Recent content by SpellObjectEnthusiast

Interjecting this article as it is pretty relevant to the conversation. It's focused on Fate specifically but imo is applicable for any kind of game, including trad games. Specifically, the part about thinking about rolls less about "Overcoming Challenges" and more as about "Determining What...

Typically if plan A fails in this sort of game, you are driven to using a backup plan to achieve the same result at a greater cost. The rogue being unable to bypass the lock might mean: The party goes to the chocolate room first, fighting their enemy without obtaining his weakness. The party...

Many games sidestep this problem by encouraging the GM to just skip rolling on checks where there's no consequence for failure and no external pressure. But that isn't going to stop inexperienced or particular GMs from just saying "well you're climbing, and theres a climbing skill, make me a...

I'm not referring to playing 5e - I'm referring to playing Od&d, B/X, or any other TSR era game today.

Your original encounter design should be fine, provided that you also include 2-3 other encounters of similar difficulty in the same adventuring day. 17,400XP* will give you a Deadly encounter for your party size - which means the party will probably win unless they play stupid or get super...

Also in the context that the original D&D designers were running multiple sessions a week, some lasting over 12 hours, including as many as 20 players simultaneously, and running for months or years. Not much else to do when snowed in in WI/MN before the internet or video games. These were...

In B/X notably this is true of ranged weapons and spell ranges but NOT spell areas and the like - helps prevent one AOE from killing hundreds and hundreds of soldiers in a mass combat scenario.

Its also encouragement for people who already backed at low levels to either upgrade to a higher tier or add add ons. The all-in tiers get to be a better "deal" as more stuff is added and you get a constant email barrage reminding you of that fact.

Yep its quite real. I've been following SimzArt for years and I think they're pretty much pulling from their whole body of work for all the book illustrations. 0% AI.

I believe the top ones that aren't 5e D&D are, by volume of players, in no particular order: Pathfinder (both editions) Call of Cthulhu (all editions) D&D (All editions other than 5e + Retroclones) World of Darkness (all versions) Pretty much anything else is just a rounding error relative to 5e.

"perception" in Old school games is essentially the Search action - spend 10 minutes searching at most a 10x10 square, with a 17% chance of success each time, no retries. This rule is so horrendously bad and unusable that, by necessity, people started making up their own way of resolving...

People typically are referring to OD&D and the Basic series when they say Old School was simpler, not AD&D and definitely not AD&D second edition. If they do use ad&d as a reference point, they ignore like 90% of the rules as optional. Old school was birthed in 1974 and died at your choice of...

I ran the premade module in it to decent success. Trying to use the campaign tools was frustrating and I ultimately gave up and pivoted to a different campaign frame. It ultimately is a better book to steal ideas from than to use as the sole source for a campaign, imo.

LL usually has the book pretty close to done before crowdfunding it. The KS's I've been on have all delivered quickly.

The art, design, and ideas in LL's stuff is really really good. They're very fun to read or flip through. They tend to lack polish/specifics though that make them more challenging to use for actual play as-is. Specifically I tried to run Wind Wraith which was very challenging to use and...