Search results

I have heard of a couple of coalmines in China that have been burning for decades.

I have had perhaps a similar trajectory as a GM to that you describe. At the zenith (or nadir, depending on where you stand) of my manipulative period I devised a set of intellectual tools (such as 'leads', 'excuses', and 'grommets') that allowed me to draw PCs along a pre-determined path...

You do if you are the writer, or the storyteller. You do if you're one of a group collaborating to write a story. You do if you are playing theatresports. Baseball, an unquestionable game, is passive if you are in the bleachers, but participative if you are out on the diamond. Games are...

Ni-to-kenjutsu?

You would have to ask the Incas about that. Though perhaps they are too low-tech to count? (Hint: Like gold, platinum doesn't need to be smelted: it is so unreactive that it occurs in nature as native metal. It is just desperately rare on Earth because it is a siderophilic element, and...

I think so. The thing that makes for unnecessary detail is not whether the combat turn is called a 'second'. Rather, it is whether that action of that turn is simple to resolve and decisive. A system that calls its turns '60 seconds', but that tends to generate 75% air-swings, and in which it...

The combat rules are in 'Campaigns'. So are the rules for the effects of injury and healing.

There are things about GURPS that bug me so badly that I have never got around to actually playing a game. A lot of them are variations of the theme of confounding things together 'to make the game simple', and then disambiguating them with special cases , so that you end up with a game that is...

E.R. Eddison. James Branch Cabell

Yes, fewer. At fifteen we were obsessed with sex, and thought we were being very sophisticated to mention such adult concepts as prostitution. At forty wre are obsessed with financial security, and discover that mortgage payments and income tax are the truly adult concepts.

I can't answer, because I don't know. I started playing D&D as a 15-year-old. But in a lot of ways I was a very grown-up fifteen, certainly adolescent, and developing fast. My game changed a lot over the following six or seven years. But I can't really say how much of the change was driven by...

Good point. In fact I'd say that trump takes the trick. Some classes may be more suitable for beginners than others, but none of them presents difficulties that enthusiasm cannot overcome, and none of them has such advantages that uninterest cannot wipe them away.

I can't but agree. Fighters' dependency on feats and tactics makes them a lot more complex than they were in, say, AD&D, where their only good choices were to hit something or change weapon. They turn out to be surprisingly complicated to play. The complexity has become second nature to us who...

Just as you say.

Yes, we have. Gary Gygax posts here fairly frequently, under the username "Col_Playdoh". I myself did not play my first game of D&D until May 1980, so it is only 26 years for me.

I consider this question to be analogous to asking whether soccer is a game or kicking a ball, and to what extent it is one or another. It isn't either to the exclusion of the other. It is wholly both.

Maybe. I meant to say that and more. That [systematised] RPGs began within D&D, and that D&D got going before [systematised] RPGs. D&D was something else before it was an RPG, and for some people it retains the appeal that it had before [systematised] RPGs. Yes, but neither they nor we call...

There is no such fact. D&D can be played as a role-playing game. But it needn't be. Don't lose sight of the fact that RPGs developed within (and to a certain extent out of) D&D. D&D is older than role-playing, and there is and ancient strand withint D&D in which gaming matters and roles don't.

Very likely you did. It was about 1966-1975.

No, nowhere close. LOTR has sold more copies (combining all languages) than any other book except the Bible. I'm not sure of exact sales figures, but they are over 100 million, in forty languages. And it still sells, steadily, enough copies to keep it on the bestseller list every year. A few...