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I have a number of hobbies, and I've noticed that other hobbyists spend more time and energy -- and money, of course -- buying things associated with the hobby than doing the (supposed) hobby. I don't think the buying and collecting element ends up as fulfilling in the long run.

It takes skill and effort to fit a campaign into someone else's world -- or the historical real world, for that matter. I've always wanted a D&D where the default assumptions were more in line with the fiction I read (and watched), like The Hobbit, but not necessarily a dedicated Middle Earth game.

Fantasy has a number of advantages over other genres. First, it borrows plenty from well-known, real settings -- Vikings, pirates, knights, etc. -- without a need for accuracy. This is why Robert E. Howard created Conan and put him in mythical Hyboria: it was easier than writing authentic...

I think you need to look at both the costs -- including the total cost of ownership -- and the benefits of your purchases. Spending hundreds of dollars on a family vacation to a game convention might be totally worth it, for instance, while buying miniatures that you won't really use but will...

Resetting assumptions so that, say, sixth level is epic level goes a long way, if your group can accept that Gandalf is a fifth-level wizard. But the total amount of magic isn't necessarily the problem. Middle Earth magic doesn't appear the least bit Vancian. Rather, it appears to exhaust the...

Hop to it! ;) Oh, that'll definitely derail the thread! Rather than address what "low" and "high" do or should mean with respect to fantasy, let's just say that pulp sword & sorcery short stories are fast-paced and simply suggest a setting you already know -- Conan's a corsair now, go! --...

You need to remedy that, RobShanti. Order The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, read it, and report back. The whole sword & sorcery genre is "low" fantasy, unlike Tolkien-esque "high" fantasy, which fits Savage Worlds' mantra of fast, furious, fun adventures.

I would say that the key notion is that time passes between adventures; the characters don't go directly from adventure to adventure. So, in addition to calculating experience, leveling up, picking feats and spells, etc., between adventurers, you also age a year, see how your domain has...

Here's what I said in the other thread: For a D&D winter phase, you would need to compose your own "random encounter" tables for adventurers' non-adventuring lives.

Best system or best materials?

You should look into a Pendragon-style Winter Phase.

Excellent point, Bluenose -- and one that applies to most real-world adventures, too.

I started reading Vathek, and it's not a bad Shakespeare pastiche, like Otranto; it's a good Arabian Nights pastiche. It's certainly not Tolkien-esque fantasy, and it's not swords & sorcery, either, but it is proto-fantasy, with a sorcerer's tower, magical monsters, a dangerous quest, etc.

Certainly a scene-by-scene adaptation of an epistolary novel won't work on the stage or screen, but the classic movie versions have missed many of the novel's best visuals: Dracula's bushy mustache, his climbing down the wall head first, Van Helsing's terriers coming to the rescue, Harker's...

You recall correctly. Despite having a haunted castle with a secret tunnel, Otranto isn't much of a dungeon. The nearby cave complex isn't interesting either.

I recently finished The Castle of Otranto, and Corathon's right; it's not very good. It reads like a bad Shakespeare pastiche, actually, with all the tropes dialed up: mistaken identity, long-lost family, comedy-relief servants, star-crossed lovers, etc. I do believe that Otranto is the source...

I have no trouble with a system where roll and miss means feint and see no opening, but roll and hit really does feel like it should mean swing and hit.

No, I'm asking you to be far more specific about what pulling out all the stops means, because making an extra effort when you see your chance in real life is nothing like using up a daily power in the game -- although both may appear the same from the outside. I am not arguing for a game where...

I thought I'd repeat what I cited in another thread, about free kriegspiel (free-form wargaming), since it illustrates the difference between abstract (lacking detail) and disassociated (lacking connection to the modeled reality): The system for finding the results of combat in a free...

You raise an excellent point, GreyICE. When the players don't know the mechanics involved, and they can assume that the DM will do something reasonable, everything becomes associated again. The players are thinking through their characters' situation as if it were real and not a boardgame with...