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Mechanically this change seems to work for handling supernatural for offense and defense, and it's sure worth a try. As the guy who switched the 3E first-draft sorcerer from Intelligence to Charisma, I would miss the distinction between the bookish wizard and the flashy sorcerer. More generally...

Chaotic Good: "I'm a nice person, but I make my own decisions." That's Western individualism right there.

The campaign never got off the ground, so there's nothing there. But maybe I should dust of Rivals of Esthedil and run a blast-from-the-past Kickstarter with it. I'm glad to hear that you're still interested in the project, Allan.

Yes, and the fact that these settings were not well-designed to make money means that they could be quirky, like Dark Sun.

@ grodog. Posts on Ars Magica are on their way! Rivals of Esthedil was 1993–1994, and the half-gods concept was 1997. Rivals of Esthedil was going to be about top-level mortals claiming a mini-plane for themselves, so the PCs were the bosses, not the insurgents.

Indeed Gradine is right, and I typed too quickly. I would say that violence is generally more suitable than sex, rather than either/or, one being suitable and the other not.

I've been thinking about this issue for almost 40 years, and this summary is pretty good. Humans find sex and violence to be interesting, and of those two pursuits violence is the one suitable to group activity, as in a roleplaying game.

I see you explained this for me before I did, so thanks.

Yes, I am not surprised that your experience would be different from mine. An individual DM can control and pace things in a way that a game designer or a scenario designer can't. If a party's power level over time correlates to the number of rests they take, a DM can balance things on the fly...

That's true. The game has fewer feel-bad results now, but that means that you're not afraid that the monsters will make you feel bad.

In fact, it's hard for me to play D&D and take it too seriously because per-day spells are more or less impossible to balance. The number one thing that limits PC power is limits on resting and re-upping their spells, but that limit isn't built into the system and balanced. Instead, it's an ad...

Another factor to consider is that reliability and consistency matter a lot to whichever side has the advantage. The underdog in a fight benefits from increased randomness, while the favored group benefits from a lack of surprises. In RPGs, the PCs are almost always the favored side. A...

Back in 1988, I wrote an article for Gateways magazine about how you can't treat what happens in the game world as emotionally separate from the impact you're having on the flesh-and-blood players at the table. Thirty years later, here we are. My impression is that this sort of abusive behavior...

Thanks for all the comments. A few followups. 3.5: If you want me to talk about what led to 3.5, buy me a drink at a con. I don't think I'll be covering it in this column. To-hit bonuses by AC: One way to tell whether a rule in AD&D was a good idea was to see whether other game designers...

The story of Third Edition D&D starts, perhaps, with Peter Adkison reading 2nd Edition AD&D (1989) and being sorely disappointed. For one thing, he felt the new system left several underlying problems in place, so players didn’t get much benefit from the effort it took to switch to a new system...

The world exists primarily for the PCs and secondarily for the NPCs. In 13th Age, the players exercise some authorial control over the setting, especially as it relates to their own characters. Currently, my group is running through Eyes of the Stone Thief, and we decided that the "Priestess"...

RQ is actually on the list, but subsumed under Empire of the Petal Throne. The RQ setting was a better fit for an RPG. Maybe Over the Edge belongs on the list of "games that changed the way we design games". It reached a lot to game designers and future game designers.

The "dramatic pole" is an exciting addition to character conception. It appears (sort of) in the new Over the Edge as a characters "question mark". That's a character trait that is destined to come into question as part of the story. If your character's question mark is "Honorable-?", then...

Yeah, I'm pretty proud of that part of the game. It's the game "that does wizards right".