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According to the Acaeum, That's not just 200.000 copies, that's five times as much, years after the huge D&D boom. Plus Basic D&D didn't just sell X copies, it gently guided new gamers towards other lines (Advanced D&D and so on). For all the talk about being an industry giant, WotC doesn't...

hong: clever.

Most modules that give you a sandbox to play in - an open environment with a lot of possibilities - is suitable for a party of anti-heroes or true villains. In that respect, you already have a lot of product to choose, from Keep on the Borderlands to Lost City of Barakus and City State of the...

Very early in my DMing career, I deducted XP from players who were dicks IRL. In hindsight, I should have just told them to get better or go away... as I eventually had to! (And after that threat, they indeed got better.) There was also the threat of changing a PC's alignment and thus reducing...

That's nothing compared to Chainmail, where the contempt is literally dripping from the page - something along the lines of "these diminutive chaps have little place in a wargame, but if you really wish to include them, here are the stats".

Unfortunately, whatever Gary claims, Tolkien's influence on D&D was much stronger than initially suspected. Although it may have been an afterthought or a minor addition to draw in Tolkien fans, demihumans and the rest of the Tolkien legacy quickly became a core of the game, especially once...

What the hell does that word have to do with the topic? Or did 'nostalgia' change its meaning to 'things I vaguely don't like anymore'? :confused:

Two things here. The first is party size in individual adventures, where 3e stresses 4 members and balances the game for that number, versus 1e and BXCM D&D, where 6-8 was the norm. It is probably held up as an example of the 1e/BXCM rules-as-actually-used-by-most-people* being light enough not...

I prefer systems where the players have enough footing to roughly know what their characters can expect in a conflict situation, but wide enough to allow the DM a lot of leeway. Neither D&D 3e's over-integrated and over-defined ruleset, nor 1e's minutiae appeal to me in this respect - although a...

Start thinking in the Century Gothic font. It is good for you.®

Aha! I forgot: 7. Remove social skills from the game. Right now. KILL.

The closest I got to the damn thing with actually recognisable 3.0 rules featured the following changes: 1. Higher XP requirements for level advancement: 2000*current level instead of 1000*current level - so it goes like: 1st 0 2nd 2000 3rd 6000 4th 12000 5th 20000 etc. This change comes from...

Varianor: I let him figure it out himself. He progressed from the general somewhat blasé "I am familiar with this, so let's get it over with" jaded player attitude to "now wait a minute, what was that?" and later to utmost desperation. It was a fun session. Of course, it's a trick you can only...

I am entirely serious. The game could probably benefit from an universal resource that would be reduced by adversity and increased by being cool and awesome. Maybe we could call it Victory Points, as in our good friend Victoria Bitter:

I don't know how weird that is, but I once did a very elaborate whodunnit complete with NPC portraits, conflicting testimonials and hidden agendas, where one of the PCs was the killer - under the influence of a demon-possessed gemstone. The look of shock when they were getting close to the...

Tome of Horrors from Necromancer Games is one of the most useful monster tomes for 3rd edition, especially for reintroducing a lot of creepy-crawlies missed in the core books. Can you have a meaningful D&D® experience without giant beetles? Can you have one without Giant Frogs ? That's right!

The Fun Engineers at Wizards of the Coast will no doubt choose to remove all remaining save or die elements from the game and replace them with Hp, ability score damage or negative modifiers. Suffering adversity detracts from the fun of cultivating a character build, and is a deprotagonising...

After years of lagging sales, TSR releases 3rd edition AD&D in a last desperate attempt to stay afloat. With very little goodwill from existing consumers, and failing to grab the imagination of young blood, the game is unsuccessful, and not even the relative success of relaunched Greyhawk is...

Mt. Zogon has been the funniest comic strip running in the TSR magazines since Finieous Fingers. So yeah, I like it. :D

Thaks for the info, grodog! It kinda dispells the "it is only random encounters on a random map" idea a lot of people had...