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I'd like to add a suggestion that your campaign might feature something else again, such as a pre-Mediaeval outlook. You know, with paganism and all that. The Julio-Claudian dynasty, the one that established the Roman Empire, claimed descent from the goddess of whores.

Lying, cheating, stealing, abuse of trust, betrayal, embezzlement, perhaps victimisation of the weak (though that might be seen as evil rather than dishonorable), perjjury, false witness, …

The temple of Pelor couldn't ever get the moxie together to organise a Regenerate spell effect? I would have thought it was a cheap price for getting a paladin back on the warpath. Probably cheaper than 60 years of board and nursing.

I did it once in a Castle Falkenstein campaign. There were four of us who rotated the GMing on a strict schedule, with an explicit agreement that we had to wrap up our adventures in a single evening to leave the deck clear for the next guy. And the four of us had very different styles of GMing...

Thanks, that is a really useful review. I already have a general-purpose RPG that I am really happy with, that is powerful and flexibile and has tools and subsystems that cover pretty much the whole range of what I'd need. I would be more than confident of playing Firefly using ForeSight. So...

Just a personal thing. But I hate rules (and settings) like that. It means that there is by fiat no way to work out a clever strategy. It robs the character-players of significant choices to make, denies them a chance of contributing. IMHO. YMMV. YDWYDWP.

A clarification. As habitués of rec.gmes.frp.advocacy will instantly have recognised, the terms 'gamist', 'dramatist', and 'simulationist' were not originally mine. I use them with gratitude to the people on RGFA who thrashed out the Threefold.

That has to be balanced against the fact that Luke would not be Luke if he were dependably so lucky as to be able to count on being immortal. He is cool only while the audience (for a movie) or the player (for an RPG) are able to suspend their disbelief, and pretend that he is facing real risks...

That's right. Because of the Central Limit Theorem, as you add in more random variables, the distribution of the sum of their values approaches Gaussian Normal, which is a symmetrical distribution with median equal to its mean. The sum of five geometric distributions isn't particularly close to...

The mean is still 50. Standard deviation is reduced to 21.2, which is a better statistic. Better yet, you could make it 10 d5. (Std. dev. =14.14) Or for a really accurate system, which still requires only value to be recorded, and save the bother of all that die-rolling, why not 50 d1? (Std...

Those last two are good buys!

Do you really have the million? Are you prepared to put it in escrow? Because you are offering better odds than any lottery, and millions of people buy tickets in million-dollar lotteries every week.

Congratulations! The expected number of spells a wand will fire under this scheme is exactly 50. (It is a sum of four geometric distributions with p=1/20, 1/12, 1/10, 1/8, mean for the geometric distribution is 1/p, and the mean of the sum is the sum of the means.) The standard deviation is a...

Since ability increases with level come as +1s, not +2s, the benefit is not without penalty. True, the penalty may be delayed, but it is still there. If I had a +1 adjustment to my most important ability , and my best roll were even, I would put that best roll in the most-important slot anyway...

I think that was a good choice. Criticism (ie. constructive criticism) always goes down better wrapped up in an apology. So much so that I sometimes make up having something to apologise for.

I should think that ought to be more than enough. Were I to run D&D again I would use only the 3.0 PHB, DMG, and MM1. And not use everything in the latter two books. Though the Arms & Equipment Guide sounds intriguing. One problem with all the supplements is that everything gets much more...

Yep. Three stats in D&D are rendered problematical because they confound together abilities that realistically and in fantasy convention ought to be separate. A D&D character can't be good with his hands without being athletic. A D&D character can't be absent-minded or short-sighted if he is...

Until you reach level 4 and get a stat bonus.

I don't think that the Lord of the Rings is at all good as a reference standard for D&D orcs or half-orcs. Tolkien's orcs were smaller and weaker than men, in clear contradistinction to D&D orcs and half-orcs. They flourished in the same sort of tunnels as dwarves, and the 'huge orc-chieftain'...

Dwarves are infantry. Negotiate with your DM for a substitute ability.