceive that area as horribly cursed. Healing would be dreadfully slow and often incomplete, crop yields...

Fair enough: I sit rebuked. A given game can have an agreement (probably unspoken), a "game contract" that certain 'hijinx' are PC-only; that the NPCs will avoid them or act as if they don't exist, and if it works for that game, it works for that game. I will call it bad if there is such an...

The DM using PC style tactics against them often is uncool and unfair, and even bad DMing. But that's because those tactics are exploits that the PCs shouldn't be allowed to use either. That's been a touchstone of mine for a long time when I consider a rule interpretation or new house rule...

I'm sticking with 3.5e. I do heavily curate it, with a blanket-ban on 'prestige' classes and a "must be approved by the DM (me)" rule for any feats or spells outside of the core. And a white-list of "PCs must be one of the eight core PC races." 3.5e has flaws, and I've written rants about...

For me it's more about what I dislike than what I like - although there are some types of mechanics that I do like. I dislike automatic successes and failures, and I really dislike critical successes and critical failures. And I absolutely detest when critical success or failure produce...

My preferred city supplements are kits that provide pieces-parts to customize your own towns and cities while perhaps providing an example-city as an example. I'm fond of the old Flying Buffalo CityBooks, and also the even older (1979) Cities random-encounter book by Stephen Abrams and Jon...

My understanding is that tournament lances were designed to break - and were also designed with blunt tips. They were intended for sport, and getting killed by one was a matter of unintended and uncommon bad luck. The lances with pointy tips and a non-easy-to-break design were the ones used when...

Interesting. I wouldn't want to use cryptic codes that need a key to translate. I'd prefer tiny print that spelled out "overcast" or whatever. Transition to different seasons will be a significant problem: Temperature transitions in climates with wide seasonal swings in temperature, and (I'd...