Recent content by Lorne

Greetings all, After playing the current D&D ruleset for the past several months, I think I have a reasonable handle on how the game is played. One question I still have, though, involves the number of characters in a typical adventuring party. Some of the out-of-print adventures in my...

Greetings all, How many characters are there in a typical adventuring group in your campaign?

Two options come to mind, given the time constraints you've described. The first involves 'thinking like a beholder.' Everyone seems to have concurred that the heroes have challenged the creature and placed some doubts in its mind about its ability to dispose of them with typical ease. While...

Actually, that information might be useful to see how many folks don't use non-PHB classes and just stick to the core rulebooks. Not part of the original question, but I'd find it to be interesting. Lorne

While I think having a 'working knowledge' of the rules is necessary (read as: you can handle a basic combat and you know where to look to check infrequently-used rules), I believe that rules expertise takes a back seat to having a sense of dramatic timing and an ability to vividly describe...

I've been pronouncing the title "OZ-rik." Edit: just realized everybody is joking. Boy, am I sleep deprived. Having a two-year-old does that to you. . . Lorne

To a limited extent, I do enforce a style of play, by not allowing evil player characters. I view D&D as a game of heroic fantasy, and playing a villain is anti-heroic in my opinion. Besides, in my 22 years as a DM, I've never seen an evil PC played according to alignment - it's been my...

Do you mean this? Lorne

The practice of designing against the rules is annoying, but the effects of that usually get minimized when I prepare an adventure for play. I've found that few products can be run out of the box without modification for the particular party that will be going through the module; when I run into...

For the last ten years or so, it's been 2e houseruled to tiny bits. But I've started playing 3.5, and I enjoy it very much - particularly the mechanics simplifications. I don't know enough about it yet to determine whether it captures D&D or not. Lorne

Sorry gents, my fault. It was my intnetion to make the point that newer isn't necessarily better. In hindsight, I should have just said that instead of trying to illustrate the point with specific differences betweeen editions. Rookie mistake. Lorne

True enough, although I think my clumsy example illustrates my meaning clearly enough, even without adjusting for inflation. We could just as easily use your $30 figure to press the same point - it would still cost three times as much for new players to get started, assuming that they don't...

I thought that 'D&D' meant official WotC products and 'd20 fantasy' meant material produced by third parties. After reading all the posts, I'm not sure if that's accurate or not. Lorne

If we assume that higher tech planes are better, I'd agree. But I'm not so sure they're better all the time. Please don't construe the following as 3.5-bashing. I just don't want to minimize the features of the old versions of the game that, in my experience, outclass version 3.5. Consider the...

Try Pied Piper Publishing; it's A small publishing house recently launched by Rob Kuntz, a longtime friend of Mr. Gygax. He only sells old-school style modules in print format. Lorne