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That is the sweetest thing I've ever heard. I hope my future children take after me like yours do you, at least in the world of gaming.

Make sure you hire people who are, in a word, normal geeks. If I'm going in a store and the guy is wierd, or smells funny, or talks way too much about stuff that doesn't matter, then I'm not coming back. Stock some unusual stuff. We can get 4e junk at every bookstore we want. If you have a...

I would like to recommend to you the Labyrinth Lord game- its a retroclone of basic edition D&D that really is pick up and play. The rules are simple and there's not any of the tedious wargaming aspects that a lot of new roleplayers have a hard time understanding. I tried it, and I loved it...

For me: ~1998: Found the "E" of BECMI in a box of my father's belongings, began playing with my brother and father. ~1999: Got a AD&D starter set thing for christmas (19th printing, by the site) ~2004: Bought 3rd edition D&D, played it with brother & friends (constantly) ~2005: Bought Mage: The...

Short by some of your standards, we played a game of Descent: Journeys into the Dark that outlasted its fun. I was the Overlord, and they were absolutely impossible to kill. I could only slow them down, and eventually I just let them get to the final boss and kill him so we could stop playing...

My thought is that alignment doesn't work very well, at all. If you need to give multiple alignments for multiple reasons, isn't it just easier to ignore it altogether and write, "Likes halflings, hates non-halflings, pyromaniac" instead of "LG to halflings, LE to non-halflings, CE when fire is...

D&D at high levels has always gone past the impossible. That's not the point. The point is that, for many people, it goes too far. In AD&D a high level fighter was just impossibly tough and excellent at attacking. He also had a stronghold and a couple of magical items he pilfered from. In 4th...

Yeah, I dunno about you guys, but my peers, who are heavily into anime and video games, don't have all that much money. We're working minimum wage jobs, bankrupting ourselves on college, and generally trying to save as much money as possible. We're the ones who jump on anything free, cheap, or...

I don't think they'd be sad to see him go. So some overconfident wanderers are getting out of here, so what? We at the Random City Militia have been defending our fine city for the last seven thousand years and we didn't need some self-righteous, nosy, bossy adventurers to do it! Three cheers...

Although I'm certainly not a big consumer by any means, I don't know if it'd be easy to get my money again. I don't like the direction they're headed- towards a game where it's more explosions and powers and races and settings all at a breakneck speed, all clockwork and crunch and flavorless...

I usually run mostly humanocentric campaigns, myself. Human cultures are plenty different from each other without adding some silly human analogue stereotypes. What do non-human races add to the game by their inclusion? Is there any function that they serve other than to let people get away...

Quick note: People who prefer 3rd edition aren't quite grognards just yet. That said, it's hard to predict where to aim when introducing new games. If you try and make it feel "familiar" and "similar", you risk them not seeing enough differences to warrant a change. But if you make it to "new"...

I won't play Monopoly- at first it's pretty cool, but after the second hour the charm's worn thin. I also don't really like playing Trivial Pursuit; the people who want to play it are the ones who are "trivia buffs" and they end up stomping all over everybody else. Starcraft (the board game)...

By all that is unholy, you and I have extremely different styles. One of the things that I disliked about 4e was how over-the-top it all felt, with handfuls of magic items and silly combat powers. I'd complained about it being way too 'anime' for me, no kidding.

I don't see that there's any need for you to stall combat to prevent the paladin from dying. All you're doing is rewarding the players for making poor tactical decisions by going easy on them. If anything, as was mentioned by several more eloquent posters, you need to go the exact opposite...

I would like to recommend Labyrinth Lord, especially if you don't have any of the older editions books personally. I do believe it has an example of play, and is quicker and easier to teach players than most "modern" games, especially new players. Most importantly, character creation takes all...

You know what else (else) helps? The same things that let somebody assemble a good team in real life, where you may have noticed, there is no magic: A good sense for people Intuition Interviews Common Sense Background Checks No spells, feats, or out-of-character considerations required...

@ Corathon- As you noted, True Neutral wasn't really very common- it was depicted as a waffling middle ground, where people were unable to pick sides due to indecisiveness or, rarely, devotion to the murky ideals of True Balance itself. If I recall, the descriptions for True Neutral did its best...

I don't really see what the problem is. You've got to talk to him, man to man (substitute appropriate genders, of course) and get to the root of the problem. Ask him if he's having fun, and stress that he hasn't got to play if he's not enjoying it. You can offer to run a separate one on one...

Which is one of the reasons that we have so many bland and overwrought monsters and, more directly, games. Absolutes are easy to digest and communicate, and therefore produce, but subjectives are what makes the game interesting. Like you mentioned about culture- wolves don't have an interesting...