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Thanks. Everway is getting a digital relaunch this year and probably a new edition next year. 3E is really different from Everway, so it's fun to see both of those games on your list.

That’s quite a list. Call of Cthulhu gets top honors, I believe. Setting a game in the real world has big advantages (as Ken Hite always says). Ghostbusters, also by Chaosium, was something else. Daringly free-form. RuneQuest’s cults were a big influence (Ars Magica’s houses, Vampire’s clans...

The druid in our 13th Age campaign looks like a Trudvang troll. (Players have lots of narrative control over their characters' descriptions.) Trudvang is a good-looking book.

The faster way to do the same roll is, "On all skill checks, NPCs roll two d20s. If the two dice have the same number, that's the d20 roll. If they have different numbers, the roll is 10".

Anything that reduces the randomness (such as outcomes of NPC tasks) is good for players because it puts more emphasis on what the character choose to do and less on how the dice roll.

You're right to be concerned. I've done a lot of game design work in historical settings especially ancient Egypt, 1920s Egypt, medieval Europe, and now the 17th century Mediterranean. It can be hard going. I encourage people to be flexible and not try too hard to make everything right. That...

Yes, indeed. The publisher is a new company set up to publish Everway, so some people have missed this news. The current home for information online is the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/EverwayGame/

I once wrote a medieval adventure that takes place before Easter, with a demonic attack on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The adventure was big in France. http://www.legrog.org/jeux/ars-magica/ars-magica-2eme-edition/festival-of-the-damned-en

Yep, like the new Over the Edge, Everway does not have a combat system separate from conflict resolution in general. That game is also due for a relaunch, starting with a digital relaunch of 1st edition this year.

Characters had hit points, but the GM was coached to wreck PCs in ways that are more interesting than death by attrition. In the new Over the Edge (due out in June), a character dies or knocked out of the action if they get wrecked (stricken) three times. Losing a dice throw is an easy way for...

Yeah, my revised Over the Edge game typically handles combats with single dice throws. The action at the table goes really fast when a fight doesn't slow things down.

In 13th Age, by default the party can "flee" at any point in a fight, and all the characters survive (unless they're already dead). The penalty is a "campaign loss," as in, something goes badly in the game world as a result. The rule doesn't prevent all PC deaths, but it's a big help. Back in...

Save or Die effects aren't great for monsters because there's too much riding on a single roll. They're not great for player-character powers because they invalidate the way most characters bring down enemies: hit point attrition. In 13th Age, we picked up a rule from Dave Hargrave's Arduin...

Looking for a dungeon that really makes the most of the dungeoneering approach to D&D? Check out The Grande Temple of Jing by my buddy, Danny O'Neill! I contributed to it, as did Monte Cook, Skip Williams, Chris Pramas, and more. Fun stuff from Hammerdog Games​, now on Kickstarter...

In early D&D, there was a lot of fleeing from monsters. Also, if you're playing in a dungeon, there's no narrative reason for you to defeat any particular enemy, so it was OK not to win. As the game has become more forgiving and more structured (eg, with reasons for your fights), running away...

Thanks, everyone. I was curious as to how they could fit a three-round rule of thumb into a pretty standard 90s-era system. I'm a big fan of faster battles, and I'm happy to see other game designers trying out various approaches toward that goal.

The new Vampire RPG reportedly has a rule for often limiting combat to three rounds. That rule sure feels like something my buddy Ken Hite would have written, and I have been toying with a similar idea myself. I've played out plenty of long combats where the last rounds were a grind (hello, 4E)...

Feats in 3E derive from Virtues and Flaws in Ars Magica (1987), which derive from advantages and disadvantages in Steve Jackson's The Fantasy Trip (1980).

My secret project will be announced this summer

I hadn't heard about delays with RQ2, so I'm glad to have that piece of data. As someone who's run two Kickstarters and worked on others, I think I can tell you that all my projects ended up behind schedule. If RQ2 was a troubled Kickstarter, it's in a different category from the previous Call...