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You make a good point about freelancers needing to hustle to stay in, so perhaps inertia isn't the right way to phrase it. But a lot of the rest of what I said still applies. I think you CAN safely assume that nobody currently writing TTRPGs professionally who really doesn't love it is NOT...

This is not true. (The last sentence is ay be true, but the first is not.) Inertia is a thing. People don't move because it's both effort to move, and introduces lots of uncertainty into your life to move. People can be stuck in a job or industry that is sucking the life out of them, but...

Yeah... I'm boggled that the evil corporate masters didn't want you to know anything about playing games, but I'm not surprised. The nature of the work ethic in this country is extremely unhealthy in many ways... often including for the very goals that the work ethic is supposed to promote.

I don't have a lot of confidence that big conventions are going to be going even next summer....

Continual changes and upgrades doesn't work for a RPG system as it does for video game consoles. With software, the operating system is underneath, and whatever nastiness it has to do in order to support old stuff (emulators? legacy libraries?) is painful for the developers, but coded in and...

The other way I've seen is to bid for attributes, which is a modification of the point-buy system, making it competetive. This is what's used in Amber.

(I mean, I guess you could say that Zeb Cook comes out looking bad, but two things about that. First, he had to have a walkaround with his manager every so often because he said things that ruffled feathers... and I can identify with that! But, also, he was the lead designer on Planescape, so...

I'm not sure that calling out Lorraine Williams (who's the only one who really comes out looking bad here) is all that bad a thing. The degree to which she was a disaster is well documented elsewhere.

Re: Prospero being likeable, not really. Indeed, except for the fact of the insult, he probably didn't mind being abandoned on an island for a decade or two. He'd always been one to retreat to his books and not want to deal with people. So, yeah, probably not very good at being a duke, and he...

I love the Tempest! I'm sad you weren't able to watch it and enjoy it. Which ones have you watched? (I've been taken with that play since I was 12 or 13 and Julian Lopez-Morillas played Prospero at the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival. I'd been a kid in the previous production of Merry Wives of...

Honestly, I feel this way about most of human endeavor. I look at even things that are supposedly running well, and am gobsmacked by the complete waste of BS that goes along with all of it. It seems that any organization of more than a handful of people will be beset by petty intra-office...

I'm confused... Babylon 5 came out in the early 1990s. (I know this well, because it partially defined my grad school career.) So, there wouldn't have been a B5 collectible card game in the mid or late 1980s.

"Experience points for GMs" has sort of shown up as the star system for GMs in Pathfinder's organized play. (I don't know if other OP campaigns do similar things.)

Wait... Cthulhu is clean-sweeping, and nobody is mind-numbingly terrified?

I'm still waiting to see which third-party publisher becomes a first-party publisher by creating a "3.75 Thrives!" game that is Pathfinder (only not under that name) with some of the issues patched. Unless the playtest was a major red herring, Paizo has chosen to make a new system that's as...

Which was the first game to switch from a class/level system to a point-buy type system? That was a pretty big change.

A group spirit and a willingness to go along with the story that the GM and the rest of the players are trying to create. The ability to have your own character be an individual without making that individual so uncompromising that you refuse to accept another character, or to play the game...

Oh, OK. That much I knew. I was expecting some sort of lore reason why they didn't have proficiency in a sword. But, yes, I get it; the proficiency rule means that you don't need a lore reason to completely forbid trying it. Of course, this is hardly new with 5e. 3e had a similar system...

What is 5e's answer to the question of why clerics and wizards can't use swords?

Yeah. I was traumatized in a game of Diplomacy back in 8th grade. (And that was back ca. 1981, so this has been with me for a long time.) I will never play that game again. I don't want to be in a game that's like it.