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Sounds awesome! How do I sign up? I also felt that as created, the Drow were based (per appendix N in the 1st Ed. DMG) on a couple of fantasy novels: 1) The Shadow People, by Margaret St Clair. She was a 60s Bay area psychedelic writer, who described an "Underearth" beneath San Francisco...

To ensure diverse representation in artwork and text (ie: to make sure they had all the genders, ethnicities, orientations). She has a non-profit that advertises her services as a cultural consultant for RPGs and videogames, though she is pretty open on her website on being a Diversity Equity...

Lucas was one of the first to demand full credits at the end of the film. Before that, union rules required credits run at the start of the film, for department heads, to ensure the audience would see them, since they usually didn't stick around to watch the end credits. This enabled Lucas to...

I like the idea of striking a golden mean between theatre of the mind, and visual representation. I tend to draw a map too, but try to only use a battle-map draw and miniature movement only when necessary. I've found when the PCs are constantly moving the minis on a battle map to explore, they...

Your redraw looks pretty good, especially tidying up the zig-zagging corridors, while preserving the original design's exploration layout and access. You may want to include the east-west access corridor that includes rooms 14 & 15, to preserve another looping route to give the players more...

5e doesn't really support social with rules (coz they rushed the DM's guide out on a deadline), but it can be. Give the PCs an obstacle they need to RP to overcome, without a combat option. Or, give them a combat obstacle that can be more easily defeated if they parley with the opponent, find...

There are websites that pirate the books, and poor college students will sometimes just download a pirated version for free.

Yes, but it could be something like -- hey, we've all had a stressful week, let's just have fun playing, nobody cares about addressing the rule loophole right now. If that's what the players want to do, and they all agree to it, they are not obligated to fix the rule.

I think that newer players and DMs like having the rules spelled out for them, and given the larger number of new players in the hobby, they just don't have the experience of doing DIY. D&D also evolved out of wargaming clubs, which in turn evolved out of military modeling. That entire hobby...

Prolly not -- but it would make for a swell OSR adventure...

I guess my point, is that hiring a sensitivity reader is still no guarantee of authenticity, and it carries with it (since the reader is sometimes given powers of censorship) the risk that you'll interfere with the project so much that it ends up being a failure.

Yeah, but that's a sucky Jerry Bruckheimer film, and just one example. There are lots of other films where they hired cultural consultants. For example, Johnny Depp in "Dead Man".

Before the concepts Representation and/or Cultural Appropriation were talked about, Hollywood would just hire a Native American scholar or cultural consultant, who would work with the writer (whatever their ethnicity) to make sure the depiction was authentic. I guess this is similar to a...

This system is usually used for groups of NPCs, mass combat, or military units in wargames. For example, in an abstracted combat where 20 knights are battling 50 orcs, roll mass damage for each side, and remove "models" accordingly, to simulate attrition. Since the players play PCs...

Well, character generation was kind of a dice mini game ;). That's 250 times the fun!

More games that no one would ever want to play: Government Commissions and Committees Factory Work Treadmills and Timeclocks Dentistry Braces and Bicuspids Energy Drinks Heartburn and Hypertension Cowboy Felinekin Lariats and Litterboxes, the Role Playing Game Madea Movies Tyler Perry...

Yeah, Traveller Mercenary combat can divert the focus of play more into wargaming that RPing, esp. some of Frank Chadwick's rules sets like Twilight 2000 did, or trying to use Striker to play Traveller miniatures combats. My game had some simplified combat rules that interacted more with the...

In my military game, it was kind of a structured RP "Kriegspiel" which I modeled after the way more complicated RPG "Burning Empires". The PCs were conducting an operation against an enemy forces that functioned as "fronts" from Apocalypse World. The players had scouts they could send out to...

4e's Skill Tree character builds favored tactical decision making. They also required elaborate prep on the DM's part to challenge the players, and let them take advantage of their character builds. For me, this was a weakness of the system, because the prep time incentivized the DM into...

I typically use the Spinward Marches circa 1110 as a go to setting, because: a) I like it -- it's got variety (hi tech developed worlds, low tech backwaters, military and political intrigue, a frontier to explore, and the spinward main. b) It's easy for one-shots -- Traveller is an alternate...