Recent content by Von Ether

D&D's "high fantasy" has long evolved something closer to the Renaissance/Colonial period where essentially magical and planar research replaced the development of firearms and science. "The future has arrived, it's just not evenly distributed." And at the turn of the century, a lot of remote...

The longest AD&D game I was in had a common joke about how helpless humans were because all the rest of the non-humans had to rescue this human village or that human village.

I think the visual for the Saurians species was inspired by an article going around at the time of what dinosaurs would look like if they had evolved intelligence.

There you go! https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/493396/the-sword-of-cepheus-2nd-edition

Yep. In my experience, it's GMs who want to run Traveller or sci-fi but can't get their table to try something different.

This is interesting as it seems lots of gamers are reluctant to do a peanut butter/chocolate thing with Sci-Fi/D&D - until they figure it out for themselves and then suddenly it's awesome. Getting hype for a sci-fi game is also an uphill battle. I've talked to ttrpg journalists who were even...

I'm appreciating card initiative as it also does the bookkeeping.

Oh! Cool. Duly noted that he is a fan.

In Eberron, it's more likely the orcs will react by asking if you're lost or why the hell you're in the back room. For Eberron, that's not out of place, and that encounter would lead to different opportunities than you wouldn't find in typical adventures unless you mocked up similar atypical...

If one wonders why most of of WotC adventures are set in Forgotten Realms, and now a bit more in Greyhawk, it's because the company sees both IPs on a spectrum of vanilla fantasy. Fans of both settings may get their feathers ruffled hearing that but from the outside looking in, one could run...

Hindsight: 20/20. WotC would have had to go all digital much sooner in an industry not embracing it just yet. You need a wide selection of adventures to make adventure line profitable overall, but then the overhead nickles and dimes you to death. It probably would have been more predictable...

Also every other 3pp D&D setting has been "DARK" and "DEADLY" since like d20.

I hear you but when people are going to complain anyway, a completely new is just more of a gamble compared to sneaking in a few new things inside something old.

Seeing as the OGL was invented to offload module creation onto 3pp due to small margins and the need for a large library/inventory of them, I wonder what their strategy is this go around. In the end, even a lot of the 3pp turned from adventure modules to settings as that where the money was at...

So more math to make the the potential success gap even wider. That is indeed trying to ensure BigNumbersGood goes all the way around. Everyone is different, as for me, while subtraction would not be a big thing, I'd not say it was "trivial" when the other two options (RAW and Blackjack) is to...