Recent content by Thomas Shey

Eh, some of those characters have rarely been at all self-contained through their history. Some can go it alone, but I'm not sold how long some of them would work that way.

Comfort-food games are a thing. Its one reason I've currently stopped buying new games, because I can't get myself to play them when I find dropping back to XCOM2: War of the Chosen, or (even more extreme) Master of Orion 2 relaxing wheras getting myself to actually engage for long with Phantom...

There's always the question of whether changing that will make the problem worse, not better.

But they're not depent on them in any way. You can have Spider-Man stories go on forever and a day without a guest star and they don't look odd (not that they do that, for the same reason as what you reference; both characters are so popular they boost other characters just by appearing with them).

Most modern digital maps work with most VTTs. A few older ones sometimes have problems. (This is direct image files here like .jpgs and the like; I'm not sure the same applies to maps specifically stored as PDFs, but those can usually be resaved as other images without too much fuss).

Though I think there's probably an argument that can be made that the there examples at hand there (Batman, Spider-Man and the X-Men) have very often lived a story-life almost detached from the rest of their relative universes (which gets pretty weird at times with the X-Men, but what else is...

Yeah, when we took her in to the ER and they found her BP was 200/100, she knew it was time to talk to our doctor post-haste.

In your case maybe you wouldn't, but since I consider the other things mostly trade-offs too, and don't find the high end gusting particularly virtuous, its pretty painless for me. Not the way a lot of people are going to see it if it happens frequently no matter how you frame it. I'm not...

Yeah, different rest states produce different results. Whereas while I've been friends with most of the people I play with for a long time--some as long at this point as a half-century--we're only friends because of gaming; outside my wife I didn't know any of them before i started gaming with...

Well, can't say I expected quite that dramatic a flameout in that thread, even if it was getting testy.

Even that's more risky than low-prep or (my general preference) prep-as-you-go. The problem I've always found with that is if someone sits out one game, there's a pretty good chance they'll never come back because they've hooked up with a game with another group, and they don't tidily end at...

While I somewhat agree with your second sentence, I'd argue heroes in a fantasy world should be able to expect some consistency and a D20 usually isn't doing that. That bell curve doesn't just prevent your from reaching outside your capabilities, it also makes it a lot less likely you'll look...

Its a thing some mapmakers seem to be prone to. DramaScape used to make some really interesting maps (I'm not sure if they sold them in physical form and they may have stopped making them at all at this point; at least I haven't seen a new one from them in a while) but their early ones were...

Very possibly. There's also the thing that D&D has usually kind of wanted to have its cake and eat it too; be vaguely fantasy-generic while having very recognizeable specifics. The latter are absolutely there, but can sometimes be paved over if you don't look at them hard. Any critiques I may...

I don't think I'm assuming everyone has the same design goals. I'm just assuming its usually a virtue to have something in terms of what effect decisions make in mechanical expression, and that most of the time that's beyond purely narrative ease. As an example, there are absolutely some...