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As someone who played RuneQuest through the years after Chaosium and before Mongoose (and now Design Mechanism), I entirely agree with the premise. Whole years went by when the only product was fan-made, and it hardly stopped people playing. Slow product schedules doesn't seem to have stopped a...

Shackled City preceded it, even if you only include D&D and something more than the short series that already existed. Runequest's Borderlands also dates from 1982. Also Chaosium.

Sandbox: Place. AP: Plot. At the most basic level that's how I'd describe the starting point for design, which is what the players interact with. In a sandbox, you start off by thinking about what sort of place the players will be in, and build on the principle that the players are going to...

While I recognise your description and think it's fine, I don't think it's as valid to to object to people who go into character generation without any idea of what sort of character they're going to play. Many RPGs simply don't give you the sort of control over the character generation. Early...

Quite literally the only person I know who ever recognised the D&D Mage/Wizard was a comic-book fan who wanted to play a Doctor Strange style character. Everyone else who had an idea for a character that they thought would be a Mage found that the class didn't really play out that way. Including...

Both of them in various books. Different fields of technology with different levels of advancement is one of the things that more detailed world-generation covers. It's even a "thing" in the OTU, with one race being seriously affected by plagues from another branch of that race due to limited...

Are Paizo, by the standards by which WotC and especially Hasbro judge, a success? It seems equally possible that the reason the legal issues involved haven't been resolved is that they aren't important enough to be a priority.

I think that would depend on how much the edition changed and how much it instead added or made slight modifications to. There's plenty of RPGs where the changes from one edition to the next are small. Simply because the publishers have decided to stick a new number on a book doesn't mean that...

Or by looking at how well their kickstarters are doing and/or have done. Usually rather well.

So, what's the role of the priest and wizard? Because you tell us what the other two classes do, but for those you describe how they do... the whatever it is they do.

I thought it was mentioned in the chapter on casting and preparing spells, rather than in the bard class entry, but I might be mistaken. I certainly can't find it now. It's also perhaps worth noting that there are examples of priests who can't heal because their deity doesn't grant that sort...

The Bard explicitly uses arcane magic in every edition since 2nd, and that includes the editions where they get healing spells (3e onwards). And where you get the idea that "healing magic" = "divine magic" in non-D&D RPGs is beyond my understanding.

Some of the best gaming I've had, and long lasting campaigns at that, have been in games where characters didn't advance their skills in any appreciable way - Traveller is the ur-example, of course. If you start the game with characters who match up to the concept you have of them, then...

That got me thinking, what companies are publishing more than that for any of their games? Paizo, of course. FFG for Star Wars. Mongoose for Traveller and Legend. Cubicle 7 with Doctor Who. Not all hardbacks, mind you.

I think there's a reference to Gondor's borders reaching the south-western edge of the Sea of Rhun, but Dorwinion is on the north side. Though it might have been a tributary state, since I think Rhovanion as a whole is described as paying tribute when Gondor was at it's peak.

If you don't want your character to have hard-coded limits on the things they do well, don't play a game where classes impose hard-coded limits on things a character can do well.

Arguably for WotC the options are to expand their slice of the RPG pie - I personally think that's unlikely to happen, they were after all number one in 4e days while they had a significant release schedule - or to make the pie bigger in general. People are drawn into playing RPGs through video...

While Dorwinion is technically southwards of Erebor, it's off to the east near the Sea of Rhun and not anywhere near Gondor. I've always wondered what it was actually like, as it's off in the east but doesn't seem to have been similar to other "Easterling" peoples.

Humans have no idea, but it comes in cans and when people have had to eat it the experience has been... unpleasant.

There are genres and games where "leveling up" would not be appropriate but where players nevertheless appreciate long-lasting characters more. Reaching high levels is incidental to being a character who can be remembered fondly.