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I agree. I've always viewed 4e as a very gamist system (as opposed to 3e's simulationism), and I fall on the side of the coin that views that as a positive thing. Does it make sense, from a flavor standpoint, for a zombie or something to have an abysmal reflex save? Probably. Is it a good thing...

I ran D&D last night using a little cheat sheet* with example skill DCs, damage amounts, etc by level. I didn't have any stat blocks, and when we had a combat, I just gave all the enemies abilities on the fly. It worked out pretty well, but one thing that worried me a bit at the time was...

I'm a huge fan of Fantasy Flight Games in general, but Age of Conan is a disaster. Avoid it. Takes forever, not least because of constantly having to look up rules and then figure out what is meant by the constant ambiguous and/or contradictory wording.

Well, the only problem there is that you're conflating a game term and a flavor term. "Fighter" is a class that specializes in wearing heavy armor and using melee weapons to protect his friends. A "fighter" is someone who fights, regardless of class or how. Rogues can be fighters. Rangers can...

Who cares about uncreative? Play what you like. I tend to play either Lawful Stupid Paladins or Chaotic Stupid Barbarians, because I enjoy hitting things with heavy, pointy metal and charging blindly into bad situations. Who cares if they're cliche?

You mean a shifter?

Hooray for contemptuously dismissing something you clearly have no knowledge of! I can see why you'd think the Warcraft universe is shallow, though. After all, the story only spans 4 video games, 1 tabletop RPG, 1 CCG, a couple dozen books, several comics, an upcoming movie, and 17 years.

Because everyone that plays WoW is in agreement that Blizzard always makes well-thought-out decisions and even if the change is large and scary, ultimately it will lead to a better game experience for everyone. Ha, just kidding! Any time Blizz changes anything, people come out of the woodworks...

To clarify a bit, Diablo II had skill trees, which WoW's current talent system is a clear descendant of. The thing that makes the new talent system look different from the skill trees, and more like 4e's powers to me, is that they've gotten rid of the tree. Your later choices are independent of...

I can't really come up with 10 "must consumes." I have fairly eclectic tastes. That said, I certainly have opinions on your picks. :) Back in high school, I picked up a Lovecraft anthology. Even better, that night, there was a storm and the power went out, so I read the Lovecraft anthology by...

BlizzCon, the annual convention thrown by Blizzard in celebration of its own games, is this weekend, and they've announced the new expansion. I'm super excited for it, for reasons that aren't really pertinent here (*coughpandasandpokémoncough*), but one rather interesting thing is that they've...

You can leave one somewhere that you need to make sure you can find your way back to. For example, if you're out chasing pirates, you could leave one at port in case you get lost at sea.

How big are the compasses? If they're small enough, you could try to plant it on someone to track them. Even if they're larger, you could still get them into a cart or something that you wanted to follow.

How about a disease that feeds on magic. Starts out as a harmless cold, something like that, nothing major, but some noble hires a cleric to cure him of his sniffles. That causes it to mutate into something far more deadly and infectious.

There's a concept known as Schrödinger's Gun. It's kind of an amalgam of Chekov's Gun and Schrödinger's Cat. The idea is that, until such time as you tell the players what happens, anything can be changed. An example: In a Savage Worlds game I ran, I had a mysterious villain who was a dragon...

According to my players, the creepiest game I ever ran was one that I was afraid would be too hackneyed and cliched. In a nutshell, the players took shelter with a strange family in a mansion to escape a storm. Freaky stuff happened and the family tried to kill them. After they escaped, at the...

For what it's worth, I just checked my go-to board game site and they had it available at a competitive price ($20.99). It doesn't appear to be available on Amazon, which is a bit annoying, but it's still available online...

A while back, someone on BoardGameGeek, someone I don't remember brought up a distinction that I've found rather revelatory. The idea was that there were two distinct forms of randomness in games; randomness which occurs before you act and limits the decisions you can make, and randomness which...

Excellent idea, can't believe I forgot those!

I just created this, and hope others might find it useful as well. It's a sheet for players to keep track of their character's state at the end of each session. Specifically, it's to keep track of: Current HP Remaining surges Expended daily powers (this assumes you never end a session in the...