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If you want to design a good beginners game, listen to what the "typical online forum pundit" has to say on RPGnet, The Forge, etc. and do exactly the opposite. What they all seem to miss is something even far more fundamental than a focus on tactics or story. The beginning role-player needs...

Paladium is what I like to call a vulture. It basically feeds off of D&D's table scraps by catering to a segment of the D&D audience and giving them more of what their style wants. In fact, I'd argue that Paladium is one of the few companies ot realize that D&D is the gatekeeper game so it...

I think they'd be lucky to hit 25,000, which could still be economically viable. A lot of role-players are cheapskates and there is also competition out there from not WotC settings. Let's not forget that the TSR you are talking about when bankrupt and was bought out by WotC. I think a...

A good electronic tool can make the symptoms quite bearable. I use Jamis Buck's NPC generator: http://www.aarg.net/~minam/npc.cgi http://www.aarg.net/~minam/npc2.cgi Fast enough and good enough to use at game time for improvised NPCs. Just have it create 10-20 NPCs of the sort you are...

Further, you can use the bits and pieces of the city in other cities with little trouble, too. That's how I intend to use it -- less as a city and more as a resource full of locations to use in other cities. I think you succeeded spectacularly in this regard.

I would say that Little Keep on the Borderlands (LKotB), the Hackmaster version, is with the $19.95 price tag with the caveat that it contains a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor and comedy, some of which is difficult ot cut out. But it greatly expands the concept and on the characters in the Keep...

I'm not talking about being timid. I'm talking about looking at the big picture. What is the net benefit and cost of a particular course of action? If I witness a woman being attacked in an alley, I could just run down the alley without thinking like a hero and try to stop the attack. If...

I'm currently running a 3.5 game with my regular group and playing in a 3.5 game with a new group that one of my regular group plays with. That actually paints a pretty warped picture of what I normally use because I hadn't played D&D for over a decade before that, though we like d20 enough...

I disagree. What makes terrorists particularly loathsome is that they purposely target and kill innocent civilians to hurt the real target of their agression. While one could argue that the slavers are legally "innocent", it's not as if they are contemplating murdering the families of the...

What's fun can vary substantially from player to player. I've seen the elimination of game-ending consequences destroy a game just as surely as a TPK could have. Sure. But those catastrophes will never be game-ending and thus not really catastrophes. I think it has a great deal of value in...

I'm not necessarily talking about things working out how the players want, either. But if you eliminate outcomes that could wreck the game, you are eliminating the worst outcomes and protecting the players from catastrophic implications. I'm also not saying that things have to be presented in...

I first asked for D&D based on seeing an article about Gary Gygax in People Magazine in the late 1970s. I learned how to play from the book (though quickly moved over to Traveller). Many of my earliest role-playing games were GM-less and, in many ways, I'm glad I learned how to play myself. A...

It's called "underprinting". You put a solid layer of cyan under the black which creates a darker "blue-black". You could probably also underprint in magenta to get a darker "brown-black". With a five or six-color press, you could probably double-print in black, too, if you want to spend the...

Well, you could trim that down to the basics, too. I think that depends on the person. Of course the larger problem is that the hobby needs more GMs. And if you cater to the really lazy players who don't want to do any work, they'll never grow into being GMs for other players. Without more...

And that may very well be the choice. Run that sort of game or find a different group of players. It might help to ask if the players ever had this feeling in other games and, if not, why not? If the reason is that they never felt their characters could die in those other games but do now...

I'd suggest leaving one-handed simple weapons and the quarterstaff legal for everyone. That would actually help justify the players carrying things like quarterstaffs and daggers instead of swords and such.

My version of the Keep has an on-staff Wizard and an on-staff Chaplain who, along with the Warden, are in the 7th level range and they've got some magic items on site for just such emergencies. If you assume a Cleric that can do 3rd Level spells, you've got Searing Light and Align Weapon that...

What a low-level meat-grinder dungeon game taught me was to stop caring about the whole game. Really. There is a reason why I didn't play D&D between the late 1980s and last year, when I decided to run a 3.5E D&D game to learn the d20 system. (My game isn't a meat-grinder, nor is it PC death...

Let me set the theme for this reply up front: "There is no one right way to play D&D." It can be, with suitable script immunity and a GM willing to have everything work out in the end. Not every GM runs their game that way. D&D doesn't inherently have a single genre. Even "heroic fantasy"...

Original D&D had random characteristics, rolled in order, and then two very easy to explain meaningful decisions -- race and class. All a GM had to explain were the basic races and the basic classes and the player had to pick one of each. There is no reason why there couldn't be a basic...