Recent content by Edgar Ironpelt

I prefer to ban them completely. If you need an auto success/fail rule to hit/miss, that's the rules and the dice telling you that the GM should just hand out a "don't bother rolling the dice" result. Right now I'm leaving criticals in place for my 3.5e game where I'm trying to keep the house...

My "Brotherhood of Rangers" game is a "restricted gestalt" one: PCs must be ranger-gestalts with only one other class. It works very well, enough so that I'd try the concept again with a different class, given the appropriate campaign idea. E.g. a "Dungeoneering in the Megadungeon" game where...

Re 'joke' characters, I've done a few tongue-in-cheek things as NPCs, so my touchstone for joke or joke-adjacent PCs is "Would this character fit in my game setting if I created it as an NPC?"

As a GM I dodge the issue through a combination of having racially cosmopolitan nations and strict enforcement of "approved PC races only." In one game where I specifically wanted mostly-human PCs, I had a rule that to play an non-human PC, the player first had to bribe the GM by creating a...

I prefer to have magic-augmented economies in my game-worlds. Magic-augmented food production in particular, but also other forms of magical augmentation, often running below the level of broken-out detail in the rules for regular official magic. Instead, it's things like having various peasant...

I don't play 5e, but in earlier editions I preferred to start characters at 4th level (or even higher). So if I did ever abandon my stronghold position of "3.5e is peak D&D" and ran 5e, I'd do the same there. So you could say that PCs in the games I run technically go from level 1 to level 4...

And as I posted previously: "Implementing this causes complexity to creep into the initially simple system." It might be a net benefit, but there's very much a tradeoff if the initial choice of a slot system was for the sake of its simplicity.

LFQW very much did exist in 1e AD&D. I know because I was there. It was mitigated by making low-level wizards extra wimpy so that fighters and wizards were roughly 'balanced' at mid-level rather than at 1st level, and so that the disparity at high level wasn't quite so bad. 3.x did make things...

The weakness of slot-based encumbrance is dealing with small items - items where there is a desire and powerful intuition for allowing a slot to hold more than one of them. Implementing this causes complexity to creep into the initially simple system.

The reason why there are so many solutions is that people don't find the existing solutions satisfactory - even when there are already tons of them to choose from - and so they create yet another solution in an attempt to fix the problems they see.

That sounds like the Runequest 2e system of "things," where a "thing" is something you can easily carry in one hand, some items (those 2H weapons and armor) have an encumbrance cost of more than one "thing," and you can carry a number of "things" equal to your STR or the average of your STR and...

In the old days, some DMs handed out Bags of Holding to first-level characters, handwaving that they were super-cheap and available in the setting, because encumbrance was such a PITA that even the DMs disliked it. RPGs have some Intractable Problems that people have wrestled with over the...

I'd model it on the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul. So a covered market in a big city - the largest city in the region if not the world. Shops, lots of shops, with any 'adventure' arising from mercantile interests and/or the criminal underworld. It's easy to find the shops the Grand Bazaar has...

Runequest (2nd ed). It was something I played but never ran.

I've heard of at least one campaign where the PCs were members of a gypsy band, with the stereotypical gypsy house-carts. And I have wandering gypsy bands of that sort in my Etan setting, although I haven't worked them out except in the sketchiest of ways. ("They make up a semi-acknowledged...