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The move from heroic tier to paragon tier in 4E simply feels a lot different than going from level 10 to 11 in 3E/Pathfinder. In 3E games this was the point where magic users really start skyrocketing in power leaving the martial fighters behind. In all the long running 3E games I've ever played...

Any rules that really modeled use of fantasy/medieval weapons. A lot of systems simulate the stage fighting you'd see in movies with single attacks against a dodge, parry, or defensive value. Real fighting is attacks and parries strung together in combinations to better your position for a...

I did this very thing this week, picked up some heavily discounted Rackham stuff off of Miniature Market. I love Rackham's AT-43 miniatures for sci-fi soldiers and robot suits and their pre-painted Confrontation miniatures are gorgeous. I intend to use them for PC minis in the 4E and Pathfinder...

Keep in mind what "encounters" actually are: intense action punctuated by a short rest. A more descriptive name for "Encounter powers" would be "Power that you can use once per short rest". I find keeping that concept in mind really helps with the narrative around encounter powers. Likewise...

You can also "minionize" non-solo opponents once they get bloodied or their ranks are significantly thinned. There's a couple ways to do this. The easiest is to just drop a monster's HP to 1 once it gets bloodied. They're still a danger if the party ignores them but they're easily dispatched...

There were three nails and you hit two of them on the head. The third was the emergence of CCGs of all stripes. A ton of gaming/hobby money that went into D&D in the 80s and other TRPGs was redirected to Magic and games like it as soon as they hit the scene. While CCGs as a gaming experience are...

So...an on-topic reply... :erm: If you want to try out the D6 Star Wars can don't want to or can't find any of the WEG books the free D6 Space rules are essentially the revision Star Wars rules without the Star Wars license. It's even got the "Metaphysics" chapter which are the same as the...

Star Wars is one of the many settings where it unbalanced when you try to run it like a D&D game. Once you get to the point where Jedi begin to outpace your other characters you need to provide the group with equally divergent challenges. Jedi should be fighting the Sith BBEG while the non-Jedi...

Please give some page numbers of these rules. I haven't seen them before and I'd love to integrate them into my game! On second thought don't bother, I don't need to include your fantasy rules into the actual game. There's nothing in the rules that match what you describe. Hell, the Dungeon...

Now the practice is: (1) Find out what the players want to do (2) Break up those actions into one or more ability or skill checks (3) Assess the likelihood of success and assign a difficulty to the checks This is no different to what RPGs have been doing forever. The DM doesn't have to pre-plan...

The "D&D has to compete with them dang vidja games" meme is really amusing to me. D&D has had to compete with video games as long as I've been playing (20 years). If you think today's games are magically more attractive than games when I started playing D&D you're fooling yourself. Dragon...

I really enjoyed the Saga Edition rules, not only did they presage some 4E rules but I think the system did a bit better than WEG's D6 system in terms of Star Wars feeling. WEG's system was clunky in too many areas (in my opinion) to really do justice to the high adventure of Star Wars. Every...

I've always explained the lack of epic monsters overrunning the world in terms of threat radius. Even the most bad-ass dragon has a fly speed of 10 squares, this gives them a maximum of 100 mile range assuming they are performing full round movement. They're unlikely to want to stray too far...

You'll save a tonof money (and time) if you just pick up the CD-ROMs from FFE. You can get the entire Classic Traveller, MegaTraveller, and TNE collections of PDFs for about $35 each. The PDFs are scans but contain the OCR text so they're completely searchable. The Traveller wiki is also a...

No I'm not a WotC employee but I do know a little bit about the publishing industry. In publishing there's some basic truths regarding production limitations, inventory, and cost structures; being aware of those can inform you about the actions of publishers. When WotC then makes comments and...

You don't seem to understand, it's not that WotC is sitting on a bunch of core rulebook inventory that isn't moving. It's moving but at a rate that the current inventory will cover for some period of time. Even if the Essentials books had advertisements and references all over for the core books...

For the Encounters games I've been playing lately I've been using the DDM figures for PCs and colored pawns for monsters. When using minis I like to have one that is similar to what I think my character looks like. I've got a small box of a few dozen minis that I share with the table. In the...

There's one huge assumption that the core rulebooks are going away and D&D will now only be Essentials from now on. This assumption is based on a misunderstanding of some comments made by WotC people at GenCon. When asked if the core rulebooks will remain in print the WotC people said they had...

My friends and I started in elementary school in the late 80s early 90s. Somebody's older brother had a couple AD&D books and one of us finally got a Basic Set box. We managed to play at lunch sometimes but the way my school was arranged you just couldn't hang out in the cafeteria the entire...

Tonight I played an Encounters game and played a Knight. I loved how much hurt I could put on the bad guys even while surrounded by them. If they did anything but attack me (and miss thanks to my 20AC) they got punished for it. When I cleared out the enemies surrounding me or they backed off I...