Search results

It’s interesting that the most popular RPG in the world is more complicated than 98 per cent of boardgames. Some suggestions why: D&D has it origins in tabletop wargames, which are complex by the standards of most hobby boardgames. On top of that, it addressed the variety of different...

So give me some examples of fantasy novels that match the way D&D was played when 75 per cent of play was in the dungeon, lethality was extremely high, and XP was awarded for gold recovered from the dungeon.

You can use fiction, TV etc. as inspiration for elements besides story. To turn things back to the OP, if D&D had originally been intended as a vehicle for protagonists to tell epic and heroic stories without death on the table, the designers utterly failed to support that approach mechanically.

Most D&D-family games are deadly at low levels, including every official edition before 4E, and pretty much every OSR game.

You’re the one who claimed heroic fiction spawned D&D. Presumably to give a heroic story-driven approach to play legitimacy. If the original approach of D&D is irrelevant, why did you bring it up?

Appendix N in the DMG came out five years after D&D was first published. And the books cited were mainly inspiration for settings, monsters, spells, etc., not for stories. Can you name some stories that involve a band of wizards, warriors, and hired porters making repeated expeditions into a...

D&D was not originally created to emulate the plots of novels, movies, and TV shows. And the degree to which adventures today emulate those stories is a matter of personal preference.

Agreed.

Yes, and it’s one of the few settings I feel was scaled for boots-the-ground adventure. I was disappointed 4e was mothballed before the Nentir Vale gazetteer was published. Even the Threats of the Nentire Vale monster book was a more practical and inspiring book for running a campaign than most...

I’m not sure it’s a matter of PF1 to PF2 adoption so much as Pathfinder just relentlessly declining in popularity since 5E came out. Activity on Paizo’s forums is way down, adventure paths get far fewer reviews than they did 6 years ago, very little fan content is being released on Youtube, etc...

I've run sandbox games. But they typically take place in areas of no more than 300 miles by 300 miles - or less than 5 per cent of the Greyhawk map. I'd have oved it if TSR or WotC produced a sourcebook for an area of Greyhawk that size, with writeups of towns, castles, lairs, factions...

But that stuff is irrelevant in most campaigns, especially early. What does it matter who the king of the Great Kingdom or Nyrond is if the bulk of the campaign is going to take place in a half-dozen hexes in Ulek and the Lortmils?

As much as the original Greyhawk folio and its poster map were totemic to my early days of D&D, it was pretty much useless as a campaign setting. If a campaign is supposed to aid the DM in defining and running his world, Greyhawk is at far too large of a scale for be useful in that respect...

The Pathfinder Society does a god job of this. The premise of an organization of explorers with lodges in every land is a great hook to hang a party or a campaign on. WFRP 3E did the same with its party cards (mercenaries, diplomats, etc.). There has to be something better in terms of...

I don't have the Rime campaign myself, but how many monsters are there in the book? I'd guess 600 or 800 individually statted monsters. I'd also guess that in most campaigns, the great majority of those monsters are killed dead. Chopped up, gutted, blown to pieces, burned to cinders. Again, many...

This gets to what I said earlier about some people wanting their fantasy worlds to be like idealized versions of real world. Cosmopolitan and diverse settlement full of tolerant people are a good thing in the real world. But are they a fun environment for action fantasy gaming? If every...

I don't see anyone here unable to draw those distinctions in the real world. The question is whether they apply to an action fantasy game. To most people, they don't. They don't apply in tabletop RPGs, videogames, boardgames, etc. Because when we play we aren't acting as moral agents in the real...

Are we still talking about a fantasy game or about the real world? Because to most of us, those are two entirely differently things. It would be unthinkable of me to hack a person dead with an axe. But my PCs must have slain hundreds of bandits, outlaws, mercenaries, cultists, etc. in D&D.

That's interesting, because ogres, minotaurs, trolls, orcs, kobolds, and goblins all eat humanoids in my D&D. Always have. Goblins aren't a pesky nuisance who steal the occasional sheep. Goblins are vicious predators who snatch up children in the night and devour them. Their lairs are littered...

I was wondering when Gygax was going to be cancelled. What are the odds his name is excised from the next edition of D&D?