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Note that 4E allowed you to use either Wisdom or Charisma to determine your Will defense. I always liked that -- Charisma should be able to do more than just be the social-fu stat.

Besides the cultural aspect, smoking was also an easy way for writers to insert little bits of "business" to break up long conversations. And you could reveal things about a character's personality and emotions from their choice of smoking materials, how they handled them, etc.

This sort of thing was really common in 90s games: skill lists that cover every single thing a character might possibly want to do, regardless of whether it might make sense for the game or genre. Gotta have that Underwater Basketweaving skill in there!

The Realist perspective sometimes leads to what's occasionally called the Guy at the Gym problem -- where the mighty warrior who's at or near maximum human physical ability can still only accomplish the sort of feats that a moderately fit 21st-century human can do, because the DM thinks anything...

I mentioned that the Stone Thief is a living dungeon, as in it's actually alive. It travels around beneath the surface, occasionally popping up to eat buildings and towns for more material to extend itself. Which, of course, should include places that are important to the PCs, to motivate them...

Obligatory vote here for Eyes of the Stone Thief. Since it's a living dungeon, it's designed for multiple visits and it can shift around between visits. It can pop up wherever the PCs go (and if they piss it off enough, it will actually start hunting them). 13 levels and over 350 pages of...

Yeah, there are a couple fan-made datafiles for Dazzler floating around out there, and they all work by giving her a Limit to shut down her light powers when there's not enough sound around for her to convert, plus letting her use a reaction to step up or create a stunt die if she's hit by a...

Another odd thing about the Rank system -- it's apparently assigned based not on the character's comics power level, but on their sphere of influence. Like, Daredevil is Rank 5 because he mostly sticks to one neighborhood, Spider-Man is Rank 10 because he's best known as New York's hero, but...

They don't. An opponent who can challenge a Rank 25 character is completely untouchable by a Rank 5 character, and will turn the Rank 5 character into paste with a single attack. As for noncombat challenges, the game uses difficulties that scale by Rank. I know some people hate this approach...

The hybrid rules were a kludgy as hell attempt to create traditional multiclassing. If you weren't experienced with the system, it was all too easy to create an unworkable mess, or in a few cases something that broke the game's power curve (the dreaded paladin|warlock, for instance). I much...

Count me as another old gamer who blinks in disbelief at "players cared about the adventure, not levels, in 1E/2E." Next, you'll be telling us that old-school players didn't care about all that silly loot and just adventured for the pure joy of playing...

It's not an unusual way to handle super-attributes, but Spidey being Mighty 1 makes me wonder how the game will handle someone like Beast, who's much stronger than any human but well below Spidey's weight class. Is there a Mighty 0?

Looking at the powers, I wonder exactly is the difference between Webcasting, Webgrabbing, Webslinging, and Webtrapping, and why you would need to break down "slings webs" into several different abilities. I assume Spider-Dodge and Mighty 1 reflect superhuman levels of Agility and Might...

Besides Madness at Gardmore Abbey, there's The Slaying Stone and Reavers of Harkenwold. The Chaos Scar adventures published in the Dragon were good for short one-session games. And even though it was very uneven, I liked the Scales of War adventure path. They may be difficult to track down...

Yes, the early monster books suffered from bad math that made for boring fights. The revised versions in Monster Vault and Threats to the Nentir Vale are much better. I'd probably start with the first couple of PHBs for classes. Admittedly, some of the PHB classes (particularly paladin and...

In literature, maybe, but isekai manga and anime are still massively popular.

I'd say that anyone who thinks Vance and Leiber are mundane low fantasy really hasn't read much of Vance (check out the Rhialto the Marvellous stories, for one) or Leiber.

48. The world of the Dragon Empire, the default setting for 13th Age.

Who says a halfling can't be modeled more on Bullroarer Took than the stereotypical burglar?

We used them all interchangeably; my local group was one of those that went from Holmes Basic to B/X to AD&D, bypassing BECMI entirely.