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If you want to try the Realms and see how you like it, you'll get the best overall sense of what it's like from Ed Greenwood's original 1987 Forgotten Realms Campaign Set. The 3E setting book has a lot more words, but it's a compendium pulled together from many years of published development and...

To be able to heal all your hurts with a night's sleep feels to me like a weird power of a supernatural hero from Celtic myth -- just too much of a genre clash with most kinds of D&D fantasy and their influences.

This is the line between those who like variety of action to be represented by human narration and improvisation, and those who want it encoded in micromanaging rules. This game is evidently trying to serve both, and as a very experienced player who has not the least wish to choose between...

Well, a small selection of his notes out of the hundreds of boxes. His campaign may have reached that time frame, but his players voted not to use TSR's Godswar. But the presence of a rather nice new Realms logo! The Company of Crazed Venturers campaign of the mid-1970s took place mainly in the...

This thread makes me think of changing meanings of women's clothing sizes.

Matt Finch, Mythmere's Adventure Design Deskbook Vol. 1

It's interesting that Forge thinking and 3E thinking concur on this point that rulesets should deliver good outcomes with their unchanged die rolls, and designs that need/acknowledge/work better with fudging are incoherent. I think it can be perfectly coherent to use dice as a resolution...

Having read a lot of these threads, but not every post of this one, without looking back I don't even know which sense Bullgrit thinks the common one is, or what's marginal about the other ones.

I think the ubiquity of mutual misunderstanding and talking at cross purposes in 'game balance' threads shows it's not a commonly understood term at all. In the run-up to 3E, its designers started using it in a very specific and somewhat novel sense, without (at first) making that sense and its...

Of course, the current set of RPGers has been shaped by many years of selection through the 'sell rules supplements to a dwindling pool of enthusiasts' model. This is surely one of the main differences here: someone's who's been frustrated as a player by bad DMs throwing their weight around is...

One of the main things that causes this unfortunate ill will and fractionation (over rulesets, play styles, settings) is the tendency to generalize one's experiences and feelings into universals. I think the term 'broken' itself is a provocation to discord: 'it doesn't work for me, or the...

I really don't understand why you give credence to the self-insertion thing. What are you basing the 'steals the limelight' claim on? Naturally he's active in the fiction he's in (most of which, once more, wouldn't exist if TSR hadn't wanted him to write it). I can't think of any of it where he...

I didn't know how else to read "pretty well every powerful female NPC". I'm not saying it's always asexual. If it comes across as prurient to you, it's likely because the Code of Ethics meant there are indeed instances where nudity has stood in for sex in Realmslore, much as all the brothels...

If he did it all the time, and for the reasons given above, I agree, it would be. But that's one little quote out of a lot of information we have on his DMing. Ah, I found the post I was looking for. Here's a better glimpse of the home Realms campaign: here and search for "not long after the...

No, the Simbul was raised by Oraumae of Rashemen (The Seven Sisters p. 8). Why do you think you were so sure of this mistaken point?

You're right, I sometimes overestimate how well-known this is. Here are a few quickly scrounged citations: the interview in Dragon #335, Candlekeep.com here (search for "No, of course not") and here, and a 1998 REALMS-L post which I can't find in the archive so I'll quote from: Unfortunately...

Because Ed, Rich Baker, Steven Schend etc. say so and no one in TSR/Wizards/Canadian circles says anything to the contrary. In other words, to get epistemological about it, the kind of evidence we have for most behind-the-scenes gaming history, except less unclear and controversial. I had a look...

Like I said to GMforPowergamers, I didn't think the straight points of Realmslore (or what Ed has said) were in contention. I could footnote them all, but thought it would seem pedantic. Anything in particular you're thinking of? Quite, that would be a much more civilized discussion, but the...

From what I've read online, most of the people who think/thought so are/were under the impression that Ed chose to write novels about Elminster, and openly uses him as something of an alter ego. Those things are what definitely isn't true. They think he's Ed's favourite character. While that...

Aus_Snow, that's a nasty bit of innuendo you've got there. Are you going to leave it at that or tell us what you're talking about? OK. But in the many things I'm not an expert on, I don't usually insist my second-hand ideas must be right. No one's disputed it, just cited hearsay. There may be an...