Recent content by Thomas Shey

Well, that's just skill lumping/splitting questions which is, I think, a bit of a different discussion than not using them at all.

But the problem is, some failures won't reveal that. You'll find out you've got it wrong--when you find it out. Missing information is sometimes anything but obvious.

I'll have to give SotWW a look in that regard. That's usually heavily wrapped around either spells (which SotWW does fairly differently than D&D) or limited use powers (which I don't recall SotWW having much of). But I'll try to give the spell system a quick lookover and see if there's a...

I'd have to do the "I know it when I see it" situation, and there'd be all kinds of ways for people to (legitimately) tell me I was full of it.

Well, I don't tend to use prewritten adventures, so that wouldn't even occur to me. I was thinking more in terms of what impact just deleting skills would have on things like the 3e rogue or bard..

It tends to be the way I do it too; after all, how would you know if you'd correctly got the information other than checking, and if you can do that a way other than when it matters, what was the point in the roll in the first place?

Sure. I was just noting that just eliminating skills isn't always the simple solution; there's probably other overhead you need to do.

Though in some cases they may have chosen a class because they had good skill options. The only games where pulling skills out of an extent system aren't to some degree fraught are those where it was implemented pretty off-hand in the first place.

As someone who's had probably an unusually frequent need to do research involving older Internet material, if you haven't done it its easy to not realize how often bitrot sets in over time. As you say, archiving is potentially very important here.

Or in some cases being able to respect the value of a work that you know personally would not set well with you. But the reasons it wouldn't involve engaging with it closely, not from a distance. I'm always interested in superhero settings, but neither media presentation of The Boys is...

There are only two I can think of. 1. OD&D. This may be a case where I was already in my head moving out of D&D, and didn't see a reason to move over to B/X or AD&D when they weren't going to bring me to any of the things I was wanting that OD&D didn't anyway. Of course this was arguably a...

I'm not sure I ever felt that 4D3 didn't take it a bit too far. I did see 4D6 used as the core resolution system in one middlin' obscure game system, and it seemed to work okay.

That tends to be an artifact of games that assume every character will participate in ever zone of play. Combat is the common one, but I've seen games where they'd make sure people weren't too far apart in piloting for similar reasons.

Like I said, its much harder to tell with big linear rolls in the first place, because they're so all over the place.

The big problem they had in 1e is that they sometimes got carried away with additional attacks chained off that. That was the big problem with the original Huge Green Dragon. If the die rolls came up wrong, you could do a pretty ridiculous amount of damage, and that was assuming no crits...