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I think reading Jon Ronson's book So You've Been Publicly Shamed warned me off ever going anywhere near Twitter. At one point in the book, he talks to a US judge who gained a reputation for issuing gimmicky sentences involving publicly embarrassing things and the judge points out that in the...

Doing a good metaplot? I'd make it a "what if"--optional and non-binding to future writers. Such as Exalted's two big metaplot "events", Return of the Scarlet Empress and Locust Crusade. They were big events that fundamentally changed the world if they happened--but critically, future books were...

I think it was the X-Files / Lost / Battlestar Galactica principle. You could plan out the big secrets and the revelations in advance.....but it's a lot easier to throw out some vague allusions to something big in the background that you never intend to follow up on, and just let the fans work...

Mk3 wasn't that different at heart--the changes were nowhere near as big as what happened between first and second edition. If it had just stuck to being a well-thought-out and timely cleanup of the rules, and a rebalancing of models, it would probably have been a success. The problem was, it...

Personally, I'd say they were more White Wolf to TSR, or Image Comics to Marvel / DC. The plucky young contender that took advantage of the big dog being increasing complacent and out of touch, and looked at least for a time like they might just topple the old guard, before things turned out...

Surely making a world living and breathing is the job of the players? That's my main gripe with metaplot--since it can't take the actions of player groups into account, it's usually "one of our NPC's made a big change in the setting--if your PC's were lucky, they got to watch and clap in a...

I'm not Neonchamelon, but here's my take on what happened (spoilered for length).... At about the same time, PP seemed committed to tripping over their shoelaces whenever possible. --The Press Gang (volunteers who promoted the game and participated in a reward scheme) were axed following a...

I played the wargame for several years, and the background for the Iron Kingdoms is crazy detailed--Keith Baker on Eberron levels of thorough. There was a lot of love that went into this setting and its history. It got a bit stretched out for the wargame (when you have to have reasons for every...

I mostly agree. Even if the end product is the same, a Chinese author creating a wacky pastiche of a setting loosely based on their own country's history is going to be different from a Westerner doing the same, because of the power imbalance and history. That said, I would like to steer away...

The Palladium Fantasy RPG had the stats for a frying pan, and it could potentially be one of the most powerful starting weapons in the game. (high-quality weapons with a bonus to attack and damage were represented by multiplying the base cost--but since a frying pan was dirt cheap to start...

People "disrespect" their own culture all the time! Or to be more accurate, they tinker with, re-interpret it, or just borrow the shallow aesthetics to tell their story. That's pretty much how we got D&D in the first place! A subtle risk of being too respectful is that non-European cultures get...

That's where I am. I'm naturally inclined to get angry quickly and side with whichever side of a story I hear first, so I always consciously try to slow down and wait for details. It's one thing that makes me very uncomfortable about seeing cultural or social issues discussed online--that...

Stuff like this is why I'll never use Twitter. I'm most aware of it as "that place where mobs form" and "that thing that famous people commit career suicide on out of nowhere".

Let's hope he's mellowed a bit since the "rock star game developer" phase in the 90's. :)

That's a good point of comparison. Yes, maybe the mooted evil PC for a campaign advertised as heroic will be intelligent and fit in with the group, and won't screw over the party, spotlight hog by going behind their backs to do nasty stuff, or PVP. But-- --A lot of DM's and players will have...

I never said "doesn't want to play a human/dwarf/elf/halfling", that was you inferring. If I pitched a setting that didn't have those four race where they were wiped out in a primeval war with the gods and haven't been seen for thousands of years, those players would immediately slap down their...

Agreed, but there's also two other categories. One is the "look at me!" guy, who wants to play something weird as a way of hogging the spotlight. Now every other player has to work their concepts around his, and the GM has to give him more attention as the world either reacts realistically to...

It sounds here like you're insinuating that another poster's views on what a fantasy world's views towards strange and terrifying-looking beings could be (not to mention settings where that fear is overwhelmingly justified, like Drow in most regions of the FR) is a reflection on how they think...

Thinking about it, my decision to include something unusual that a player wants would depend a lot on how they present it. If they're making a good-faith effort to explain why this unique creature is here, and also to tie it into the lore of the campaign world (for example, a warforged in Theros...

I know if a player asked for something that didn't exist in a setting, my fear would be that they're not interested in the setting or the sort of game I said I'd be running, and that lack of investment / desire to be the super special unique guy is going to affect the game itself. I've probably...