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For a real-world spaceship, I'd give the Iconic first place to Eagle and its Saturn V launch vehicle. "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

USS Enterprise (Star Trek TOS) The Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars (The first movie, rebranded as "IV A New Hope") Dauntless, from the Lensman series (written SF)

There was more than one Old School, and partisans of "player characters need very high stats" existed well before 3.x. In fact, we were around back in the 1e days. The revolt against the best-known, DM-centric, munchkin- and power-gamer-crushing Old School didn't appear out of nowhere.

As I've mentioned before, I use my own house-rule random/point buy hybrid system: Roll 3d6 for each ability score, in order, to set the minimum scores. Characters can then increase those scores until the total of the six reach a campaign-specific value (85 for my Brotherhood of Rangers game)...

I checked "Gods are canonically real, but their role in the mortal world is limited." In my D&D settings, most deities have multiple names or aliases, some aliases are used by multiple deities, and a few deities have no (known) names. In particular, there's the goddess referred to ironically as...

No, but it was written down in the saved file: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc From: morrow@gandalf.rutgers.edu (John Morrow) Subject: Re: Human factors in game design Date: 1 Mar 1995 19:52:42 -0500 EDIT: I'm going to go ahead and repost the entire thing here: --- begin quoted repost --- I...

I was a big fan of GURPS way back in the day. How far back? I would call up the SJG BBS with my trusty Commodore 64, download messages, and make posts. I contributed in a small way to the system, and I remember the morning when I dialed up and got the "We were raided by the US Secret Service"...

There's an old post from the USENET days about "Human Factors in game design." It's long, so I'll only post the whole thing if requested, but it does have a section concerning math: EDIT: I should note that the post is not by me. It's something I agreed with, found useful, and saved as a reference.

I'd say "It depends." Many systems have magic items that let non-casters do magic things, and often effectively require the non-caster types to have them. A system with formal martial and caster classes can allow cross-training with a greater or lesser premium charged. A "classless" system...

Niches and niche protection can be an issue even between two characters of the same class. In my Brotherhood of Rangers game (3.5e with gestalt characters), the party has two fighter-ranger gestalt characters. One was a greatsword-wielding melee guy, while the other tried to be both a good...

My experience has been that most players have yet to encounter that long run where winning every encounter gets boring - despite years of gaming. It's a common preference; lots of players have a low threshold for how challenging they like their game, and find dealing with low resources to be...

It seems to me that the 5 minute adventure day came from players doing their darnedest to optimize fun into the game - for them. It's less fun for DMs, but more fun for most players - the exceptions being the players of fighter types who get left behind in the "more able to do more fun stuff...

Fighters are the exception that are allowed 12 levels. Other than that: Exactly so. PCs in this game are all expected to have two classes, at least after they reach sixth level.

"What is this 'prestige class' thing you speak of?" Seriously, I blanket-ban prestige classes, so your suggestion would 'work' by not being allowed. As I noted above: More generally, I want the core PC classes to be the prestige classes, rather than being 'beginner' classes that get left...

Here's a commentary/rant I wrote back in 2006 The Things I Love and Hate about Third Edition D&D (AKA the Good, the Bad and the Ugly) This rant has been building pressure in my head for some time, but only now has it burst out in actual written words. It's divided into three sections, the...

One thing about 3.0 & 3.5 that was elegant in theory but I find a pain in the heat of play is the frequent use of temporary ability score increases and decreases. Elegant because a broad cascade of effects can be produced by a simple +4 to DEX or -2 to CON. And a pain in the heat of play for the...

Practically the first thing I did. Hmm. In my "Brotherhood of Rangers" game, where I wanted to keep house rules to a minimum (other than using the gestalt rules), I decided to go with the flow of cure light wound wands, making them a well-known thing that was done in-universe. For other...

No, not gestalt. Multiclass. Six class levels of rogue plus six class levels of wizard for a multiclass character of 12th level. Not a 6th level rogue/wizard gestalt. And no 12th level rogues or 12th level wizards because class levels are limited to 6th.

I don't call it E12 because classes are limited to 6th level (with the exception of fighters). So the 12th level characters would be things like 6/6 paladin/ranger, 6/6 barbarian/fighter, 6/6 rogue/wizard, 6/6 sorcerer/cleric, etc. E8 was already an E6 variant out there when I went looking...

I was happy to see the then-new skill systems in 3.0 and 3.5. "At last!" I applauded, "D&D has a skill system that's at least half-way decent!" Now the implementation was over-fussy. I didn't like the large gap between class and cross-class skills, and I really didn't like the way multiclass...