Search results

You're welcome, and I'm super happy with how the OGL has helped RPG systems develop, just as you say. Internally, when we learned that 4E wasn't going to have strong OGL support, many of us were also mightily disheartened. 4E was, seemingly, built as the anti-3E.

Thanks for that. Omega World has a special place in my heart, and pound-for-pound it might be my best RPG work ever.

I sort of love it, but I haven't looked into it well enough to have a professional opinion. To me, it feels like a great way for a corporation to acknowledge fan content. Roleplaying games have been worth spending my life on because they encourage the creativity of regular people.

For me, the designer, the deathbots were pure joy. Players may have had a different experience.

It sure would have been nice to see some source for identifying the best OGL material out there.

Maybe there would have been a way to make a broad range of games work, but the market logic of intellectual properties and brands makes it easier to be profitable when a corporation piles onto the IPs and brands that are already the most successful. As a creator, I love the idea of a range of...

You're welcome, and thanks for the kind words. Rob and I loved having the opportunity to do things our way, and we each brought something different to the design. I'm going to pass your comments on to Rob.

That game gets a lot of love. It was a small enough project that I could write it in my own personal style. The d20 system carried the weight, and I could just focus on the joy and the deathbots.

You're right that technology disrupts the D&D play style and the balance for challenges. Many years ago, I played in one session of Peter Adkison's high-level D&D campaign, which included Jedi, psionics, technology, etc. We won the major battle that Peter has prepared after I asked whether we...

You're welcome. It was fun to see what Rob and I could do when we were designing to our own specs and not following a corporate agenda.

In 1978 at age 12, I bought my second roleplaying game, Metamorphosis Alpha (MA) by Jim Ward. That’s the day I became a fan of the Open Gaming License and the d20 logo. Or at least I would have been a fan if someone had gone back in time and told me about them. The rules in MA described a...

I don't mind questions, and yes you got that right. I put details in my home campaign that I would not have put in a published work. One theme was that the Creator's good world had been corrupted by the Adversary.

My 3E campaign, called Elysombra, is the best loved campaign among my game group, which has met somewhat irregularly for 20 years. In that campaign, one theme was that the world that "God" created had been damaged to the core by "the Devil". As such, pointless death was always possible, and I...

Seems like we agree that we don't see how the societies of Greyhawk or Faerûn would hang together with people like the PCs wandering around.

I believe that I stole this practice from John Wick's Seven Seas. Well worth stealing, to my mind.

How does a pre-industrial society hang together with super-powerful individuals and groups wandering the land at will, especially as these people rocket up in personal power in just a few years?

I wrote that kobolds had "sorcerer" as their favored class and that they say that they have the blood of dragons coursing through their veins. I meant everyone to figure that they were deluding themselves, but everyone loved the idea and it became canonical, basically. I don't remember how that...

That's a good analysis. The other trick is that if charging up let's you get double-value out of your daily spells, it increases your per-day power level even if it doesn't increase your per-round power level.

Not much to say. Rich Baker created the original sorcerer as basically a variant wizard with different spell-casing rules, and I suggested we switch the main ability from Int to Cha to create more differentiation. A "spell point" system appeared with the psionicist, and it had the drawback that...