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Magic Points in BRP RuneQuest (and presumably other BRP games, though I can't recall specifically) refresh over a 24 hour period (at a variable rate depending on the character's POW characteristic -- so if you have POW 8 you get one MP back every 3 hours, POW 12 gets one back every 2 hours, POW...

It seems strange to me that someone coming into the game for the first time would expect it to have a "storyline" -- IME that's always been a concern that comes along later, after people have been playing for awhile and for whatever (IMO misguided) reason decide they want the game to be "more...

FIFY. As " just another module," B2 is pretty mediocre (though there's some great flavor sprinkled here and there -- "Bree yark," the shrine of Evil Chaos, etc.), but as the first module, an introduction to what the game's all about, a way to show 11 year old novice DMs how to design an...

So do you reject the notion that these two modules (written by the same person at approximately the same time) aren't just a case of one "being at the top of his game" vs. the other "not" and instead represent deliberately different approaches -- KotB is a skeletal framework, a toolbox for the...

There was a book of starship stats for MegaTraveller called Fighting Ships of the Shattered Imperium that were all so error-ridden and just plain broken by the game's starship design rules that wiseacre fans renamed the book Shattered Ships of the Fighting Imperium :)

There were some guys I played with a couple times back in the 80s who used some silly electronic random number generator called a "Dragonbone" instead of dice. According to Rob Kuntz, when Brian Blume was GMing Boot Hill he used to insist on using the random number generator function on his...

Sure it does. Here's the pertinent quote from the 1E DMG: Those are ratings based on quality of role-play and the numerical values translate directly into how much time and money is required for the character to gain a level -- a player who is "just good enough to not be bad" is likely to find...

Well, most of the D&D stories suck too (at least IMO) ;)

Game. You can tell a story about what happened in the game after the fact if you want (because you can tell a story about anything).

I don't consider the DM ignoring or fudging die rolls to be cheating. Frequently I won't even have stats prepared for monsters or NPCs and I almost never look anything up in the books, I just go by feel. That said, dice are usually rolled at least in the semi-open (I don't call out results or...

I see that as more of a player-level issue (sharing vs. hogging the spotlight) than a rules-issue. If a player wants to be a "face" character and has created his character accordingly, but doesn't have that type of personality in real life, the other players and DM should respect that player's...

Depends on what you mean by "role play" -- the training rules in the 1E DMG specifically address how well the player has been portraying the character in a manner appropriate to his class (i.e. the quality of his role-playing) by means of the "performance rating" system (which, IME, was seldom...

Maybe I've just been exceptionally lucky in the people I've played rpgs with, but I've never had the kind of "player actions don't match the character's stats" game-breaking problems that seem to be such a big concern in this thread (at least for the last couple pages). In my experience...

What he said.

That's a move in the right direction, at least, and I'd be happier playing in a game where my actions could at least affect the DC of the roll in this manner (though of course Taking 20 on an "I search the room" would grant the same result, so the effort seems only marginally worth it), but it...

The dice sets you could order directly from TSR in the 70s (and which were included in Holmes Basic Sets before they went over to the chits, and early Gamma World sets too, I believe) had 5 dice (no d10, d20 numbered 0-9 twice), were pre-inked, and in my experience always came in the exact same...

First off, I'm talking ideally/theoretically about avoiding combat and not rolling dice -- in actual play we pretty much always have at least some combat in each session, and I roll lots of dice in both combat and non-combat situations. I just like to de-emphasize both where possible, and...

Well, I also happen to greatly prefer a style of game that doesn't reduce those sorts of things to die rolls either (which is just the style for which G1 was written, incidentally -- note that per the text of the module if the party thinks to disguise themselves as juvenile giants their ruse...

The primary focus of the game has almost always been on combat with groups I've played with too, but I daresay that's more because the groups I've played with have, on average, not been all that good, and not because the game necessarily works that way. Combat is the "easy" way to play the game...

This is absolutely fantastic news! Now I just have to hope one or more of my local stores are among those "who wish to carry it"...