Recent content by Lord Shark

In the playtest, you now roll your icon dice only once per "arc" (the new term for the three- or four-encounter sequence between full heal-ups), not per session. Which is how I'd been doing it anyway. There are also a new 20-25 pages on how to use icon relationships in play, with a ton of examples.

Pelgrane is based in Britain, so I'd think their EU shipping rates would be more friendly than a US-based company. The fighter's (and bard's) flexible attacks are gone in the beta playtest, replaced by more straightforward abilities.

Looking through the playtest beta, they've added champion- and epic-tier talents to the paladin, so you're not stuck picking from the same little pool of talents for your paladin for your entire career (like the 5E battlemaster). Smite and Lay on Hands are now both class abilities so they don't...

Wilderness of Mirrors is also unusual in that the GM is supposed to provide only the premise of the mission, and during the planning phase the players fill in the obstacles between themselves and the goal -- which is quite different from the "try to guess the DM's mind" type of traditional...

A hour of valuable game time spent planning, and then suddenly rendered useless because someone biffed their Stealth roll and alerted every guard for miles around, is not fun.

Yeah, that's one of the problems with banning magic item stores, especially if you also insist on handing out randomly generated treasure: the party is inevitably going to accumulate a pile of magic items they've outgrown and/or have no use for -- which contributes to magic items feeling boring...

The only way this game is crunchier than D&D is if you ignore D&D's 100 pages of spells.

Yeah, the "problems" with guns come up when you start treating them like Wands of Instant Death and then feel you have to balance them with long reload times, expensive ammunition, etc., until they become useless and no fun. Meanwhile, in most fantasy media that includes guns, they're just a...

Excessive planning, excessive timidity in exploration (the "poke everything with a 10' pole" style of play), and combats that are just there for attrition and/or XP.

Yeah. In situations like this it's all too common for martial characters who don't have reach weapons to get stuck with no way to engage the monsters, leaving them with little to do beyond plink away with a javelin or bow.

If you're talking about magical effects that PCs can never have, note the casual mention of the monsters in the ziggurat being charmed to stay put. Charm monster is not a permanent effect in 1E, and it's not one of the spells that can be augmented by permanency. And even if it could be, every...

I don't play 5E, and nothing I've seen of the "fixes" makes it any more interesting. So no.

It's the trickle-down theory of RPGs.

One of the things I learned running 4E is that I'd rather have one 60-minute fight where there's a lot going on and everyone has opportunities to do cool stuff, instead of six 10-minute fights that are just rolling and marking off spells and HP.

If you're referring to the Pathfinder 2E playtest, that was free. Paizo also printed and sold a physical copy of the playtest rules, but that was aimed at collectors and completists; you did not have to buy it to participate in the playtest.