Recent content by Paul Farquhar

You want to rule out one of the genre-defining novel series from the genre?! That swerves into mythic fantasy as much as sword and sorcery. Conan the Destroyer is more genre faithful. That’s the thing really, you don’t need different rules, just different flavour text.

Yeah, but this edition war will be fought with giant rubber mallets.

It’s better than the vest majority of Star Wars not called Andor. Star Wars is fantasy, it’s not supposed to be realistic.

Elric isn’t so much a summoner as someone with Gate on their spell list. He is a noble not-elf trained in spellcasting and alchemy. He relies on potions to compensate for his frail constitution (or a soul-sucking magic sword). He has a chaos god as his patron, but spends a lot of time worrying...

There are a number of ways to do an Elric-type character in D&D. Deities and Demigods made him a multiclassed wizard/fighter, since his magic is learned, the hexblade warlock was based on Elric. You could do a fighter/artificer(alchemist) due to his reliance on potions or a ranger given his...

Gandalf in no way resembles any S&S character that I can think of. Oh, and what S&S caster fights with a staff or sling? Because I can’t think of any, proficiently or otherwise. Neither. I’m trusting my players to make an S&S type character (or say they don’t want to play an S&S game). So...

all sports and games require referees to make rulings. There is no such thing as an infallible set of rules that requires no judgment calls. And the rules do clearly state that making such calls is one of the DM’s roles. Adventures League is a perversion.

Grey Mouser. I don't see that has anything to do with S&S. Conan is if anything less flexible than a typical 5e fighter or barbarian. And a caster with less magic in more martial? You have just described Gandalf, very much not S&S. If your players want to play an S&S type protagonist they will...

As I said, no need to ban them. Not a rule, a campaign parameter. And Conan, Elric etc seem plenty superpowered to me anyway. Defiling never worked as a game mechanic. You don't need actual rules to do S&S, more like guidelines. Something similar to the Dark Fantasy section in VGR (which has...

Unless they are Elric. Nope. Marital Characters in 5e are stronger than Conan already. You might want to suggest that PCs select martial characters - if they ignore you, they are clearly not into the setting, so play something else. Casters are plenty dangerous in S&S. They are just less...

This is setting fluff, not game rules.

What rules do you think need changing?

There is still atmosphere, known at the exosphere, at ten thousand. And traces as far as the Moon (384,000 km). That’s why satellite orbits gradually decay. To get an idea of scale, the Earth viewed from the distance of the Moon is about four times (3.7) as big across as the Moon viewed from...

I don’t think there is any place for the use of the word “lazy” as a critique. The people who create these games, like the rest of us, are overworked, overstressed and under paid. And this is far more likely to be the reason they sometimes make poor decisions.