Recent content by Thomas Shey

That's fair, but I'm surprised more of it didn't carry over. After all, a relatively small percentage of people back in that day didn't hit D&D first. But apparently the new environment evoked a new perspective.

To be blunt, all this proves is someone read the game fiction there before hitting the game. But I roll to disbelieve that's the common case with most of those. I'm not sure I even think its common with the D&D fiction, but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt there.

I'd say the real answer is there is no useful compromise within a single play group. The desires are simply incompatible. Now within a game system I find no really credible reason not provide both options unless you're sure your market simply doesn't care about one of them (as is the case with...

Eh. People have been used to D&D forcing combat to one degree or another on every character for decades. I don't see it as intrinsically any worse to force some capability in other spheres.

While I'm not going to deny its a virtue to have software support there, I think (at least generically, how it is for you is of course your own thing) its entirely possible to build characters without it. I did it for a considerable time in the early period of 2e and 3e (and presumably 4e) were...

Though there were absolutely games outside the D&D sphere that still had pretty high mortality. The BRP sphere was (and to some extent still is) fairly far along on that simply because it can be unforgiving. Oddly enough, it never had the culture where that was a virtue to the same degree, though.

Honestly, it didn't matter as much back then depending on where the bad stats landed. A cruddy Int on a Fighting-Man or Thief was mechanically irrelevant for example. And the range of what was "mediocre" could be quite wide on a number of stats. Though yeah, "throwing your character on a...

Honestly, the usual solution was vaguely analogous to the "character funnel" idea. You went through a lot of low level PCs until some of them survived long enough to be a little more viable, and accumulated enough money to pay for raise dead for their friends. It just required a bit of working...

There's a couple problems here. 1. "Antagonist and unfun." Many of the people involved in this did not feel those two terms went together, including a lot of players. They just thought a certain degree of antagonism, as long as long as it wasn't beyond bounds, was "how things were done". In...

The problem is that this is not one of those cases where if the wants are strong, you can have it both ways. If the game system actually rewards high rolls and punishes low ones, a system that provides point distribution for people who don't want that isn't going to solve the problem used in...

It is, but if you want anything beyond the games they supported at the time, you're on your own. I was particularly soggy about PF2e in this regard. I don't run them in person either, but I still don't want to be dependent on a third party's servers to do so. Its the same reason I use...

Spawning fiction and the fiction being widely available are not the same thing. Traveler is in a weird spot because in a lot of Traveler games, most of the setting lore is largely irrelevant; you need to understand the available technology and campaign type, and possibly the aliens, but you...

Same. I've backed a lot of games in the last decade, but if I got more than three physical books in that I'd be surprised (and at least one of those was a mistake).

No, they're asking that games support their version. That's not a judment call, that's just stating their wants and needs.

The value in "balanced" is not everyone sees it the way you do, and they'd like to play too.