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No, I think it requires only one person to have success and convince others that their white room is reasonably fungible. After that it's merely power gaming by concensus. "Ok Google, what are the best spells in 5e D&D?" "Ok Google, how do I do the most damage in 5e D&D?" "OK Google, what are...

That definitely feels like 3e era advice. However, I'm come to find that die rolls slow the game or distract from the play I want to focus on. Yeah, rolling a die is faster than stopping the game to look up a rule. But rolling a die is still kinda slow. Today, I think I prefer this advice from...

Sure, go ahead and dismiss it as a "skill issue." The fact that you can't even articulate a response beyond that tells me everything I need to know about how critically you examine the design of the games you play. Being able to recognize a bad system doesn't mean you're falling prey to it...

It's more of a points of light style setting. The wilderness is vast and untamed. Civilization is holding on, but it's grasp is tenuous. There are many lords but few kings. The elves and dwarves not only distrust each other, but humanity as well. The forests are dark and dangerous. It's like...

I've always heard them called "zines." I've also heard "short form" or "single scenario."

Interesting how the answer is kind of, "Basically, right away."

Record of Lodoss War started as a series of "replay" serialized novels. Basically, a novelization of a B/X campaign in Japan. It was first serialized in the Japanese Comptiq magazine beginning in 1986. It is basically where all of the Japanese fantasy tropes in gaming and media originated. If...

You're going to have to be more specific.

Given that GNS is, in part, supposed to tell you why people have fun playing RPGs... Yes, he is probably wrong. Because, IIRC, many of the games he claims are "bad" or "played wrong" are, for the people actually playing them, wildly fun. In other words, for a theory that's supposed to describe...

Hm. I'll have to look at this later, depending on how much I can stand. My guess is that I won't be able to stand very much. The last time I seriously looked at GNS, my takeaway was that "Simulation" was an equivocation. The theory defined unintuitively compared to the plain English meaning of...

The base bonus is +1 every two levels, but between magical items and ability score increases, PCs get a total bonus of +27 or +28 over the course of 30 levels. That discrepancy is why the Weapon Focus (Expertise?) feat grants +1/+2/+3 at each tier, and it's why so many people called it a "feat...

In general, I think people complaining about "exception-based design" are mostly complaining about how heavy the rules are more than anything else. It's a complaint about preference while feigning being merely descriptive. You can tell that to be the case because people only seem to use it to...

My only disappointment is that this will be another stupid thing for TTRPG reactionaries to be endlessly outraged about. In the past I would have found the nose-tweaking hilarious. I think now I just find it tedious. The miniature is fine. Elmore's response is fine. WizKids is fine for making a...

Hm. I do remember finding a bunch of gold at the end, but not that much. I wonder if our DM was looking through what we had completed so far. We were probably part way through the module when we found the rule and someone wanted to level up. We were used to leveling up midway through the...

I think training costs and upkeep costs were a common house rule in part to suck away some measure of wealth and to encourage the PCs to keep gold on hand, but also just for verisimilitude. I'm pretty sure we settled on 100 gp / level, which I think is what the 2e optional rule is. I call them...

That's just it, though. It doesn't really do that. I feel like you haven't actually looked at just how silly the math is. I don't think Gary did. If you play it straight, it doesn't just make gold mandatory for progression. It makes a lot of gold mandatory for progression. It makes gold...

The 2e AD&D DMG explicitly lists Training as an optional rule in Chapter 8. B/X has no rules at all for training, let alone training costs, and BECMI's "Training" refers to it's own Weapon Mastery system. Similarly OD&D had no training costs; the only limitation that I can recall was that you...

See, I don't think that's really true. Because in B/X and AD&D, gold is pretty useless. You need enough to upgrade your equipment. Full plate and composite longbows. And horses and carts and hirelings. But that isn't very expensive, really. A couple thousand gp is enough to equip and supply any...

Vicious Mockery and Eldritch Blast are two of the best cantrips in the game. They might be the two best cantrips in the game. Seriously, don't underrate VM. The only thing you're looking for is when the target is adjacent to you and has a high Wis save, or when the target has high AC and a high...

The player rolls. If they don't like it, they can have the DM roll. Whatever the DM rolls is what they get.