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Indeed, and that's actually a really good conflict one could set up that would break out of the standard "save the world from the evil dark lord" style: Followers of the "Old Ways" could be backed by the gods while followers of the "New Ways" could be arcane casters. It's narratively...

There are also individually potent actors, e.g., archmages or high priests, that can affect things, as well as gods or other beings who may act to slow change down (or not). I think the real world analogies of what's believable often forget those things. No matter how potent a political leader...

Indeed, there are places where the Stone Age more or less survives to this day, such as the Andaman Islands (admittedly with the cooperation of outsiders) or remote parts of the Amazon. It lasted in Australia until the arrival of the Europeans.

Maybe, as I recall a lot of the Industrial Revolution was pushed by labor shortages after the Black Death. Yeah, to some degree, though by LotR things are getting pretty darn bad in most of Middle Earth. But I very much think it's important to remember that JRRT was not trying to present an...

I'm not sure I buy the static vs. dynamic moment in history. If things had gone differently in the Middle Ages, it's quite plausible to think the Industrial Revolution wouldn't happen and 500 years of dynamism might well have skipped. We don't know and it's an interesting thing to play with in a...

Remember the advice of Sage Carlton Douglas Ridenhour: Don't believe the hype!

I've met a number of often quite good players who either won't or can't DM. I know I ended up DMing early because I was the "early adopter" among my friends (due to the Erol Otus cover Red Box) back in the day and so I had it pushed onto me, but I suppose if I hadn't had to step up right away...

Certainly the expectations given by streaming are a pretty big issue.

Another is actually pretty thematic for how magic is often described in fiction: To cast without lots of health loss, the mage needs to spend time gathering mana. This can be an action of some sort, possibly a roll. However, Health can be substituted for mana, meaning that if the mage wants to...

Could be, but this was definitely a time where the RPG industry as a whole started going down so I don't think it was just WotC. I see 3.5 as more of a "we see sales going down and are trying to boost them" situation that didn't work. As I recall this was industry wide. Part of it was the glut...

Could be, but this was definitely a time where the RPG industry as a whole started going down so I don't think it was just WotC. I see 3.5 as more of a "we see sales going down and are trying to boost them" situation that didn't work. As I recall this was industry wide. Part of it was the glut...

In that sense, 2E sounds like the model. For better and worse, 2E was quite similar to 1E.

In that sense, 2E sounds like the model. For better and worse, 2E was quite similar to 1E.

I think it's because the designer of the Spy book also worked on 2D20. Heh. I actually think it would be a much better match for an espionage type game than a 5E-based ruleset, but you're right, not applicable to this product.

It's totally cool to not like a system but "worst evah!!!" seems like hyperbole. I did search and without going into tedious point by point quotes, I think some of them come from a misunderstanding of the system. Admittedly, Momentum and Threat read weirdly, but they work quite well in play...

I didn't single out any fields but easily could have (e.g., economics, computer science) because I wanted to focus on the "leaky pipeline" idea, but that's more or less how things work in the USA, too. Right, that's more or less what I was saying. I kept the numbers really simple to make the...

There actually are a growing number in the undergraduate levels, but at the graduate and post-graduate levels, there are a ton of barriers that differentially hit women and minorities. Not that these fields are easy for anyone, but if the difficulty level for a single guy is, say, 1 at each...

If you want to expand the market substantially you have to bring new people in. To do that you often have to break things open with a new concept. VtM was a very new concept when it came out and, if I recall correctly, that was right around the time Anne Rice was popular so the ground was...

That's all true, but I think it misses the competition in the market. 3.X had the misfortune of being in the marketplace competing against a ton of D20 RPGs (which was, arguably, their own doing) as well as the widespread success of MMOs and collectable minis games (things that couldn't be...

That's all true, but I think it misses the competition in the market. 3.X had the misfortune of being in the marketplace competing against a ton of D20 RPGs (which was, arguably, their own doing) as well as the widespread success of MMOs and collectable minis games (things that couldn't be...