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That's overall the hypothesis of my 3rd Edition Revisited thread. Might be of interest to you.

It's something that becomes quite apparent when you go through the Grey Box with an eye for such things. It very much feels like everything south of the Sea of Fallen Stars is only a vague reference and not actually detailed at all. When the Grey Box talks about "the North", it's always...

Yeah, horde of skeletons would take a long time to take all their turns in a round. But so would two dozen hired mercenaries. Which are about as strong and fairly cheap to keep around for a good while by 5th level.

The best known and documented ones are the Moonshae Islands, and Vaasa and Damara. With the Moonshaes it's really obvious, as they don't have any connections to any other regions, except one of the two peoples living there being said to be related to the Norsemen of Ruathym and Luskan. Even the...

This is the first time I am seeing anyone acknowledging the existence of Bahamut.

I have not played chess in ages, but I do occasionally watch chess game analysis videos on youtube. Some of them are just hilarious, and I understand enough of the game to understand when something amazing is happening. Like a player having only one available move for 11 moves in a row before...

Oh, reminds me of my actual most important piece of advice: If a player declares an action that seems nonsensical, most of the time the player misunderstood the situation you described. To clarify, ask the player what the action is meant to accomplish. This usually reveals if you explained the...

RPGs are all about players making choices and dealing with the consequences that follow from them. Don't prepare adventures with scripted scenes and outcomes.

My plan for trying 3rd edition again is to cap all characters at 12th level, use only PHB classes, and no prestige classes at all. (Plus Expanded Psionic Handbook, because I feel fancy.) With the PHB classes and 6th level spells, I feel like you can properly represent all the AD&D campaign...

The main thing that has given me a new interest in 3rd edition is that it provides you with mechanics to cover all the things that could happen in an AD&D campaign, without having to deal with the AD&D mechanics.

I ran 3rd edition from 2000 to about 2009, and Pathfinder a little bit longer. At that point, I really didn't like the system. It just wasn't providing the experience that I wanted to get out of campaigns. I thought it was actually pretty bad. Too clunky, too slow, too bloated. But a few...

I don't feel there is much of a case being made.

1. Roleplaying Games are about players trying to make the best choices they can in a given situation and then having to deal with whatever the consequences if their actions turn out to be. RPGs are not a tool to let the GM present an already completed story. Any RPG that aims for that fails the...

I ran a game before I ever played in one. Someone got to start. There's no necessary qualifications to run a game. Learn the rules of the game you want to run, and do it. You won't be good, but you will be good enough. The only recommendation I have is to start with something short and...

I like print in theory, but in practice most RPG books that I see coming out these days are really inconvenient in print. 200 to 250 pages for a hardcover is fine. 300 is also okay. But it seems like everyone is doing these humongous 450+ pages doorstoppers now, and those are just too huge to...

I am feeling the Mediterranean Sword & Sorcery pull again. And RuneQuest is one of the names that always appears in my mind first. But I don't really know much about it, other than it being a very old game that had a lot of different edition with various side branches by different publishers...

Same thing software developers at WotC have always been doing, presumably.

That Star Wars game that is all (proprietary) funky dice has stuck with me as having the most off-putting dice resolution system I have ever heard of. It's really the only thing I know about it. Once I saw that, I just wanted to run away and never look back.

Tracy Hickman might possibly only have been delivering what the market had already been calling for, but I still feel like the Hickman Revolution was the biggest turning point in the development of RPG culture since its inception. For the worse. The idea of what an "adventure" is supposed to be...