Recent content by SageMinerve

This. The number of potential new RPGers alone makes this Kickstarter campaign an incredibly great event for our hobby!

Tolkien sold the film, stage and merchandising rights in 1969 to LotR to Saul Zaentz, a Hollywood film producer. The rights included everything published at the time, so LotR and Hobbit were in, but not everything that JRR's son Christopher published after his father's death in 1973. So The...

There are two licensees for Tolkien Legendarium. Middle-earth Enterprises own the rights to Lord of the Rings (including the appendices, very important!) and The Hobbit. Everything else in the Legendarium is owned by the Tolkien Estate (controlled by Christopher Tolkien's descendants). The...

Anybody who's read Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld would not be surprised by the geek side of Sam Clemens...

If your gripe is with the way 4th ed achieved class balance, then I agree with you. It didn't bother me as much as it seemed to bother a lot of people, but achieving balance through different paths would be a desirable design objective, to me at least. Regarding non-combat contributions...

This is of course a figure of speech, but I think you would just have lost your life right there. I, like everybody else and as Umbran wrote upthread, cannot in any way put numbers on how many people think combat balance through the classes is important. All I can tell you is that combat...

I agree that saying all RPG gamers dislike change is a bit of a hyperbole. But saing that they're not because of 3rd ed's success is equally preposterous. The situation now is too different from what it was back then to have a valid equivalency: 1) TSR was dead and WotC, who was THE gaming...

Not a bad suggestion, actually: non-caster fighters, mages and "hybrid" (blends fighting with magic) would make sense as class groups.

I sometimes think so too. But those issues, in my mind, are much more important with Barbarians, Paladins and Monks.

To be able to have something like what you're suggesting explicitly stated in the rules book, you'd need to either: 1) Make sure that, for level X, all class abilities from all classes are equivalent (so you can for example swap a 5th lvl Fighter class ability for a 5th lvl Wizard ability); OR...

I agree, better drop this.

It comes from the fact that, a couple posts up-thread, you wrote that you had removed the barbarian, paladin and some other classes from your game because you judged that they had the same problems as the monk. To your POV, not having those classes in the core roster would be a good thing...

I went back and read your article. Weirdly enough, I find that "It's more about what you can't do than what you can do" intersects with your 5 reasons, but especially #2 and #5. But it's apples and oranges, really. You're talking about virtues (I'd call it "goals" or "objectives" personally...

IMHO you have it backwards: classes are defined first and foremost by what they can't do, not what they can do, because otherwise what's the point of having classes? Why don't we have fighters casting fireballs? Why don't we have rogues casting healing spells? Any RPG has to put boundaries on...

When I say "more", I'm talking about the class roster as it stands now: about a dozen classes. I too absolutely hate class-bloat such as was seen during the 3.5 era. Each class should have a strong-enough archetype that: 1) is sufficiently different from other classes and 2) is not merely a...