Search results

If we're going to talk about potentially harmful stereotypes used for humor, the gender dynamic between Spock's in-laws is fascinating. T'Pring's mother is a bigoted harridan who uses her husband's family honor to rationalize and reinforce her own prejudices-- simultaneously very Vulcan and very...

The Love react is really insufficient to contain my response: I love every single word of this post and I am enshookenated to consider it. It really... resonates very powerfully with my favorite time travel franchise, The Terminator, and all of the reasons why it is my favorite time travel...

Maybe. I will confess to having bounced off of AW/DW so hard that I just didn't glean anything from the experience and what it considers immersive and character-driven feels excessively stilted and contrived to me. It's purely a matter of personal preference, of course, but I wanted to like them...

I've been a real big fan of Israeli Theory ever since I first heard of it. Couple of really subtle and powerful tools for table management, but the important lesson is that you don't have to be the GM to use them. Every player at the table shares the responsibility of keeping the game...

It's not properly a 5e game, but I am planning a Spelljammer/Flying Swordsmen mashup and I figured out it's a lot easier to use the structure and basic math of 5e as a vehicle for... random assorted content than to make FS work in OSE. So, specifically: I am using more of the AD&D Spelljammer...

You glean some very interesting worldbuilding insights by playing a game I like to call "what two concepts are virtually identical in real folklore, and completely unrelated in D&D?" And then just... make them related. For instance, wandering priest-judge-poets with supernatural powers of...

My lifelong White Whale, until I finally gave up on it a couple of years ago, was to get a comfortably large table-- 6-7 players-- with the same players running two concurrent games in the same system, but two different settings: Planescape and Star•Drive. On a slow burn, a real slow burn, the...

Player Agency, to me, is as simple as whatever scenario I put down in front of my players, they feel free to set their own objectives in relation to it-- and then, they feel that their success or failure at meeting those objectives and the consequences of their success or failure are entirely...

I wholeheartedly agree with one of these statements.

Won't someone please think of the children? My very first ever player character in AD&D was a 1e Monk. I love the idea of the Monk class, and it'd be fair to say that most of my 3.X player characters had some Monk levels, though I never again played a single-class character after that first...

So, let's just get our pizza order out of the way first: anchovies, extra pineapple, onion, and roasted red peppers. Everything, every single thing, about D&D's alignment system is the worst thing about D&D's alignment system. It is fractally awful and there is neither any redeeming quality or...

Oh, we can do better. How about the timeline where a completely unprepared Kaine has to retire from his life of crime to raise his orphaned niece Mayday?

Psionic combat is fun. Your attack and defense modes are fueled by your daily supply of psionic strength points, like all of your abilitires to do anything as a psionicist. Every single monster that has psionic attack and defense modes gets them for free. Third Edition (3.0) had the same...

I've been using it a lot for inspiration, since my design process involves a lot of analysis, synthesis, and emesis.

All of the reasons I described why high-level modules don't really work for legit– "earned it"– high-level adventuring parties are the reasons I prefer high-level D&D as the next logical step from low-level D&D. The power fantasy of trodding the jeweled thrones beneath your feet or asking The...

Yeah, this is something I do-- classes are proficient in all their class weapons, weapon proficiency slots are for cross-class weapons, fighting styles, martial arts, and (if you're a fighter) specialization/mastery.

It ain't so much that people don't want to play at high levels or have content for high levels-- though it's obviously going to be less popular than beginner and "sweet spot" content-- it's just that as games run longer (and reach higher levels) prepackaged adventure modules are going to be less...

Guess I'm still waiting for my Circle of the Far Realms Druid.

Non-D&D Fantasy Games I can recommend: Novus - A 2d10, class-and-skill based game by the author of HARP. Against the Darkmaster - A well-polished retroclone of MERP. Class-and-skill based, elegant d% system. Barbarians of Lemuria - At least I'm pretty sure BoL is still in the game, but it's...

I want high-level martials to be legendary and, yes, magical. I want them to have mythical, supernatural abilities. I do not want them to cast spells, just like I do not want mythical, supernatural monsters to cast spells.