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The one point of distinction I make with that ScreenRant write up is regarding how “easy” it would be to make a Greyhawk or Dragonlance setting in 5e. Creating material for those settings, in an Unearthed Arcana or monster book would indeed be easy, but if anything those settings are harder to...

The Paladine/Bahamut and Takhisis/Tiamat issue strikes me as simply a planar version of the Greeks coming into Egypt after the Alexandrian conquest, seeing Amon-Re, and saying that’s Zeus in a different form. Are the dragon gods separate and merely identified as a familiar form, or are they a...

It strikes me as sort of funny the logic that “psionics should be it’s own class because it was in previous editions,” when players from 1976-1991 were introduced to and used psionics as a system outside of its own class (in its Eldritch Wizardry/1st edition AD&D appendix form before the 2nd...

I’ve thought about the same. The way I’ve considered it is to have a Knight of Solamnia fighter subclass which gains set abilities at Level 3 per entry as a Crown Knight, but has a set for options for Levels 7, 10, 15, and/or 18 for the three suborders, similar to how some of the Barbarian...

1st edition AD&D. A first-level cleric who I think may have been named Brother Paul (or something like that). The exciting thing was, although I didn’t roll terribly well on attributes, I actually roll the random chance for psionics! The groups, played by us children, ventured into the dungeon...

As someone who’s spent too long working in publishing, I immediately think that “it’s been an incredible ride” is less a punning hint and more a joke about editorial drafts going back and forth…

The D&D solution is to solve this with a roll…

As a 41 year old who very casually played MTG for six months twenty years ago (I scrapped together two decks from extra cards friends had and bought some lands) but has played D&D across editions for over thirty years, my 38 questions were far too heavily weighted towards Magic. There really...

One of the reasons I expect to see something out of Dragonlance eventually is how Ravenloft is now being presented, as not just a world but a toolset on how to run different forms of horror in fantasy. As enunciated in the DMG, Dragonlance is D&D’s epic/romantic fantasy setting, the sort of...

Grab the new Ravenloft book. The PCs wake up seemingly a few hours later on the abandoned battlefield, batting away some carrion birds pecking at them. Something seems…off about the terrain around them, but they cant quite place it. And why don’t these wounds seem as fresh as they should be?

Don’t focus on raw power — remember that there’s always a bigger fish. If the PCs are exceptional it’s because they have the bigger story, the key connections to something in the world that matters, something about their nature that can change things when a thousand others with the same skills...

Colossal Space Puppy off the port side, Captain!

I’m just happy to sneak under Mercurius’s wire here at 41. I’d feel odd being a “new player” cutting my teeth in the “1.5E” AD&D UA era… ;)

You don’t kill the character who isn’t there. You “accidentally” leave him behind when the party moves on because he didn’t say anything (the old Home Alone trick). Gives him the option of finding his way back through humiliating solo play meant to teach him a lesson!

I’m curious to see how these mechanics work with horror based more on conspiracy and questioning of reality and perception. I’ve joked in another thread about making a domain like The Village from The Prisoner, where high-level PCs find themselves prisoners of a shifting banality that their...

Are there any mechanics where the PCs themselves may be faced with that question about their own reality? The oft-spoken 5e carousel of life and death becomes a lot more complicated when your character fears that his death may simply erase him from existence — or else send him elsewhere on the...

For every great dungeon crawl back in the day (I’m thinking of around 1987 rather than 1981 in my case), there was a group using a convention module too straightforwardly, and another group at the mercy of a killer DM working off stress at the players’ expense!

We always have to keep in mind that terms like Old or Modern are so often based on when we as gamers experience them or when they enter the vocabulary of the games we play. Third Edition was famous in its import of Rolemaster-style and Traveller-style rules, many dating back to same late 1970s...

The old systems served by or emulated by the OSR were puzzle boxes. The design of the dungeons and traps, the monsters to avoided rather than necessarily fought, and the characters with few in-game bells and whistles, those all were built around the players navigating by their own wits various...

Part of the issue is always fighting to 0 HP, as if all battles are of necessity to the death. Instead, add in morale rolls as circumstances change in the battle and (additionally) as HPs drop to particular levels (looking at the optional Wisdom save rules in the DMG, one could pretty easily...