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I've certainly been there. I've been the guy who says "I'll hold them off! You get out of here!" obviously not expecting to survive. It's not about valuing my/my PC's life as the highest goal. Who doesn't want to be Kyle Reese? It's the immersion in feeling what my character is feeling. I find...

I think all three of the things you said are not true. :LOL: (1) The group rarely has 6-8 fights between long rests, (2) it wasn't an easy fight (although it was a low-XP fight), and (3) the Cleric using up her level 3-4 spell slots on Fireballs wasn't an example of magic items making a...

1. "Again, where does this idea come from that 'your character will not die meaninglessly' equates to 'total plot immunity'?" Nothing to do with my point, which was about my own feeling of immersion. 2. "I can keep my play of the character separate from my knowledge that he's not going to die"...

You can have Narrativist play without the possibility of PC death. The game addresses some Dramatic Premise. Or you can have some light Dramatist story-creation type game without the possibility of PC death: let's cooperate to create something that looks like a Prince Valiant adventure. What...

What are you trying to emulate? The experience of being a character in that popular fiction? The experience of watching (or creating) that popular fiction? IME it's usually the former. If you are emulating the experience of being Indiana Jones - Indy knows he is highly competent, he does NOT...

I liked the combat engine, but the railroad plots were abysmal and no fun. AFAICS they could have made a decent sandbox for the same effort.

Here's one PC group in one of my campaigns (FR) after about 2.5 years of play, with their magic items. Most of the PCs have AC 17-20, with the leader Lord Norrin a stand-out at AC 24. This group recently struggled in a battle with a few dozen Dust Goblins (AC 14 HP 5 ATT light crossbow ATT +5...

7 years later, I'd pretty much stand by this. There is something of a break point with AC, when you start getting up around 24-26 then most weak creatures are only hitting on a 20. But you don't even need magic items to get up there; an Eldritch Knight with plate shield & casting shield is...

Yeah, sorry! In school Latin class we did Metamorphoses & The Aeneid together, I mixed up the authors. :oops:

IRL of course seas are (were) much easier to traverse than land, so the north south & east coasts of the Mediterranean were much more integrated than the areas beyond. So Greece & Egypt had more contact than (eg) Greece & Germany. OTOH that does mean that white people could sail the sea too. I...

If I had to bet, I'd bet against any pre-Ptolemaic Pharoah ever having been blond. I think it's impossible to know for sure, but AFAICT the Sea Peoples never ruled Egypt (just been Googling) :LOL: having been defeated by Rameses III, and AFAICT they were the only possibly-blond folk in the...

Homer didn't see blue; Ovid did see yellow, AFAICT. Of course Queen Dido of Carthage is more myth than history, and even if she was an historical figure ca 800 BC there's no particular reason to think Ovid ca 10 BC was giving an accurate account of her hair colour! Ovid's description is only...

Ridley Scott said he used Anglo-Celtic actors for Ancient Egyptians because they were cheap & plentiful. :LOL:

I think he said 'golden' hair. Certainly there's a cline; Italian blondes tend to be fairly dark compared to the lightest Scandinavians. OTOH even in Scandinavia brunette hair is most common AFAIK.

BTW Ovid (edit: actually Virgil) in The Aeneid describes Queen Dido of Carthage as blonde. She's a Phoenician colonist. The Romans seem to have seen blonde hair as something that existed, but rare enough to be noteworthy.

While it's far from clear, I get the impression the Sea People invaders were probably Indo-European speaker (trad: 'Aryan') types related to the Ionian Greeks et al, so pretty fair, so related to Celts & Nordics but likely darker. Most Egyptian dynasties seem to have resembled, or been, Semitic...

I definitely think it's important for megadungeon play to use 1 week long rests or similar. Been doing that for years. I find short rests work ok at 1 hour if limited to 3 per day. I also recommend use of 1:1 time as per Gygax in the 1e DMG, so that the IRL calendar generally matches the game...

Yeah, I'm not really averse to having eg a DC 15 Persuasion roll, and the GM decides when to use it. Social interaction is an area that I think needs a lot of tailoring by group preference.

No, I think the social pillar of play is too important to be left to rules.