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The concept is not unreasonable. The problem people (including me) see is when experienced adventurers then go on to hunt Rodents of Unusual Size, rather than trolls or winter wolves or displacer beasts - opponents that just have bigger numbers, rather than opponents that are dangerously different.

I'm a GM who is willing to call for rolls for everything under the sun, and I'm also willing to extend DCs down to 5, 0, or even negative values. I want mechanics that give guidance to questions like "Is this task really easy enough that a fever-addled five-year-old could do it while sleeping?"...

I'm one of those who doesn't like it that way. I'm reasonably familiar with 3.5e and I haven't seen those dreaded mid-level characters with bonuses up in the 30s, 40s, or even higher. I can see how very high (20th level) characters will have bonuses in the 20s and even low 30s, but more than...

My first thought was for the old Flying Buffalo Citybooks series. I will say that Aaron Allston's Strike Force, mentioned in the original post, is worth at least a honorable mention. I'll also put down some of the D&D Mystara gazetteers as honorable mentions, in particular The Grand Duchy of...

One advantage of roll-high, at least in the "roll and add the character's modifier" version, is that the GM can keep the target number secret while letting the player make the roll. With a roll-low system, the GM generally has to make the roll himself if he wants secrecy with regard to the...

My character-death rule: When a character is at negative hit points (or the equivalent) but not yet past the 'death threshold,' then PC death is at the player's option (and NPC death is at the GM's option). The player may choose whether his character (a) dies at once, (b) lingers for a lesser...

The "Gods Born of Belief" shtick is older than Pratchett's Discworld or Gaiman's American Gods. It's also actually an attempt at being 'scientific' about it. The oldest story I know of that uses the concept is the short story "The New One," by Fredric Brown, first published in 1942. That said...

As a 1e player (and to some extent a pre-1e player) it was 'the only game in town.' As a 1e DM, I really wanted to house-rule the heck out of it (and when TFT came out, I immediately changed my campaign over to that system). OK, not literally the only game in town. I also played some 1st/2nd...

My first RPG memory was seeing the ads for the microgames Melee and Wizard (from Metagaming), and being frustrated because mail-order was not an option for me back then. My first D&D memory was playing a wizard for one session in the fall of 1978 as a college freshman; with the first AD&D...

Some abilities would be better (IMHO) if they weren't resources to be managed. In particular, I find that the need to resource-manage Rage uses per day cuts against immersion with a Barbarian character. So do my players - especially those who would enjoy playing a Barbarian, or who would find...

Bad link. Page Not Found. "This page doesn't seem to exist." Which I suppose is a form of meta-Weird.

1. Swashbuckling fantasy. 2. Medievaloid fantasy of either the High Fantasy or Swords and Sorcery style. 3. Superheroes. Was #2 in the past but has moved down a step over the years. 4. Space Opera I'm not a fan of Secret History stuff, and I really don't care for horror of any variety, or for...

For a real-world spaceship, I'd give the Iconic first place to Eagle and its Saturn V launch vehicle. "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

USS Enterprise (Star Trek TOS) The Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars (The first movie, rebranded as "IV A New Hope") Dauntless, from the Lensman series (written SF)

There was more than one Old School, and partisans of "player characters need very high stats" existed well before 3.x. In fact, we were around back in the 1e days. The revolt against the best-known, DM-centric, munchkin- and power-gamer-crushing Old School didn't appear out of nowhere.

As I've mentioned before, I use my own house-rule random/point buy hybrid system: Roll 3d6 for each ability score, in order, to set the minimum scores. Characters can then increase those scores until the total of the six reach a campaign-specific value (85 for my Brotherhood of Rangers game)...

I checked "Gods are canonically real, but their role in the mortal world is limited." In my D&D settings, most deities have multiple names or aliases, some aliases are used by multiple deities, and a few deities have no (known) names. In particular, there's the goddess referred to ironically as...

No, but it was written down in the saved file: Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc From: morrow@gandalf.rutgers.edu (John Morrow) Subject: Re: Human factors in game design Date: 1 Mar 1995 19:52:42 -0500 EDIT: I'm going to go ahead and repost the entire thing here: --- begin quoted repost --- I...

I was a big fan of GURPS way back in the day. How far back? I would call up the SJG BBS with my trusty Commodore 64, download messages, and make posts. I contributed in a small way to the system, and I remember the morning when I dialed up and got the "We were raided by the US Secret Service"...

There's an old post from the USENET days about "Human Factors in game design." It's long, so I'll only post the whole thing if requested, but it does have a section concerning math: EDIT: I should note that the post is not by me. It's something I agreed with, found useful, and saved as a reference.