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Or, in other words, the cackhanded submoronic parasites at Hasbro just cost Wizards of the Coast another easy hundred million dollars.

The original Buck Rogers materials are entering the public domain soon, in 2026. Unless the license deal gave the Flint Dille Trust some sort of license to the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century property-- and why would it?-- when the Buck Rogers name and character become public domain, Wizards of...

I am putting together a homebrew game for my friends and family, and maybe for the PBP section on RPG Pub. Rules are a mashup of heavily simplified/streamlined PF1/5e, Rogue Genius' Talented supplements, and Dreamscarred Press' entire catalog. Setting is a mashup of Spelljammer, the...

Human racial traits: featherless biped always count as Good when assensing their own Alignment Dunning-Kruger Effect BEHOLD A MAN In the Shroompunk game I am developing, humans have mandatory subraces. These aren't ethnic or even strictly biological... the human subraces are aasimar...

In my games, I replace the standard "backstory" with an index card for every PC; the player gets to write down their name, race/gender/(sub)class/background/theme/kit/omgwtfbbq, and then six facts that would have come from their "backstory" that they want me to use. Every player is privy to...

You need the three core rulebooks and I would highly recommend Unearthed Arcana; don't use everything, and I can't even really recommend specifically anything, but you should at least read the book and make a conscious decision about each component part. Likewise, I have always considered...

I just realized, this is why Dwarves weren't allowed to be Paladins in AD&D.

I used the PF term. In D&D terms, I'm talking about "Wizard" versus "Swordmage". It's funny... you know what "katana" means, literally, in Japanese? "long sword" A katana is a longsword. But a templar is a leader class, not a striker, and a soulknife doesn't need a backup weapon to fight...

Basically... all the task resolution is on the same d20. You roll a d20, you add your bonus, you try to meet or exceed the DC. Bounded Accuracy means that the range of possible bonuses is less than 20 (-1 to +17, roughly) and the range of significant DCs is 20 points exactly (10 to 30) so any...

Honestly, I can trace the majority of my complaints about 4e and 5e to "slight reflavoring". If the flavor doesn't match the mechanics, or the mechanics don't match the flavor, that's the literal definition of disassociated. Immersion is ruined and players can only interface with the game world...

I don't really care. I don't understand why we need "floating stats" to replace racial stats, since the racial stats served a specific purpose that we are intentionally removing. But no adjustments and floating adjustments are both better than the AD&D or 3e/4e/5e racial adjustments. There...

Because all of the classes available to other races were designed as human classes. Nobody wanted to design classes that weren't available to humans... and when they did, they placed them in the "kit" design space. Battlerager and Bladesinger could very well have been dwarf- and elf-exclusive...

In most settings, I don't think Orc Wizards make sense. Witches, Sorcerers, maybe some flavors of Magi? Totes. But where I am going to agree with you is that any class an Orc is allowed to advance in, an Orc should be able to be good at. To the fullest capacity of mere mortal game designers, any...

Class/race restrictions, yes. Level limits are terrible.

It wasn't anything about the OSR, actually. It's all the nonsense I saw in 3.5. I loved all of it at first, but it started to wear on me after awhile.

I'm 110% in favor of a sidebar telling umpires that it won't ruin their game if they decide to shuffle those restrictions around for their homebrew settings, or toss them out entirely if their players don't want to play that way. Starting about '96 or '97, I started rewriting the whole...

I've already stated it several times: it overcomplicates character creation for little gain, it makes character ancestry an even less significant portion of most characters, and it encourages players to make ridiculously implausible characters at the expense of immersion.

I generally prefer adding bonuses and rolling high-- because I like the ability for abilities to be open-ended-- but there are some advantages to the straight roll-under. It replaces table math with pre-calculated numbers, and if you're really clever you can straight-up import the MOGA system...

I'm really not going to sit here and try to give you advice about how much you should set players up for character moments... especially since you already tried and the player didn't step up. But I'll tell you that I would self-defense an entire orphanage off a cliff to get players willing to...

Except, as befits its origins... it stuffs the "simple caster" class full of fiddly, irritating mechanics like Burn.