Search results

I don't doubt this isn't an insignificant inventment of time/resources to do. That doesn't change that the longer WotC dawdles on completing it, the more they burn away any of the community goodwill the promises created in the first place.

Book of Many Things would be a much more frequently recommended product if you didn't also need to buy a $50 deck of cards you'll never use in order to get it

Exactly. I am assuming a malicious intent because they have consistently demonstrated malicious intent until community outrage and financial threats (dndbeyond cancellations) forced them to backtrack.

I imagine the point is the make it as painful as possible to continue with 2014 in order to push people into using 2024 without the bad press they'd get from completely removing it.

My point is emphasizing that Shadowdark does not have an Open License, and that it is far more restrictive than many other games in the same space, to clarify a post which indicated that the base game was.

....Which is something that doesn't require a license to do. Thats a supplement, not a derivative game. Open Game Licenses allow you to make derivative games.

You don't need a license to claim compatibility with a game system. You only need it if you want to use the specific logos that Kelsey created and provides in her creator kit.

Monte cook games is still doing this with their OGL 5e products, claiming literally everything inside as "Product Identity".

This isn't granting anything you couldn't just do already. You don't need a license to use game mechanics that you've rewritten with your own words. The main thing the shadowdark license offers that you cannot simply do license-less is to specifically replicate Monsters, Spells, and Magic...

The main system is also proprietary, largely. The Shadowdark license is pretty restrictive when it comes to what you're allowed to reproduce from the original source - only Monsters, Spells, and Magic items. No other game text is open content for 3pp licensed products. You cannot reproduce...

I don't think its possible to have a perfectly neutral game session in which a player never takes an action or asks a question which requires their referee to make a judgement call according to their own biases. You can mitigate it with rules heavy systems or extremely detailed modules. But...

Did you think of all of the physical details of every trap? Every creature? Every hazard? Every room? At some point the game will require you to Invent something about the fictional space in the moment, you cannot possibly prepare for all eventualities.

It's rarely so cut and dry as your example. Players tend to do strange, and often ingenious, things - you can never eliminate improvisation with prep. If you create, say, a concealed scything blade trap triggered by a tripwire, the PCs may try to disable it by cutting the wire. They also...

The best way to avoid arguments in an RPG is to settle on the genre expectations you want to stick with. The best way to ensure that your group sticks to its genre expectations is to have rules that support them.

This is exactly it. I see people ignoring this fact constantly when talking about Classic D&D - It was designed for and often played with huge parties!! 4d4 kobolds should be a trivial encounter, since you should have 6-10 PCs and a half dozen hirelings with you! Lots of those groups...

Hard agree with this. I just use the "Fatality Mode" to get around this problem, but yeah - having a living character who cannot act for potentially hours of real life time is Bad.

Every day I strive to be an even lazier GM than the day before.

The important thing isn't whether you use the wotc or the tsr era stat curves - it's about where between 3 and 18 the game assumes a PC to have as a baseline. In B/X, you use a roll-under for ability checks. If you have a 10, the average roll of 3d6, you'll have a 50% chance of success. In...

D&DBeyond tends to just make the play experience worse, IMO. It automates just enough things that players can get away with not knowing whats going on.

Just gotta wait for SRD 5.2 to come out so that fans can make/release tools that actually work.