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You know, I just finish explaining to someone that science isn't like in the movies, its actually a lot of careful reading, thinking, labwork, and analysis... and then I read a headline like "Giant Rat Found in Lost Volcano."

Dying Earth is from 1950.

Can you estimate how much of the DMG II will be material that by its nature will not make it into the Compendium or into any electronic tools? That's the biggest determinant of whether I buy it.

I never play RPGs at conventions. Conventions are a place to experience new things I haven't experienced before. Playing a new RPG might be a new thing, but unfortunately it tends to be a new thing that takes hours and hours of time, preventing me from experiencing many other new things that...

He's not making the claim that rape never has a place in fiction. Apropos of Nothing prominently features a rape scene. There's good presentation and bad presentation. Vance's isn't the best. Vance's work, particularly the violence and evil, is quirky and wryly humorous. His prose is great...

Heh, we just did. We're about to enter P2 as well. We dropped a character right at the end of H2, largely for the convenience of our players. We knew it had to happen, and rather than just have the character poof away into nothingness or get randomly killed, we plotted in advance that when...

I was unaware that there were people who didn't make fun of gnomes, until I encountered this attitude on the internet. I thought that was why we had gnomes. I thought their whole point was to be ridiculous and the butt of jokes. I thought that was the whole reason gnome fans liked gnomes-...

I totally understand that. That doesn't make it fun to read.

I wouldn't have allowed it. I would have allowed the character with the most experience with disguises to help the others and give them a bonus on their check, though. I find that a bit more... aesthetically pleasing than just letting the disguiser roll his own skill in place of his ally...

I'm sure it would work. I'm running a game with only elves/eladrin and dragonborn. Those were the only races my players chose, so I deleted all the others. The real question you should ask yourself before doing this is, "why?" And then, "Will my players find this as appealing as I do?" If...

1. Vancian magic, particularly of the D&D-Vancian variety, tends to assume that a spell is a *thing.* It is a *thing* that you have stuffed into your head. When you cast it, you are letting that *thing* out. Look at the spellthief to get an extreme example of the implications of this point of...

I'm not convinced that forging documents was intended to be under Bluff before. I think that was a line for convincing someone, verbally, that the forged documents you are carrying are real ones. The line does say "passing off forged documents," not "creating forged documents," and using bluff...

That is something I'd really enjoy in Dragon- book reviews of books not published by WotC. I'd be willing to write them, even. I'm not sure if that's really doable, for a variety of reasons. It trades off with the marketing of their own books, it might involve reviewing material with sexual...

Well, clearly you know more about it than me. But your rules of advertising apply to the general economy. I rather suspect that the rules of practice are different when your product is competing almost solely with your own discontinued product, the product in question never expires so no one...

Your defense is nice as a concept, and would really make a lot of sense, except that I don't think the facts on the ground really bear out your interpretation. Here's the entire reference in the existing skill rules to document forging and non magical disguises: There's also a "disguise kit"...

I don't think the marketing actually alienated 3.5 lovers. I think the marketing provided a flashpoint for people who were going to be angry anyways. Many of the more common criticisms of the marketing at the time simply weren't reasonable and generally boiled down to criticisms of the entire...

Somewhere in this thread, about the time people began talking about the power structure system and ended by talking about a superhero team repurposed to be all green lanterns, I totally lost track of who was talking about in game homogeneity and who was talking about mechanical homogeneity. I...

I tend to allow reskinning. Mostly because I think its awkward for a game to have a couple dozen sentient races. It makes it harder to develop them since you're spread so thin. So certain races tend to become "one off" options for characters. Like if you wanted to make a character that's...

Huh, I didn't remember those being quite that long. Last month's Dragon clocked in at: Domain of Dread: 13 pages Fighter Essentials: 12 pages Explore Airspur: 8 pages Playing Githzerai: 6 pages Primal Items: 10 pages Bahamut's Champions: 10 pages Domain's of Eberron and the Forgotten Realms...

Oh, and I forgot. The other side of the 'don't make people explain things, just let them use their abilities" position is that its absolutely worthless when your players want to accomplish something that isn't actually an ability or in the rules. Like, say, disguising yourself or forging a...