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The falling damage article was impactful on me to this very day, as it got me thinking about how damage could be modeled better to our expectations and experience, such that falling off a ladder is potentially lethal but also people have survived falling out of planes. This lead to a long...

To a certain extent you are right that "immersion" can be seen as just as synonym for "my expectations for the game" and those are of course going to be divergent and contradictory. For me, "immersion" is that quality of feeling in the game, and I feel it sometimes in both cRPGs and ttRPGs...

Yeah, Minecraft is a great game but if it was my job, it would be an incredibly tedious mind-numbing job and I'd hate the game inside a year.

The NYT is so bad that it counts as anti-information, in that the more you read and rely on the NYT the less you know and the less you are informed about the subject. It's Walter Duranty from top to bottom. And while there are ideological biases, sometimes it is actually more useful to read a...

The only thing that I find hard about vision is that it's really really annoying in typical tabletop play when different characters are capable of seeing different things. They have a lantern. The dayvision races can see 60 feet, but only 30 feet clearly. The Darkvision races can see 90 feet...

My players tried to use Speak to Plants on a carnivorous plant. They eventually figured out: a) Plants are typically very stupid. b) Plants do not have a lot of sensory organs. c) The plant was interpreting all the attempts to bargain with it as suggestions to feed it. Yes, it would like if...

I don't agree, but I would say beware who you make bargains with. If you make a bargain with something like a dragon that considers conversation with you part of a dining experience, don't be surprised if it goes badly.

I put that campaign on hold in 2020 when we weren't able to meet in person, but before that it ran like 7 years about 150 sessions (600+ hours of play). I have wanted to pick it up again, but players have moved in the mean time and meeting in person has become hard. So I've been running for...

As far as Haste goes, the changes in Haste in 3.5e compared to 3.0e turned haste from an automatic self-buff any caster did at the beginning of a fight into a buff a caster might do to other party members at the beginning of the fight. And to me, that's a crucial change. I am really all for...

"Natural Spell" was a mistake, as it produced a situation where the Druid was a better fighter than the fighter while simultaneously being competitive with a Cleric as a healer and with a Wizard as a general caster. I don't allow the feat, as it was both overpowered and therefore compulsory...

I'm not as restrictive as you but do agree that shapechanging is problematic in play both for balance reasons and speed of play. I therefore require a player who could shapechange (or summon creatures) to have already prepared an adjusted character sheet (or stat block) for each and every form...

Alter Self Transmutation Level: Brd 2, Sor/Wiz 2 Components: V, S Casting Time: 1 standard action Range: Personal Target: You Duration: 10 min./level (D) You assume the outward appearance of a creature of the same type as your normal form. The new form must be within one size category of your...

Family D&D Christmas in Tomb of Horrors Star Wars Campaign: Session #63: Terrorists attack Anti-Grav Night Club Session #64: Planning to protect the Prefect

I'm happy with the 3.5 Haste, but all the 3.5 shape changing spells including Alter Self are broken as written in 3.5 because they allow you to make LA adjustments to your character class. They would to be balanced require everyone who made a monster to ask, "How would this impact Alter Self or...

I think it's easy to compare this to earlier editions and see how much more useful the earlier editions were from a story telling purpose. You could take any science fiction setting and get a pretty good feel for which TL that setting was at using the older tables. Something like Outlander was...

The trains that existed in 1890 were more advanced than the ones in 1850, but they were still trains. They were more numerous, more powerful, and more economical and more accessible, but that just meant the technology had matured. The way of technology is that for any given invention it...

@Bill Zebub I think there is a general agreement that "magic" is by being rare a specific exception to the general rule that a player always has agency over their character's decisions. I also think that there is widespread agreement that even though mind control magic exists, you don't use it...

More to the point, when I bought the rules and played we were according to the rules TL7 and TL8 was "the future", and the future could be recognized by things being "different". There was going to be "game changing" technology in TL8. And the thing is, everything now just feels like slightly...

sigh This old argument again. Egypt had three dark ages before the rest of the world even learned to write. They are not particularly unusual in history. However, it would be a mistake to make one of the two common misconceptions about the European dark ages. First, that the whole world...

I think you are correct to import fixes to problems you have in 3.0e rather than importing 3.5e as a whole. The more I learn about what is actually different in 3.5e, the more I consider the whole thing a bad move. I feel no desire to give up horses occupying a 5x10 area. Yes, formalizing...