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You might be a fighter with Strength 15, but then you find the gauntlets of ogre power, and you're hot sauce. You're a crummy little wizard conserving your spell slots... until you get that wand of magic missile, and two scrolls of fireball. You're a cleric, and healing people is your jam, and...

"Jump in" or "the GM makes a Move" are still methods of taking turns.

That is still The World. You don't have to do extensive world-building, but you do have to say when and where they are, and something about what is "real" in the game.

Well, semantics, and the purpose of this discussion forum. If you think this forum is a good place to describe how to play "Once Upon a Time," then I guess we don't need definitions.

Well, you do, and you are always fine with the judgments. :)

You could do all that in a game about rabbits living in a meadow. You could simulate their behavior, give them experiences, and watch them live and die. But I don't think it's an RPG, in the formal sense we use the term here, unless someone plays a rabbit. That's the "role" part. When...

That's just one major element. You also have to player characters, and the story has to be told through a game system. "Let's take turns telling a story" isn't an RPG as such, it's just taking turns telling a story.

You also have to have player characters, The World, and someone to arbitrate on the mechanics.

You are asking what is essential. That is not the same as an example. An example of a mechanism might be, "You can only post an action three times a day, and if you interact with another player, you may not post a further action until they respond or a week has passed" (example rule from a forum...

A design principle is something like, "Any intelligible action or choice can be resolved in the game with appropriate results." If you write three or four sentences in response to everything in my list Tonguez's, you have enough to run one of those forum-based and chat-based RPGs we used to...

The Sword of Heironeous. There's a little bit of boob plate going on here but otherwise perfect. My last 5e character was a fighter, for whom I used this mini.

My experience is mostly with previous editions, but WFRPG is really great for that "grim company of adventurers meeting by the hearth late in the night, conspiring at some aim or quest." It's very much Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, it's the hobbits meeting Strider at the inn, it's the Three...

Defining the setting. Giving the GM or someone the ability to referee. Deciding who gets to decide how to narrate the results of actions, and how they are allowed to do it. Some structure for defining the playable characters, and what are allowed PC types. An agreement among the players as to...

I suspect level 20 was chosen because it was divisible by both 4 and 5, common breakpoints for various progressions. Just as in BECMI, I think 36 was chosen because it's divisible by 4 and 3 (eg. fighters in that version gained roughly +2 to hit every three levels). OD&D didn't really consider...

You didn't have a lot of direct damage dealing ability until high level, but then again, it wasn't common to rely on magic-users to regularly expend fireballs, either. You had a few basic jobs. First, you could do creative things with illusions. An illusion of a spectre, for instance, would be...

I left because I was a BECMI player and DM, and I got tired of high mortality, completely rolled and arbitrary ability scores, alignment languages, and rigid class roles. I envied AD&D for having playable gnomes and some cool subsystems like weapon specialization and kits, but overall I thought...

Yes, except when I'm in a hurry, I don't.

Some of the monsters are sort of already built this way, while others do die changes, and a few don't seem to follow any pattern. One quick idea you can use that if you want to boost damage, you can take away a monster's Strength bonus to attack with that attack, making it powerful but slow and...

Reasons this makes sense, in no particular order: Original D&D setting, so the 50th anniversary nostalgia factor is there Existing fanbase who have been out in the wilderness ever since Living Greyhawk went away The much more toned-down variations of ancestries map well to the toned-down...