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Two of my read-only fiction settings, one fantasy & one sci-fi (alt-history with psi abilities) have humans as the only sapient species. It's "standard" to have multiple sapient species in a game, because the earliest games were that way, but it isn't necessary, and I'm not convinced that it's...

That's ridiculous. Everyone knows that orcs (or at least real orcs) hate vanilla ice cream. Instead they have a passion for pistachio ice cream. "It tastes like elves." :)

Which ancestries/races/species are "standard" as PCs will vary by setting and campaign, especially in non-D&D games. In my old Etan game, for example, there have been both PC and NPC goblin and lizardman characters, because those two are among the "standard" for Etan. But there won't be any...

As a player, my response would be "Noted. And we'll get back to that. Now, what do I see?" And on getting back to that: "Just what sorts of things would my experience as a competent adventurer tell me that I might miss? Just what are the limitations of Darkvision as you run it?"

The ability to see in the dark is a prime example of the sort of cool wish-fulfillment fantasy that lots of players play the game for. Darkvision, low-light vision, and other see-in-the-dark abilities are practical necessities for the denizens who live in the dark, which is why so many monsters...

My world building tends to have two or three Primal Beings, and then a selection of lesser (but still potentially very powerful) gods who are often ascended mortals. Or in one case, the magic sword of one of the Primal Beings. (Starfire: The Ace of Swords, treated as a peer by the major deities...

The good monsters don't have to be active allies to leaven the game with non-combat, non-hostile encounters. I like a generous mix of combat in my games, but 100% is too much; it's better world-building to avoid "Everything is trying to kill you, therefore you must try to kill[1] everything."...

In my worlds, the gods are extremely limited when it comes to interacting with the physical, mortal world. Beyond that, they're often powerful and knowledgeable but not all-powerful or all-knowing. Also, I dislike and avoid the common trope of "gods need prayer badly." In my old, non-D&D world...

I'd say I run episodic adventures, with the "journey back home" or "return to base" parts tending to be glossed over or handwaved. The PCs do have downtime / between adventures activities after they get back to home base, but those are generally not played out the same way. (I have been known to...

I shamelessly invoke magic for my various and sundry fantasy settings. Magical worlds have deep magical effects beyond allowing spell-casting and the use of supernatural abilities. And those magical effects can be different in different places. Dragons, for example, might be limited to certain...

I'll put down two in particular: 1. Massively powerful spells "balanced" by harsh limits on the number a character can cast. (And by the "quadratic wizards" syndrome: Wizards are gawd-like at high level, "balanced" by their being worthless loads at low level.) This is perhaps the earliest thing...

Combat was plenty lethal in Lord of the Rings for mooks, secondary characters, and various characters in the backstories. It was much less lethal for the primary, protagonist characters. Is this distinction what you mean when you call combat in LOTR "cinematic"? D&D combat out of the box gives...

I can't think of an alternative genre that I'd obviously prefer to sword and sorcery fantasy as the original seed of TTRPGs[1]. I'd rate the comic-book superhero genre as maybe just as good but not obviously better. Science fiction or two-fisted pulp might have been almost as good, but only...

In Real Life, different handguns come in different makes, models and calibers because all handguns are compromises and One Size Does Not Fit All. (And similarly for other kinds of guns.) To emulate this in a game, instead of trying to make each model slightly different, it might be better to...

I play TTRPGs[1] largely for the power fantasy: For the opportunity to vicariously do things that I cannot, ought not, or dare not try to do in real life. I GM TTRPGs largely because I love world-building and character creation. Those are the parts of fiction writing I find fun and easy.[2]...

Medievalish-Fantasy game systems do a fair job of emulating the injury and death rates seen among secondary characters and nameless mooks in read-only fiction, but a poor one of emulating the much lower injury and death rates among the protagonists - the characters who would be PCs in a game...

I'd just as soon that magic healing wasn't such a big crutch either. The problem is that it's a crutch that gets used because most game rules make combat and injury so grim and gritty that there's a strong perceived need for that crutch. Limping along without that crutch is seen as being even...

Random Thoughts: Contrary to the usual advice, I'd say to NOT make magic items super-expensive. If they're available at all, they're available cheap (compared to the standard rules) - but mostly they're not available at all. In econo-speak, the supply of magic and magic items needs to be...

Almost anything can be made to work with the right sort of players in the appropriate sort of game. For a more-or-less standard D&D-type game, though, what's wanted is an aristocratic or oligarchic society where the PCs - at least at high level - get to be the aristocrats or oligarchs. That...

First thought: This might be a way to run my gaming white whale: A "Dawn of Creation" campaign where the PCs are the primordial beings at the very beginning of the world, where Earth, Sky, the World Tree, and the PCs exist, but everything else (wind, water, fire, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars...