Search results

So, I'm not sure if this is just an idiom obscure enough to have escaped you, or you're just being dry, but to "turn the air blue" is to use a lot of profanity. Given this game dates back to the TSR Code of Ethics era, the direct use of profanity was probably prohibited by SSI's contract.

Really depends. So, the first D&D Bard class was published in The Strategic Review #6 (or Volume 2, Number 1; the issue has both numberings on its cover), February 1976. Page 11. This very first Bard class casts Magic-User spells. Oh, by the way, for this version -- "Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits...

Oh, I so did not miss 1990s Slashdot debates over whether BSD was freer because you could use the covered code any way you wanted, or GPL was freer because people couldn't take the covered code and lock away their versions.

I mean, at the very least, OSRIC was released in 2006, well before 4e was announced.

Two caveats. First, this likely isn't true. Yes, I know it's what the ICv2 survey data said. The ICv2 survey data is, well, lousy. (It's the best the general public has, and so what we had to discuss, but it's lousy.) Statements from people (Chris Sims, Owen Stephens) in late '21-early '22, who...

Could be. Could just reflect the evolution of the state of the art in "open content" licenses after the OGL was drafted. I mean, the Open Game License was written in 2000, after all. The original Open Content License was released in 1998, and replaced by the Open Publication License in 1999...

Yeah, that isn't what I was suggesting at all (though with the clipped context of the precise reply chain, maybe unclear). I do know much better than that. (I grant, why I know better than that isn't because I sat down and compared ORC and the OGL in detail. It's just because of a heuristic...

No. (Please bear with me a bit if I say anything really boneheaded below; I'm not a lawyer.) To a certain extent, what I was depending on (possibly improperly so) is what Kobold Press did with Black Flag, where the Black Flag SRD, clearly to me a derivative work of the 5.1 SRD, was released in...

That they aren't going to dual-license 5.2 under the OGL is the next thing to meaningless. CC-BY 4.0 is quite permissive, and it's very easy to use material released under it with OGL material (ask your lawyer if you're vague on it). If you're used to the open source software world, it's roughly...

Actually, he can! With a melee weapon equipped, you can use the Aim action to attack any adjacent square, whether or not you have any movement allowance left. (Sometime later in the Gold Box series, they fix the Move/Attack code so that it still lets you attack adjacent squares when you're out...

I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that "muscular neutrality" was imported from Moorcock's setup where the victory of either Law or Chaos would destroy humanity, without anybody doing the importing thinking through how the victory of Good is intrinsically different than the victory of Law. And...

Harshest house rule? "The thief, Black Leaf, did not find the poison trap, and I declare her dead."

Anyway, the second-week ranking on the USA Today Booklist dipped to #124. Interpret as you will.

I mean, I imagine that being somewhere the current developers don't want to detail seems vaguely nice until, you know, that reluctance to deal with you results in your whole continent getting swapped to another planet, and then, when the editions next change, swapped back (not even because...

Huh. See, when I look up the year 1486, the year I gave for the near-conquest of the country, the wiki says to me that "The Shadovar besieges Arabel and Suzail until Nightal 1 when both sieges are broken and many shadovar fall." That's only two of the three big cities of Cormyr, and I said...

Oh, sure, Cormyr had a rebellion centered in Arabel, was Ground Zero for Mystra's death in the Time of Troubles (complete with a zone of magical fallout and physical chaos), and had a major mystically-fueled civil war that killed the crown princess and king, as the brief highlight reel of Azoun...

Well, while RPG books are definitionally "books", they're not the type of book the USA Today Booklist was set up to track. Changes in their data sources or methodology that jerk around D&D sales ranks do not necessarily indicate that they're "arbitrary" for the list's core purpose. It does...

Ahah! Yes, I missed that.

As I just posted to the Amazon sales numbers thread, the PHB debuted on the USA Today Bestseller List at #57. That's lower, IIRC, than some previous 5th edition releases, but there are various reasons why that could have happened. One of which, that I forgot in the Amazon thread, was that that...