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Depends on what gun you're talking about. Remember that there's a span of several centuries between the earliest muskets and the emergence of the rifle. Napoleonic era (early 1800s) muzzle loading muskets can fire off 3 rounds in a minute Muzzleloader - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. If...

One word. Training. You could train a peasant to shoot a gun in battlefield conditions in a few weeks. You need years of training and physical conditioning to shoot a longbow continuously for a battle. Early firearms were worse than bows. Early guns had worse accuracy and rate of fire. But...

Classes are a purely metagaming construct designed for player use. In my game world, there is no concept of a "class". People have jobs and they can be referred to as such. The captain of the guard or the army sergeant is never referred to as a "fighter" or a "warlord". Similarly, the king's...

The problem with multiclassing isn't multiclassing itself. As it's been stated already, if you don't know what you're doing, you can totally screw up your character (which is another problem, but not an overpower issue). Melee characters can get a lot from cherry picking, but casters (who are...

Here Fixed Careful Attack, messed up Footwork Lure etc.

Sure, progress isn't ever a clean and simple line. Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" have a number of examples where better technology or inventions is ignore and forgotten due to societal inertia. But in very general terms, the better/more efficient techs or methods usually do become...

That's really hard to do with game systems simply because we know so much about how our world (and worlds similar to ours) works. In the past, everything was magic because we know so little about it. Magic was the explanation trotted out just to give our ignorance a label. But now, even the most...

There are plenty of ways for things to fail with modern technology that doesn't imply sudden destruction. I use the example of a computer blowing up because I thought it was a funny way to carry my point across. Prolong exposure to radiation, dangerous chemicals, pathogens, carcinogens etc. can...

To the OP, how are you examples any different than if you use d20 instead of d100 (50%=10 or less, 70%=14 or less, 10%=2 or less)? You only want to use d100 over d20 if you want the resolution of your probabilities to go below 5%. How many DMs and players can meaningfully tell the difference...

One thing I'd like to add is that the reliability of a tool needs to be proportional to how often one is expected to use it (the more one is expected to use a tool, the more reliable it should be). A tool's reliability should also be proportional to how catastrophic the consequence would be if...

I've been thinking about how an item might grow along with a character. What if instead of handing out a magic item treasure parcel, you use that treasure parcel to upgrade an item, say a weapon, that a character already holds. So, after a "plot event" a character's old weapon is upgraded to...

That's pretty cool, but I would think that such items would be rather campaign specific. I keep thinking that the "special" magic items that kept being brought up in this thread would be rather like a 4e version of stuff from Weapons of Legacy. But speaking of that, were Legacy Weapons really...

For signature items, you can always upgrade the item as the char levels. Instead of getting a new item of a higher level, the char's old item "evolves" or "gets reforged due to plot coupon". For a 3ed flavour, the new item can gain new properties/powers but doesn't lose the old one. Yes, the...

Perhaps I should rephrase. I think as one moves from old to modern editions, the time frame over which "player fun" or "player power" (or whatever index you're using) is averaged is shortened. In old editions, you may be expected to take the average over several years real time. In new...

The idea behind early edition is that the game would be fair to all the players over a long stretch of time. More powerful classes have higher stat requirement, thus making them rarer, but a player is expected to go through several characters and thus will play some powerful classes and some...

It's a poorly researched article, there's no doubt about that, but there's a ton of crap articles out there anyways. I keep imagining the writers trying to learn and play all seven games in one sitting, leading to the poor review.

Depends though. If you made a deal that gave you 5 points but gave the other guy 20 points, you might've given the game away right there.

Once you introduce a magic item retail market, most PCs would trade in their quirky, funky items that is useful once in a blue moon for things that are Boring But Practical. In any case, if you don't like magic items being treated as commodities or necessities, blame the creation of a...

I'm not sure that's such an easier thing. Sure, the DM has more power and more leeway to simply make things up. But learning how to wield his power properly is the big hurdle. Maybe the learning curve for DMs of old editions is less rule mastery and more game management. A poor or novice...

I think there's a separate learning curve for DMs and players. In TSR editions, players have a less steep learning curve. They could sit down, roll chars and start playing while relying on the DM to know and adjudacate the rules. But because of the heavier reliance on the DM's understanding...