Search results

And searching for a Skill Challenge leads me to http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/gaming/dnd/4e/skill-challenge-broken.html . Now I would define solving a mystery as being something that the players might do by asking the right questions, no skill check needed; by finding the right places to...

Most of the reviews of the original D&D have implied that calling it a public beta test might be generous, that nobody could take the original books and play without having played with someone else and having learned all the things not written down. I don't exactly doubt the 60-70% figure as a...

That's why it's nice this way; had I been a OTU fan, TNE would have left me very upset. Reading the books now, long after the birth and death of TNE, I can appreciate it as its own thing.

Whenever you're talking about "why" something happened, you're talking about alternate universes. "Why did the lightbulb break? Because you dropped it" presumes in an alternate universe where you didn't drop it, it wouldn't have broken. Given the number of lightbulbs we deal with, that's an easy...

OED1, volume 3, from the 19th century, gives one meaning of class as "A number of individuals (persons or things) possessing common attributes, and grouped together under a general or 'class' name; a kind, sort or division. (Now the leading sense)" with a quote dating from the 17th century...

The N1500 (released 1972) was a tape-based machine that used a format called VCR, as linked above, not to be confused with VHS or Betamax. That clearly predates Betamax from 1975.

Which is a rewriting of history; there was the Philips VCR format first. Even then, it's all in how you define the box, since from the start of film people had been using 16 mm and 8 mm film to record home movies and play back films at home. It's always the closer you look, the more complex it...

No, WH40K is grim-dark. If you told me we were doing Pathfinder, but with differences on the level of Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed, I'd be thrilled. The whole Tolkien-pastiche/Greyhawk/FR thing is getting tired for me; "our gnomes are eight feet tall and launched the last dwarf into spaaaace"...

It was as much in response to Saelorn as to you, but I think it is being overblown. Do computer games have numeric attributes for things in the game? Yes. Does it come from D&D? No. Hamurabi (1968) and Space Travel (1969) had things in game (in Space Travel a player avatar) with numeric...

This is dealing in counterfactuals, so there's no way to make any statement with any objective certainty. And we're not talking about a product's success; if D&D went away today, it would still be a massively successful product. We're talking continuing market dominance, so it's less than that...

So, exactly the same as real life but with "the world" replaced by "the GM"? In real life you can try and try to find foot prints all you want, but if they aren't there, they aren't there. So tossing questions at someone and getting responses back is totally different agency-wise if you're...

For a simplified version of a fairly trivial combat, you've used twice as many numbers (as "Level 7 Complexity 5"), and you have established some fiction, however vague. There's two individuals, and guy one is much weaker and a little bit easier to hit than guy two. Given an actual stat block...

I don't believe that most of those elements are taken from D&D. Attributes, even numeric attributes, were not invented by Gygax and Arneson; it's hard to say who invented the idea, but William Sterne named IQ in 1912. Hit points were not first published in D&D; they were called "defense points"...

Not for me. Watching my characters die is not in the least bit fun, and getting stuck with some character I can't imagine playing is, likewise, not fun. I've tried it, and I have no question in the least I don't enjoy it. The way I attach to my characters pretty clearly stops me from enjoying...

Elegance is overrated. No matter how you write the rules, I'm going to have to look up exactly the modifiers on attempting a 15' long jump with a 15' running start across cobblestones, and when I do I can look at the exact rules for jump. (Okay, so I may not have to if the rules don't have those...

I don't think that's the end all and be all of it. Sure, I can see having this discussion about Tunnels & Trolls or Rolemaster or GURPS*. But setting and genre matter; offer something too weird like Empire of the Petal Throne or Gamma World, it could have been first, and lit off the RPG...

I wouldn't say offering a D20 version of a game "waving the white flag"; Deadlands and Traveller, for example, had their own D20 versions. A lot of that simply seemed to be advertising; there was no good reason for those games to exist, besides D20 sold. And it wasn't "World of Darkness D20", it...

I run and play Pathfinder because that's what I have and what people are interested in running and playing. That doesn't mean it's exactly what I'm looking for, especially not stock. Maybe some of the people like the epic science fiction fantasy, but would be happy to turn the grim-dark down...

Color me unexcited. It doesn't even feel like a game at that point. I don't want to leave the fiction open; I want to entangle it in the rules. Clue/Cluedo is quite simplistic, but "by a process of elimination, find the who, how and where" is way more exciting than "make a series of...

The Bundle of Holding now has Traveller: The New Era. My first introduction to Traveller was GURPS, so this should be interesting, seeing a much harassed era of Traveller. I will say (basically what I came here to say), oh, man, 90s design was awful. A lot of Traveller design is a minimalist...