Recent content by Lanefan

I think the answer to the thread title's question's has now emerged: Q: Why do people like alignment? A: So they can assign Neutral Evil as the default alignment of all DMs.

My rule of thumb is the more metal the armour has, the noisier it's likely to be; not just from clinking against itself but from things like the wearer's weapon scabbards (or worse, exposed weapons on a belt or across one's back) and other gear knocking into it, interaction with any obstacles...

When playing with friends who are forever-players, it can easily reach the point where you can fairly accurately predict what they're going to say if-when consulted with: almost invariably amounting to nerfs = no, boost = yes, neutral = who cares. Those players who are also DMs will, IME...

This was what the Sanctuary spell in 1e was for.

Or, just make on-the-fly in-combat healing not a thing; or something done only at very great risk to both the caster and the recipient. As in: --- healing effects - spells, herbs, surge, etc. - take a full round to cast/apply/use (exception: potions, which work as normal) --- any interruption...

Indeed. My game is the one that uses free-floating slots a la 3e Sorcerers (which is where I stole the idea from), largely because I very long ago came to detest pre-memorization of spells as too much fuss for too little reward. Next time out I'll be tweaking down the number of slots all...

There's a difference between cheerleaders who can't otherwise do anything and supporters who can (try to) do things just not as effectively as the expert or who can find ways to support and help the expert...or who can wander off and do their own thing; not like I've never seen this before. :)...

Some adventures are just better suited to some characters. I'm fine with that, as long as the DM tries to mix it up a bit e.g. if the last adventure was all undead where the Illusionist wasn't much use, make the next one all dumb brutes where she can have a field day. As DM I never feel...

My experience here has been mixed. I remember back in the 80s sitting around on numerous occasions with our DM and a few other players over far too much tea, shooting the breeze about all sorts of different rules ideas. Some great and fondly-remembered conversations but I'm not sure how many...

Two words. Party interdependence. Assuming the default style of play to be a group of characters going out on adventures (an assumption that doesn't seem too controversial) then doesn't it make sense to design in such a way as to encourage and support that style? If each character is good at...

Perhaps. I'm trying to separate chivalric (or anti-chivalric) knight types out from common fighters as I think there's class-design space for both. Brute-Brawler comes square under common fighter; they just choose 'open hand' as a weapon proficiency. As for ranged specialists, yeah, I have a...

They can all talk, they can (and, I hope, do) have memorable personalities and character quirks, they can all try to do things outside their normal sphere only they won't be very good at it. And yes, it helps if one accepts as a fact of life that not everyone is going to be involved all the...

Creating a setting from scratch to playable took me about a year of nowhere-near-constant effort, while working a full-time job. At a ve-e-ery rough guess I'd say it came in at well under 100 hours total. Most of the time-consuming busy-work lay in hand-drawing and colouring the maps...

Take a look at our system sometime - it's probably closer-related to TSR-era D&D than you realize. www.friendsofgravity.com/games then "commons room"; then "blue books" for (very setting-specific) player-side stuff and "DM stuff" for DM-side.

Change "Prevent" to "Embrace" there and you've got it bang on. :)