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5 out of 5 rating for Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage I've read or played in some classic big dungeons. Temple of Elemental Evil. Cloudland. Rappan Athuk. Castle Whiterock. Stonehell. I've spent many hours discussing and theorycrafting megadungeons. I've even taken a couple runs at creating...

3 out of 5 rating for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist As a source of material for Waterdeep adventures, this book has some use. It offers enough factions, hooks, NPCs, and general setting material to use as the foundation for many adventures. As for the campaign itself, it's a baffling mess. It's...

I find that hard to believe. The most watched film in 1979 was a drama about divorce. Not even a romantic comedy or thriller. A straight character drama. Yes, there are still straight character dramas being made and watched today. But they don't crack the top 30, let alone top the box office...

I think it's fair to say parents of young children used to go a lot more movies without the kids. How else to explain the fact that Kramer vs Kramer, a drama about divorce, was the top grossing movie of 1979. That would be unthinkable today. But it's also true that parents didn't have a...

Excellent point. As a kid in the 70s and 80s I could watch almost all movies on TV (many of them from the 50s and 60s too) and most the theatre no problem. So I enjoyed watching everything from Zulu and A Bridge Too Far to Giant and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Movies that certainly weren't...

Your best bet might be running 4E but only having one or two combats per session. I started enjoying 4E when I realized that it's a terrible system for fight after fight. IMHO, 4E works best when you run it like a standard roleplaying game with lots of talking, investigation, etc. and combat is...

You'd find a lot of the adults who went to those films grew up in what we would regard as horrific conditions in the 20s and 30s. And of course many of them would have fought or had their homes destroyed in WW2. Seems to me that generation had more excuse to pursue escapism in its entertainment...

I'll play devil's advocate here. Big picture, it's worth considering is there's something unhealthy in a society where people's outlooks, preferences, and pass-times don't change between adolescence and mature adulthood. When adults are regarded as teenagers with more money in their pockets...

The issue isn't so much the rules as the presentation of the rules. I'm glad 5E looked back to pre-4E editions for most of its inspirations and approaches to play. What I'm not so glad about is WotC also took a few steps back in terms of presentation, burying its rules content in walls of...

Still waiting on the Slavers! Greyhawk setting/adventure book from 2E. Most of the other highly-regarded Greyhawk books from that era are up, so hopefully it's just a matter of time.

That's my understanding as well. Rowling has a personal distaste for the cultural associations of RPGs (let's be honest - D&D), and doesn't want her property to be part of it. However, I don't know how much of a lost opportunity this really was. The Song of Ice and Fire RPG hasn't exactly, er...

This is one of the releases that makes me realize how far outside the norm I am when it comes to this game. Another MM? I've been playing 5E since the first Next playtests, and only got around to buying Volo's Guide a week ago. And that was mainly for the in-depth looks at beholders, gnolls...

To be honest, I don't understand why players are so reluctant to DM. In the first D&D craze, literally millions of kids learned to play without adult instruction or videos. I started DMing when I was 10. So did my buddy. We played in a group with a friend's older brother (he was 12) for a few...

On several occasions, the 5E devs have commented that the D&D had been focusing on hardcore players for too long (IIRC, 'for the last 10 years or so'). They referenced people who post on forums or really get into char op. And then they said that their broad polling and market research for 5E...

Whether it's best is irrelevant. The only people who care about that are uber-geeks who like to argue on the internet. All that matters to most D&D players is whether they have fun playing it. Look, if D&D's place as the top RPG in unassailable because of these network effects, and if the...

Why? The booming boardgame hobby is fueled by the 25 to 40 year old crowd, people who have no problem dropping $300 or more annually on a hobby. Hipsters, educated couples, urban singles, young professionals with kids. The RPG industry would kill to have those 'problematic' demographics. WotC's...

I'm not going to dismiss the opinions of someone who enjoys learning 20+ boardgame systems a year, because I'm one of them. However, RPGs are an entirely different matter. In my experience, people don't play them primarily to engage with the system (as most boardgamers do). A great many RPGers...

No. But the context was the PC advancement pace, and how it's intended to allow a group playing weekly sessions over a college year to progress from level 1 to 20.

I wouldn't say distribution is the primary reason D&D is more popular than indie games. At some point design aficionados are going to have to recognize that D&D has genuine, fundamental appeal as a game. And Ron Edward's games aren't even played by storygamers more than once or twice. That's...

Have them run 2 PCs each. That will give the party some staying power without resorting to the 15 minute work day. It will also make it easier to laugh off the death of a PC. Throw in some hirelings as well for a real old-school feel.