Search results

He writes or illustrates more optimistic stuff too, though yeah, a ton of his jokes are dark. Bea Wolf is great, and the book he illustrated on border and immigration policy. :D Many of these are stunners, but I think the MIRI Pillars of Creation and Protostar L1527 are near the top for me...

Hovering on Death's Door, critical hits, fumbles, weapon speed, parrying, proficiencies, individual initiative, training, individual xp awards, xp for treasure, artifacts & relics, infravision being more complex than just "see in the dark"... 2E was packed with rules marked as optional.

Right. In addition to straightforward Catholic doctrine with the names changed, his guy seems to be transposing modern fantasies about satanic cults straight out of the 80s satanic panic into his game, plus a simplistic Conservative Catholic vs. Evil Abortionist Satanists conflict directly out...

Sycophancy bias is a serious issue with all the LLMs, I understand.

Right. The context matters. The content itself would be a bit questionable/potentially discomfiting, as Afroconan pointed out, depending on your level of cultural literacy and sensitivity to the particular dog whistles, but this larger context with the author makes it look like Afroconan's...

I think Splug started my tradition of roleplaying helpful/grateful goblins to the hilt, and the PCs enthusiastically adopting them (albeit with some mistrust for Splug, at first).

It's in the 1981 Moldvay Basic rules. It doesn't go into much detail on the use of a grid, but on B61 on the second page of the Dungeon Mastering as a Fine Art appendix of suggestions and advice, under PLAYING SURFACE, we find the first recommendation of using large sheets of graph paper with a...

Elric and Battletech, I'll echo the chorus. For my pet choice, Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion would be awesome.

By that standard the same is true of AD&D 1E compared to OD&D with the supplements. And (a bit less so) 5E compared to 3E.

I can't remember the order of operations now, but yeah, I think so. That's a good idea, Max! I think I'll have to make that a thing in a future game. An artifact with the appearance of a mummified wood elf's hand...

We had to hunt down Kas in his lair on the Astral Sea, as I recall, to win his sword from him. I think he had become an epic level vampire, so was immortal. We also found the Eye of Vecna at one point, though we wound up needing to trade it to an evil archwizard for information we needed for...

The original 1E writeup for the Sword of Kas artifact said that it was legendarily the weapon which struck down Vecna the first time. To my recollection, in that particular campaign this combo was needed to kill the deity version of Vecna. Strike him down with the sword of his treacherous...

When I first started playing in the 80s we had a few minis, but mostly stumbled along TotM. When I got into a dedicated AD&D group in the 90s they used a hex grid and minis, because they found that it saved a lot of time and arguments. They had a story about a past DM who had repeatedly had...

Well, multiple things can be true. One game can be easiER because, say, D&D progressively made PCs more durable and heal faster across every single edition change from 1974-2008. It can also be true that the very nature of D&D means fights in general have never been anywhere close to 50/50 odds...

Eh. The levels are stretched but you actually get to do Epic things in the Epic tier, including planar travel, self-resurrecting, and fighting gods which make Auril in Rime of the Frostmaiden look paltry. The first full campaign I played in was a level 1-30 which climaxed with defeating Orcus...

Broccoli Rabe is great and asparagus is pretty good, but I don't think either goes particularly well on a pizza. MAYBE a white pizza with garlic.

I think I mostly follow, but that first sentence feels like it's missing a word or something. Do you ever play the 5-2-1 game for picking a restaurant? You give them 5 options, they pick any 2, and you pick the 1? Or just ask them to guess where you're taking them, then take them to wherever...

I think the game should serve both populations, and the DM's guide should explicitly discuss both. It should talk about lower power, more earthbound games running "just" 1-10, or even less. And talk about how to run more powerful games with superhuman characters level 11+. And it should...

Huh. I didn't get that at all. And yeah, I agree that Live and Let Die was already a pretty substantial break from the old standards. More of one, in some ways. Agreed. Although honestly I felt like the horns gave a good note of continuity.