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It's one of those 1e rules that adds nothing but annoyance for the GM and players. Just throw them out, the game has no need for it.

It's actually extremely easy to make in-character decisions and also not offload the responsibility of knowing how the game works to the GM. You don't have to pretend that you're not playing a game. Ignoring rules feels like it would just make that harder to do things in character.

TAZ was one of the earliest podcasts to come out during the big actual play boom - it came out like a month after 5e. The first season is fondly regarded, but also they did not follow the rules of dnd 5e very closely. The second season uses Monster of the Week and is nice. The third season...

I would definitely read through the many rebuttals in this thread prior to taking the words of a guy who has made a veritable posting career out of arguing that Paizo is an incompetent company. Zapp over here is a very biased source.

i'm sure there's a very interesting essay you can write about the different kinds of racism

Not really sure how else I'm meant to read this besides "there is some merit to scientific racism but not too much of it". There's a reason there was so much backlash: because it looks insanely racist to say. This doesn't even necessarily mean that he hates other races or that he's a bigot. It...

Disappointed that Jonathan Tweet is coming back after Pelgrane said they dropped him after his fun little "race science" tweets.

Regardless, they're not spending the time and money to recompile books that didn't sell well.

Games where death is a player choice, to me, always preferable to one where you can die because Random Zombie 6 clawed you a few too many times. Death is the most boring thing that can happen to a character, generally. There's way more interesting things that can happen. Forged in the Dark games...

Apparently the pawns were never a particularly good seller - the worldwide paper shortage and shipping crisis in addition to the reduction in in person play (and the fact people can just... print the pictures out) means that it just is not a good idea to produce them. They're also in no world...

I personally had a hard time learning the procedures of PBTA play by reading Apocalypse World - I feel like Flying Circus by Erika Chappell does a great job of teaching the GM how to run the game, restating a lot of the information in AW in cleaner, more clearly categorized writing (without...

A lot of modern (as in, 2000-onward) RPG design framework have their origins in the old forum The Forge - this is where a lot of the design ideas like gamist-narrative-simulation (the "Big Model") and fail-forward and the common idea of games trying to tell a specific story comes from. I...

Your friends you're playing with are still a "table". Virtual tabletops are tabletops, but virtual. etc.

If you're working on a system of your own, why don't you just make one thread for it instead of posting so many different threads that consist entirely of your own notes?

It's definitely a major advertising event for a lot of companies - everyone loves to make a big announcement in front of a crowd, you know? Plus (if there wasn't a horrible plague going on) there's the presumably fun aspect of getting to meet new people and play some convention games with them...

Did you know they've invented new games in the last 40 years that don't work as well if one player is 10 levels behind the others? The social contract of "you're here to play a game with all of your friends". If someone doesn't have a character they don't get to play. And like, presumably the...

This may shock you, but it's quite possible these players may have enjoyed the story and the way their current characters experienced it. I'm not sure where you get off just assuming they hate the game. The general social contract of play is that the new character gets slotted in to the party...

13th Age has a system of "campaign losses" - players can unconditionally retreat from any fight. No questions asked. But the bad guys get a victory! They win something meaningful. This is also a good option. TPKs are simply not fun. There's a reason a lot of modern systems completely make...

This isn't really that surprising. DnD and Pathfinder have some of the most complicated character creation among popular games. Having to look through a bunch of different books to make a new character, but it can't be the thing you were just enjoying playing!, kind of blows. Tons of games have...

Is Deadlands dead? It just got a big release last year in the form of updating "Weird West" to the SWADE rules, and that's not even counting the actual release of Deadlands 20th anniversary. In general, I don't think that a game needs to keep releasing supplements to stay "active". The only...