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The most effective way to make money with an ongoing timeline is to publish it as novels. Events designed to appeal as novels are often not those that work best for campaigns. In broad terms, you have pandering to the neophile consumerist lust for the newest and biggest; playing to what's...

The contents of the pulps are too broad to fit into a single style, either. While of course it's possible to make some generalizations about these stories, the modern stereotype of 'pulp fiction' is not the same as any that existed 60+ years ago. It's arbitrarily selective, excludes several pulp...

Several posts above do refer to it as genre. What I'm saying is that the modern idea of 'pulp fiction' is misleading stereotype based on arbitrarily selected elements from the pulps given arbitrary importance, modified by elements of subsequent fiction subjectively thought to have an affinity...

The recent idea of 'pulp fiction' is a nonsense, reducing a huge range of fiction into a small stereotype. 'Pulp' is no more a genre than manga or, most precisely, 'slick'. As far as fantasy published in the pulps, that's at least as big an influence on the Forgotten Realms and the World of...

I agree. Bombastic binary opinions are strutting, and therefore obnoxious in a forum whose purpose is communication. Overstatement occasionally has a rhetorical use but it far more often just causes confusion and bad feeling. As werk observes, people too often translate 'I feel/think' into 'it...

I'd say that 'cheating' is trying to deceive the DM or otherwise doing things the DM disallows.

I've also surmised that rules complexity is sustained by a feedback loop. The more publishers cater to the segment of people who like complex rules, the more they feed and confirm that desire and alienate the roleplaying culture from people who don't.

This is the exactly the false dichotomy by which some people argue that because a game system doesn't determine how you play, it doesn't influence it at all. Fair to blame, obviously not. Fair to criticize as a factor, obviously so.

'No one' is mild hyperbole, but in my reading, not even the strongest opponents of strong forms of linguistic determinism argue that language doesn't influence thought far more strongly than some posters here suppose.

Aspects of 'kewl' characters that are particular obstacles to cooperative play are -- characters with weird and different backgrounds or races as a substitute for being interesting characters -- character 'builds' worked out in advance, so the character plods on like a psychopath unaffected by...

See Gary Gygax's Living Fantasy for an excellent and explicit discussion of the adaptation of medieval/renaissance society to fantasy roleplaying that was implicit in D&D from the start.

He did it because it was in character, and it just happens that megalomaniac lusts correspond with D&D experience and gold. People act to obtain what's important to them, from inside their own reality tunnels shaped by society and early experience, not from objective knowledge of the moral and...

Robin Laws is one of the very few unambiguous visionaries the RPG culture has, and everything he writes is worth reading.

Bravo, a plain response that doesn't feel the need to project or rationalize itself into dogma. Pay attention, 007.

What's behind the trend? Selfishness and egotism, no doubt. Cool is anathema to drama. But I'm using 'cool' more narrowly than some here.

The words we use for things shape our understanding of them far more deeply than we're consciously aware of. No one in linguistics seriously argues otherwise. To claim that 'he' for unknown gender doesn't, in practice, reify male as the default gender is just ignorant, like people who claim...

A book's author is by far the main contributor to its nature and quality, and the RPG culture will be stunted until this obvious fact is widely understood. But since I buy a small minority of the books released, it's more a matter of buying books by authors I like than avoiding ones by the few I...

As has been said, the question is backwards. You develop new mechanics as needed to represent elements in your world. Making up new mechanics to represent nothing in particular would be absurd. What credible world was ever designed around a collage of rules?

Whatever Chris is talking about there, though, won't be published till late 2006 at the earliest...

It may well be the DC Comics RPG that was announced in May.