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Very, very true. Case in point . . . See, everything that Jon_Dahl wrote right there? Virtually none of that would be in my list of qualities for a 'good' referee, and in fact, I would politely excuse myself from a game run by a referee this way; for me, this list defines a 'bad' referee, not a...

:erm: *slowly bangs head on table*

I don't create or run adventurers per se, but I do name my campaigns or con games; my three most recent campaigns are Le Ballet de l'Acier (The Dance of Steel) for my Flashing Blades campaign, Cold Warriors for a Top Secret campaign, and Let's Go Space Truckin'! for a Traveller campaign, and I...

Over the years I've talked many times with professional writers doing background for stories; I wouldn't expect game designers to do less research than other writers. But isn't that what a professional writer is supposed to be good at? Setting a scene in your head? And adventure modules can add...

Do I understand correctly that you're talking specifically about Maptools here? If so, I can certainly understand why you would consider the approach you outlined in your original post; as S'mon notes, this starts trending toward a crpg (and no, I don't mean that in a disparaging way).

I've never run any game through Maptools; can you tell me a bit about it?

If you're talking about published dungeons, I agree, so why is that? As far as my own 'dungeons' go, creating interesting terrain is a significant part of the fun of mapping the site, but similar to you, my background includes surveying caves and archeological site conservation as both vocation...

No, nothing about this sounds appealing to me. I'd actually like to hear more about those numerous reasons, myself.

Well, lessee . . . yes, apparently I do know what you mean.

I agree 110%, and it seems that we're in good company. In Disney's California Adventure amusement park, there is an attraction called Walt Disney Imagineering Blue Sky Cellar. The attraction provides ". . . a rare preview of upcoming magic through the eyes of Walt Disney Imagineers at Disney...

I do, yes, by the choices the players and their characters make; as those choices are predicated to some extent by the game's rewards system and the setting, I think the themes of a particular campaign emerge from the synergy of those three elements. To the extent that the players agree to play...

"You must spread some Experience Points around . . . " :erm: I call this, "prepping to improvise." I do the same thing - the interaction of the adventurers and the denizens drives the action, as each acts and reacts in a shared space.

Okay, well, what I dimly recall from lit classes way back when is that a story may be composed of multiple themes, as opposed to "THE theme," in which case I would say that many, if not most, roleplaying game campaigns already include them. Wealth, for example: to what lengths will someone go to...

You just nailed one of the reasons I don't like 'goose Trav' (or MegaTraveller, for that matter), actually - I prefer the original skill system much better than the unified DGP system tacked on later. I think uniform task resolution is way overrated, so making skill resolution discrete to the...

It would help me to understand if you could give an example of what you mean by a theme.

Maybe you should try re-reading the original post a little more closely. Here, let me help you out with that. If Scribble is soliciting a range of opinions, then I don't think telling others to shut their yaps is really constructive.

I wanted to like it, but I didn't. Calling it "cleaned up" original Traveller* presumes that the game was in some way broken in the first place, and I don't believe that to be true. A number of the changes they made actually made the game worse for me, not better. * I can't tell you how many...

Purify water makes dirty water potable. Real-world alternative? An MSR portable filter is just one of many possibilities for purifying water, though it might be a challenge getting a water weird through one.

:confused: Seriously?

This. THE PIANO PLAYER DOES NOT TAKE REQUESTS Signed, The Management Okay, a slightly more serious answer. Of course there is some negotiation that takes place between players and the referee. But the example described by the original poster goes to Bizarro-World lengths. It takes the...