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I'm sure everyone's sick of the WotC bashing, especially WotC themselves... but critically, WotC isn't sick of it enough to stop screwing the pooch. The thing is, businesses like Hasbro don't respond to condemnation, they only respond to quantifiable losses to their bottom line. The only way to...

Monk (1e/3e): My very first PC, and one of my favorite secondary classes in 3.X. It's not so much that I love the Monk archetype, as the Monk class is the only class that does what I think every D&D character should be able to do. Druid (any): A nature-oriented spellcaster, and the first...

It wouldn't be as bad if you didn't want to eat. If you'd had dinner before sitting down with me, that would quiet that nagging voice enough that I could ignore it. I would still prefer that you were fed, but not so much that I'd want you to eat if you really didn't want to. But that's an...

The vast majority of DMing advice I regularly see is that the way to handle a player doing almost anything the DM doesn't like-- mostly playing rules-legitimate but non-traditional characters-- is to passive-aggressively take it out on the player's character instead of discussing their...

I host and I cook dinner when I'm up to it. When I'm not up to it, some of my players buy me dinner. Generally, whoever wants to run a game buys it and shares it with the players. Everyone has their own dice, but I've got a gigantic sack of loaners, and a functionally bottomless supply of...

In Rolemaster, spells are part of spell lists-- like a Cleric's Domain-- and spell lists are learned like skills in that system. I'm not sure I'd handle them that way in 5e's proficiency system, but I definitely think no character should have unrestricted access to to the full Wizard list.

I am here for this. The newest of the old Treks continues!

I prefer very loose "toolkit" style settings, little more than a genre, subgenre, and a handful of themes. Think of Spelljammer with only sphere/planet creation rules, or Dark Sun replacing all of its cities and Sorcerer-Kings with random tables for generating cities and Sorcerer-Kings. I'm...

A delightful sprawling mess. One of the reasons I argue that prospective AD&D DMs should look over the races and classes at their disposal, and the race/class limits, and tailor them according to the campaign/setting they want to run. A little effort here at the start of a game can pay amazing...

Summer of 1993-- started with First Edition AD&D and 2e Gamma World, bought a bunch of BECMI and 2e supplements because I didn't know better. Ended up switching in 1995 or so, when I moved and had to find a new gaming group.

World of Witchcraft (OSR): Timothy Brannan has a whole series of OSR products representing different flavors of historical traditions of witchcraft. Replace the Cleric and Magic-User (and Bard/Druid) with some of those. Throw in Jeremy Reaban's OSR Warlock if you want more magical firepower...

Shadowrun and Dresden Files Roleplaying Game are two very different takes on urban fantasy. You either count MERP, HARP, and Rolemaster as "D&D-adjacent" or you don't, but they're excellent. Barbarians of Lemuria has been mentioned. Deadlands is more often considered horror, but it can be played...

In Shroompunk, it's humans first and then tortles. Not coincidentally, humans and then tortles is the order in which humans and tortles rank their primary opposition. Mycelians, likely, in third followed by kobolds and then dromites and then most other kiths are pretty rare.

I'm pretty transparent about a lot of game mechanics... because I've seen a lot of things that are described as "metagaming" that are things that the player characters would obviously know, and describing the mechanic is a lot cleaner and more elegant than trying to describe it narratively...

Definitely the Core Rulebooks plus Tome of Magic. As a Forever DM who doesn't like running the same world twice in a row: Player's Option. Skills & Powers for races and subraces, Spells & Magic for priesthoods and magic systems, Combat & Tactics for era-appropriate weapons and technology. World...

One thing that I think helps is cribbing a page from the ICE playbook-- every skill is associated with two or three ability scores. Weapons combat is always Strength and Agility, stealth is Agility and Self-Discipline, magic is always some combination of intellect, intuition, and willpower.

Always. Thri-Kreen of Athas. I held onto that for a decade, and over half-a-dozen cross-country housemoves, before I traded it for a copy of the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana. One of several books I'm patiently hoping to eventually be brought back via POD.

Biggest for me is always-- I hope, bright gods I hope-- always going to be Gamma World 6e. I'm not interesting in rehashing any of the old arguments about it, but it contained absolutely none of what I was looking for in Gamma World (especially after Alternity Gamma World disappointed me) and...

Orko, Duncan, Cringer, and the Sorceress were in on it. Marlena clocked him on her own, and never told anyone else about it-- she may have guessed that Duncan knew, but for all she actually knew, Teela was in on it, too.

Largely writing a game about colonialism that is, more or less, from the perspective of the colonizers; the standard objection to Western fiction, except I think I've highlighted it in a way that makes it much worse. And then... taking the insensitive cultural mishmash that is Oriental...