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Watt-Evans is one of my favorite authors to this day, and his first major series The Lords of Dūs is a worthy successor to Appendix N swords & sorcery.

Good point from @GnomeWorks . If other classes have common access to abilities that are part of the psion's core identity, it kind of de-justifies the class. Of course this is a problem with later editions of D&D generally, where the different spellcasting classes and spell lists bleed into each...

I just started a 1e game but I houseruled in some key concepts from 2e like specialized wizards, specialized priests, and a simpler bard. I feel in love with 3e back in the day because it was new and shiny, but as I get older I am less and less enamored with the "one mechanic to rule them all"...

Excellent post. As I read it, my mind went back to the 80s and Steve Jackson's line of minigames, such as O.G.R.E., and new RPGs that were almost pamphlets. My friends and I got a lot of value out of these liw-cost games and some were very well designed as well as capturing the imagination...

LOL thanks for saving me the work @Staffan . I felt bad for leaving the OP hanging and was just about to show how to use the binomial distribution in this case. It is really hard to have an intuition for success when the mechanic includes two redundant ways to improve their odds (lower target...

What is the RPG? Legend of 5 Rings and 7th Sea run off d10 dice pools but they add up the highest k dice instead of counting successes vs a target number. I mention them because you can find detailed, precalculated probability tables online. You might find the same for your game. Calculating...

Frog and Toad make a Persuasion Check

Bards beat up the wizard and stole her stuff. "Learning the innermost secrets of the universe to unlock ultimate cosmic power? Why should only smart people get to do that?" Yoink! Bards bullied the cleric into giving up their stuff. "C'mon, no one wants to be like you because you just sit there...

@Celebrim : "Knowing the fiction but not the damage is different than knowing the damage but not the fiction." Very quotable and good advice for any DM.

I never allow skills to substitute a different ability score in general play. Doing so negates the interesting choice made at character creation to be better at some things than other things. If a player wants to argue that they should be able to use their PC's Int score to roll persuasion...

That's a fun idea. As a player, the first question I might ask is "does it actually work?" Do these Fat Boys (and girls?) get superpowers from eating exotic foods? Or is it just a philosophical order? From a gamist point of view, there's a lot to be said for making a class whose powers are...

It's an intriguing idea to be sure and I played a few turns. As interactive storytelling it does a decent job but as the story gets longer even advanced LLMs like Claude and GPT4 are likely to lose the thread. These models may have very long context windows in the mathematical sense, allowing...

If alignment is just a role-playing aid indicating ethics and tendencies, and gods intervene, then gods should have an objective and observable alignment. If alignment is a role-playing aid and gods don't intervene, then their alignment should be subjective (relative to worshipers'...

Thanks for this nugget Snarf. Was that RPG Villains & Vigilantés?

The Great Wheel is too well organized to represent a multiverse where Law and Chaos are in equilibrium.

I agree with both of the main speakers for the last few pages, more or less: * I think it is entirely possible to invent a culture that is original, or that remixes multiple Earth cultures to the point where referencing back to the inspirations is impossible. In this case we can make them as...

Agreed, but they are pulled straight from the pulps and probably sounded cool and heroic at the time. John Carter consistently describes himself as a "fighting-man".

Overall I enjoyed wizards in 2e. I was a little disappointed that the Illusionist lost some character but the extra spells and possibility of specializing in other schools more than made up for it. If the designers had been a little less conservative, they could have given each specialist some...

Wasn't weapon specialisation reserved for single-class fighters? In my experience with 2E, the 2WF was a pretty nice benefit--not as powerful as the bonus damage to giants but on all the time. But restricting it to light armor nerfs it pretty hard and forces rangers to have high Dex just to...

Only one human in the lot, and that one a paladin.