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If the goal is to improve the balance of 1E, then we need to boost the thief at all levels and the magic-user at low levels, while restraining the magic-user at high levels. If we're keeping all the subclasses, we should boost the fighter too. Boosting the thief is easy -- bigger hit die...

Although I think the game should support the concept of a scholarly wizard who simply cannot fight, I do think the default adventuring wizard should be something much more like 3E's rogue or bard -- minus the lute. Many swords & sorcery villains are masters of traps and trickery, performing...

Unusual mishaps are fun. When we look back at older editions, where a 1st-level magic-user has one spell, does that capture the feel of a sorcerer's apprentice? No, of course not. What makes a sorcerer's apprentice is that his spells never quite work as planned. Sure, you can try that...

Certainly most of them are, but notice how Ravenloft's curse system offers far, far more flavor than D&D's bestow curse spell by (a) distancing itself from pure game mechanics, and (b) relying on context. Cursing a liar who has deceived you so that he literally has a forked tongue is far, far...

OD&D Good: The entire concept, borrowed from the Braunstein game, of playing an individual with open options -- combined with magic and monsters. Bad: The rules. The good parts of the game didn't involve the rules. Ugly: The organization of the rules. There was no organization. And many of...

Certainly much of the plot device-ness is in the hands of the Director (or DM), who can decide whether a spell (or 4E ritual) is even available, but it doesn't all have to come down to DM fiat -- or to pure DM fiat. The not-so-magical D&D way -- at least the 3E way, in practice -- is to largely...

A standard complaint about D&D magic (and much RPG magic in general) is that it doesn't feel magical; it's too tactical, too well-defined, too scientific. Of course, if it's not well-defined, it's hard to adjudicate within a game -- and at least part of D&D's allure is that it's a game with...

But complexity is not the only difference -- or even the primary difference -- between D&D and, say, GURPS.

Let my try once more to explain why everyone in publishing and retail is not stupid and lazy and why you aren't paying for two books (in a bad way) when you buy one. I'll explain it with the canonical news boy model, which is analogous to book publishing and selling. Our iconic 1920s news boy...

I see. You understand the publishing industry much better than the people making a living at it. Let me try again. Publishing faces fairly high fixed costs (author, artists, etc.) and fairly low variable costs (each extra copy of a book is relatively cheap). Thus, a publisher wants to think...

If magic items last forever -- or at least a very, very long time -- we would expect to see them created primarily by those with a long time horizon -- either long-lived races, like the elves, or patriarchs of powerful families who might expect to pass on such a valuable asset. Such durability...

This is a general problem D&D faces. Your level is your power-level within the game, and it implies a certain amount of material wealth -- wealth which is both a reward for good play and a means toward more power. The game doesn't handle other, similar scenarios well either, like a low-level...

Is Lovecraft required reading? No, but he's certainly recommended, because his ideas have become so influential -- and because you only have to read a few short stories to get at the influential bits. As for the quality of his writing, I'd say it was fairly mediocre, but nonetheless...

It's not that simple, since publishing faces fairly high fixed costs (author, artists, etc.) and fairly low variable costs (each extra copy of a book is relatively cheap). And consignment makes stores willing to carry long-shots at all.

Some of us have drawn very different conclusions from the same sample data.

Stoker's Dracula looks like, brace yourself, an eastern European aristocrat -- with a prominent mustache, if I recall correctly -- and the usual vampire features: Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single...

In practice, rules often unwittingly create unwanted restrictions. For instance, if you create a skill list and allocate each class a certain number of skill points to spend on those skills, then you limit the kinds of characters that can be built within the rules -- and you end up with great...

That is an important, if subtle, point. For instance, you could run a Lord of the Rings-style campaign not by making elves über as a character race but by making a typical elf 10th level. It's the player who chooses race and class, so those decisions should arguably be balanced, in order to...

I strongly recommend that you read How did I not see a beholder? and run the experiment.

The term psionic is analagous to bionic. Where bionic means biological + electronic, psionic means psychic + electronic; it originally referred to sci-fi technology for amplifying psychic powers. (Read Poul Anderson's Call Me Joe for an example.) The term psychic is itself modern and...