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I love Free League products, but their shipping and customer service is not the best.

Alexander comes off as really self-serving here. His original post on "Xandering" implies that Jaquays agreed to the change after a "back and forth" conversation, but now after getting called out he confirms that the conversation was just between him and his publisher. Then he names the idea...

I know the modules came first, but I strong disagree that they were not railroads, especially when sat beside classic adventures modules. It's called the Hickman revolution for a reason--they were the start of something very new in adventure design, and to my mind the inception of what...

I mean the Drangonlance adventures were just scripted re-tellings of the novels IIRC. It was the novel in a different format. PCs didn't really get a choice of what happened to their characters, because they were playing the characters from the novels.

I would say the inception was around the time of Dragonlance adventures (1987), so just before 2e was released. The Hickman revolution. One memorable example for me is the Hickmans' "The House on Gryphon Hill," (1986) which concludes with the DM reading the following novelistic boxed texts to...

Though, I feel 2e adventure design is actually maybe the epitome of adventures to be read, not run.

One thing that also strikes me in BG3 is how much movement and distance matters. This is due to the verticality of the environments, but also because of how spaced out they are. As a result, you need to make use of dashing and jumping and keep in mind spell distance more than when playing 5e...

Want to redecorate the BBEG's lair with smokepowder barrels that you keep in your "camp" that you can access at anytime, you absolutely...hmm, wait...that might not work

Blades in the Dark is excellent at mechanizing downtime actions. Characters have choices to heal, train, or work on some other kind of project, and there is mechanical support more or less for resolving all of those choices. I did try to port something similar over to a b/x game that I was...

I'm just confused as to the nature of the problem exactly. The OP makes it sound like there are people who are throwing away their 2014 PHB because they can't bear to see the mark of Hasbro on it, which seems implausible. Whereas... This is a lot more clear, actually. You are talking to...

Sure, there are people who don't want to buy any new books from Hasbro. They'll keep playing 5e with what they have or turn to third parties. There are also people who dropped their dndbeyond accounts to avoid supporting Hasbro any further. But are there people who already own the books in...

So you are talking about the section of people that love 5e but that don’t want to play it anymore—even if they are just using already-purchased books—because of their dislike for Hasbro? Again, maybe I’m just out of touch but how many people are taking that exact stand? Sure, some people may...

I'm a longtime follower of your work, blog, and channel. The points you bring up here do strike me as a truism...as in, of course I can play 5e without buying anything from Hasbro. Personally I've barely bought anything from Hasbro as it is! But the reason it strikes me that way is that I...

Like so many things in 5e, it relies heavily on the DM porting procedures and rules over from other editions or from 3pp. If you want exploration to involve careful resource management (of light, rations, hp, etc), 5e explicitly and intentionally gets in the way (darkvision for most races...

The secret to what makes OSE advanced great is actually less in the player-side material than in the DMs book, which includes all the monsters, encounter tables, and magic items in a very concise but still flavorful format. This review does a good job of breaking down why the DM's tome hits the...

Agree. One could even argue that 5e has mass appeal because it is not laser focused on being the best in any one particular area

I remember listening to actual plays run by Chris Perkins. Similar in a lot of way to early critical role, his games involved a lot of free form character-focused scenes, punctuated by big encounters that were run theater of the mind. If rules situations came up, Perkins seemed to make a...

The OSR has the Primer for Old School Gaming and the Principia Apocrypha, texts that elucidate some (loose) principles for old school gaming as a style of play, not a set of products. What's the equivalent for 5e? Are you trying to capture a certain style of play, say from 2014-2017, that is...

The examples of neo-trad games this author gives are as follows I'm lightly familiar with some of these games. My impression is that they allow for plenty of GM adjudication even in basic task resolution, but I could be wrong. What are games that you would consider neotrad?

I remember this too in the 90s. Part of it was that you'd actually see books from other systems in the stores, and advertisements for those books in Dragon magazine, so you'd get curious and try them. In other words, it was culturally normal to pick up something new and try it. I don't think...