Recent content by fikuvino

I voted "true," but I rarely have to do it. Most people I play with do their best to stay within the bounds of character knowledge and avoid doing too much meta-gaming.

Outside of things like convention games, I only run sandbox campaigns. That has been true for decades now. I create the world, populate it with a lot of stuff, and turn the characters loose in it. They can pursue whatever activities they want to. I don't go for any sort of balance (running...

The publishing business is unlike most others. You might be surprised at how little many well-known fiction authors make. It isn't unusual for people with fairly extensive writing credits and names that people would tend to recognize (within genre circles, at least) to have a "day job" or to...

I commend Paizo for being so thorough in their job postings and giving upfront information about salaries and benefits. It doesn't surprise me that the salaries are in the posted ranges, to be honest. Companies that focus on rpgs are essentially small publishers, and publishing is not a high...

Yep. Cost of living varies considerably from state to state, too, and from one part of a state to another. The proximity to a large city can have a huge effect, as well. For example, a wage that allows you to live alone in a small one-bedroom apartment in Austin may be enough to pay for the...

As you said, I would feat-ify a lot of things, though there are some things that fall under "feats" that I would convert into "skills." For example, parrying (and other maneuvers) might be a "feat," but simply being able to use a particular weapon (or class of weapons) would be a "skill." To...

The only benefit I could see to it is intimidation of people who aren't trained lightsaber duelists. That doesn't really confer enough of an advantage to be worth all the problems inherent with the design, though. If I were hunting Jedi who might still have their lightsabers and wanted a...

Exactly. In the end, shelf space is the most important thing that any brick-and-mortar retailer owns, and some shelf space is particularly valuable (end caps, for example). Any item that sits on a shelf is taking up space that another item could occupy, so whatever is most likely to sell -...

Yep. That's one reason that I don't blame hobby shops that don't carry the products I want. There are all sort of issues underlying why they don't carry them, from distributor issues to the needs to maximize the monetization of shelf space. I think the shop owner who wrote the original...

That has been my experience, as well. The Simpsons "comic book guy" type of store is a lot less common than it used to be, at least in my area. I saw a lot more of that in the 70s and 80s than in recent years. I suspect that a lot of them went out of business once online sales became more...

When it comes to D&D and its offshoots, I level up characters when they have done enough stuff to have realistically gained enough experiences to become more skilled at the things they have chosen to do, or have accomplished goals they have set for themselves. Since I run sandbox games, I don't...

Yep. A lot of game/comic stores out there have been wrestling with that problem for many years, long before the additional complications of Covid came along. Unfortunately, the boom and bust of the collector bubbles in the 90s, combined with the rise in online sales, really changed the market...

A pretty significant number of the game and/or comic stores (in the U.S., at least) make most of their money off sales of CCGs (Magic, Pokemon, etc.), both in the store and online. I have heard a number of owners say that card sales account for up to 80% of their total income each month, even...

I live in a big metropolitan area, and have only found one store within an hour-drive radius that carries more than D&D, Pathfinder, and a handful of other game lines. There used to be more, but the situation has been that way for at least a decade now. There are some stores that will special...