Recent content by Thomas Shey

It can still matter considerably whether it involves other people's money (Kickstarter) or just your own, however.

I still stand by the opinion nothing about either process makes it more one or the other though; prior to that moment there was no indication the character knew this particular piece of information, so the only question is the source of and process of deciding if the information was there. The...

Came in to suggest DunDraCon, read the first post, noticed what day it is, turned around and went out the way I came in...

My own feeling is that both are, effectively, "information spontaneously appearing in your head" if you did not already know the character knew this information previously for some reason, so it strikes me as this just being different people being irritable about different, but still flawed...

Today I learned that pistol shrimp exist. I don't think I want anyone to ever tell me an alien animal I come up with is outlandish again. (Reference: Alpheidae - Wikipedia)

I think there's a difference between "Nothing exists" and "nothing exists that's going to be interesting to adventurers". The expectation that the world is going to be stuffed full of different things of the weirdness that demands adventurers is, honestly, kind of contrived. The fact that...

And there we are. All the game engines of them seemed vastly more similar than different to me.

How incompatible do they need to be? Some people would claim that about Shadowrun 4e. Traveler the New Era certainly was. Each edition of Villains and Vigilantes has been pretty significantly different from the prior, and the 1st and 2nd were both from the same publisher. Gamma World had a...

Well I explained my position. If you handed me ten games from the period of D&D 4.0 and said "One of these is the new edition of D&D" I'm pretty sure I'd have picked out the correct one in a heartbeat. The only thing that would have potentially confused me is if the other nine included...

Answer is "It depends." You'd need to rework some elements of some of them, but they have the same criteria I'm using: structural, look and feel, terminology and various things only them and games clearly spun off from them share. In the case of D&D: same attribute sets, in the same ranges...

I suspect that the the audible public of the RPG space. Its never a good idea to confuse that with the group involved as a whole.

Yup. Often the best third option they had was non-exclusive art use (i.e. not stock but permitting the artist to resell it to others. I'm acquainted with one one-man-bad writer/publisher who I've recognized art from his works in other products multiple times.

You didn't ask me, but I do. Same as I believe about all the editions of RuneQuest, even though there were some serious variations in some areas to them.

That's the problem though; how different a game needs to be to be called something different is in the eye of the beholder. I'd say even 4e was clearly D&D to my view--too many structural or mechanical elements were either nearly identical or recognizably derived and updated to be...

I'm not sure why that would be surprising; if someone isn't themselves hostile to AI art usage, and doesn't think they're potential market will be to a strong extent, its a way to save what can be a pronounced cost in producing a game book.