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DCC is such a smooth system. The Crawl zine Bard class has specific abilities that would be useful for a face character in that scenario, but otherwise, yes, a simple Personality check would make the most sense.

My preferred system these days is Cyberpunk Red. First off, for something so complex, I'd probably have everyone roll initiative to keep things straight. Either that or focus on each player's part, one at a time (which is generally my preference when out-of-combat netrunning is going on, as I...

There are a handful of causal factors that contributed to me getting back into gaming in the early 00s. The Fellowship of the Ring movie was one of them. Another was picking up this Dragon magazine from the shelves of a grocery store:

That screams Dungeon Crawl Classics to me.

Paracelsus' stuff is wild. There are some great ideas for gaming in it, though.

A sure lesson on how reality TV is anything but.

I love watching 80s WWF and 90s WCW wrestling. Like, I get that a significant portion of the people on screen died at a young age and/or are legitimately terrible people. But it's fun and theatrical and over-the-top. Not to mention, especially with the WCW, some of the jaw-dropping athleticism.

Yeah, you can't really fake the attachment that comes from leveling a character up over time, earning things through danger and excitement. It's like It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. It's all about sincerity.

One of the great things about the rise of nerdom in pop culture is that barriers between fiction and genre fiction are dissolving to a certain extent. People are writing dissertations about Robert E. Howard! Dude got out there at age 16 in a pre-internet age. That's no small achievement.

I recently re-read DL1 and was surprised at the sandbox elements (paired with a handful of timed events). Would that the rest of the series had continued that approach.

I'm a voracious reader. I've read tons of classics. I am secure in whatever literary knowledge pretensions I have. I can let myself kick back and enjoy something "lowbrow." I'm happy talking about Crime and Punishment or The Eye of Argon.

The internal chapter start art for the Dragonlance books deserves more credit than it gets. I mean, look at this one: Considering how bad the character work on the new trilogy's cover art is, that's a real shame.

I finished reading First, You Fight By the pseudonym D.B. Drumm. Prime 80s nuclear post-apocalyptic schlock. It's got just about every trope you'd expect, good and bad. Not a great book, but at least an enjoyable one. And for all the Rambo-like qualities of the main character, it doesn't ever...

Indeed. There was absolutely no need for him to try to pull that one off. Cheating at playing pretend is generally a low deal. I've long been a bit of a softie as a DM. But back then, when a player cheesed me off enough, I could be vicious. Kobold with a Nine Lives Stealer. Level-draining...

Another wonderful Dean Morrissey cover!

Extraplanar sourcebooks have always hit that sense of wonder for me since the original Manual of the Planes. There's something about the strange and alien worlds coming to life that makes me want to go there. In general, a really good setting book does it for me. When I feel like I can step...

Outside of organized play, no. I remember when I was a young teenager and I invited a new player to our group. He asked if he could bring the character he'd been playing in. He showed up with a high-level paladin with a holy avenger and 18s in every stat. Now, as an adult, I can see that the...