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I tend to do more and more-exotic world-building for the settings of my read-only fiction than for the settings I run games in. In my game worlds, for example, there will usually be a single moon that's Luna-like in apparent size, brightness, and periodicity, and calendars will be either the...

Underrated: Text. I see lots of geeking out over movies, TV, comic books, and even audiobooks, but give me printed words to read.

For most things I find a binary success mechanic to be perfectly adequate. Either you pick the lock open, or you don't. You find the hidden compartment when searching the desk or you don't. Your assessment as to whether the border guard is open to a bribe is either correct or it isn't. Your jump...

It's a fair cop, guv. Yeah, it's attar of roses or rose otto, but not otto of roses.

And if creating undead requires black onyx gems, why aren't black onyx gems contraband - and why aren't there search & destroy campaigns against them? In my games I normally rule that substitutes and synthetics are available for that sort of magical use. In any case I prefer to move away from...

The poor readability was the chief thing I ranted about.

The aesthetics can be distinguished from the rules. 3.5e is my personal edition preference and while I like the mechanics, I hate the aesthetics of the rulebooks. I've even ranted about those aesthetics back in the day.

I voted "No thanks." In theory I might enjoy a game with psi if the setting was right and the psionic rules were carefully crafted. In practice psionics is even worse than magic in terms of "everyone who is anyone must have psi powers, or at least must invest heavily in defenses vs psionics."...

Transcript? I prefer text over practically any podcast/talking head/audiobook.

The Fantasy Trip, or rather my homebrew based heavily on The Fantasy Trip, with fatigue-St costs for spells. One point I particularly like is that the St cost to cast a spell isn't rigidly fixed to the Intelligence-stat requirement to learn it. One point I particularly dislike in the stock TFT...

I'd say that I want magic to feel magical too - but my mileage significantly varies when it comes to what makes magic feel magical. Magic that's very common and even ubiquitous does feel magical to me. It gives me that "We're not in Kansas anymore!" sense of wonder. Rare magic doesn't; it...

3.5 is the only D&D edition I'll run any more. (I will run other, non-class&level games, however) It does have annoyances, but later editions have kept the parts I find annoying while dropping the parts I really like. In particular, I like 3.5e for having a skill system that was actually halfway...

A fourth point that pushed "christmas tree outfitting" was the inflated cost of more powerful items over weaker ones. For example +3 armor was 9000 gp, while +1 armor, +1 shield, and +1 amulet of Natural Armor came to only 4000 gp total. So that aspect of the system pushed for "lots of items"...

Thoughts: 1. Tracking ammo can add a touch of verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. 2. It's good to have matching levels of abstraction. If the combat system rolls for each arrow loosed at a monster, then tracking each arrow loosed is a good pairing - better than...

50% for all arrows is my house rule. 3.5e has all arrows that hit being destroyed, and half of those that miss being lost or destroyed. I don't remember what 2e did.

That's carbon fiber arrows. I've used - and reused - carbon fiber arrows back when I did archery, including bow hunting, and a check after each use is needed to ensure they're not cracked. I've discarded no-longer-good arrows, and while I have heard of arrows breaking or shattering when shot...

Yes. My house rule is that if the PCs loose a few arrows, each arrow has a 50% chance of being recoverable after the battle. If they loose many arrows, they recover half of them. It doesn't matter whether the arrow hits or misses. A special wrinkle that hasn't come into play yet is a house rule...

What magic should be able to do is a setting and world-building issue. In times past I've played around with campaign design sheets, mostly for Hero (4e) because it was a 'universal' system that needed to be tuned to the specific setting conception one wanted to run. Here's an essay of mine...

Very rarely. One noteworthy case was D&D: I bought 3.0 and 3.5 even though I wasn't finding time to play earlier editions. I was playing other games instead. 3.X brought me back to playing and GMing D&D. (And then 4e, and beyond lost me again.) But on those rare occasions where I do buy a new...

Me? Horror. I do not like the horror genre. I won't play horror RPGs. I have to say that it's a bit peculiar for someone to be OK with a genre in other media but not with that genre in the TTRPG media. One exception might be genres that are deeply unsuited to 'team' play, but even they could...