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Honestly, psionics in d&d always felt like someone just deciding to write a better magic system but then they couldn't call it magic because of the history of the game, so finally someone made a setting where psionics was normal. You can fluff it how you want, but psionics, at its baseline, is...

Yeah, Birthright, like most of the 2e settings from the 90s was meant to highlight something they made, and in this case, it was domain level play- a world built around domain level play, right down to its lore. Instead of shunting off that level of play to high levels, that's kind of the point...

There's definitely stuff in, for example, GURPS, where you're expected to curate what's included- a lot of advantages and disadvantages are made with superheroes in mind. The big one i often get is gadgeteer- which is roughly an ability that lets you pull out technologically sophisticated...

So, the Dungeon Fantasy box set was a bit of a flop, which means, I think, there's not a lot of desire for SJG to go back there. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the idea of a one-stop product for people wanting to play D&D in GURPS, I think the way it was implemented was...

Yeah, Film Reroll is probably the best known GURPS AP, and they use GURPS for a fairly particular reason- the unversality makes it work for all the different films they play with. They also don't sweat a lot of the game's detail, which isn't a bad way to play it.

Generally, i kinda presume in d&d that warlock, paladin, and cleric power source isn't important and that the mechanical stuff is fixed to them because they're not really gaining any extra power over anyone else for it. If we were playing something like GURPS, a warlock pact is a disadvantage...

I try to avoid doing the "play something else" as a response in this forum, but there is a fairly significant amount of discussion that is somewhat RPG-neutral that I feel there's something productive to do here.

Not really- but i'm really good at learning new systems. I've been learning to run OSR and 5e modules in GURPS and it's been an interesting ride. It's really hard to pass up the freeform character generation.

I'd heard a lot about GURPS when i started with it, like it was gonna be crazy but it really got me when I played it- once I understood, i was super impressive in the breadth of stuff it did well.

Foundry, mostly because it has the best GURPS implementation.

Yeah, I think people get into these weird Platonic Ideals of the Neutral GM instead of talking practically, and it's not that interesting a discussion. The Lich example of just ganking a player party is an absolutely valid interpretation of what neutrality means.. that no one would use. The...

Most of the reason I start with Zero is practical- i find it very difficult to meet players' expectations with challenges and things to do that befit a level 8+ character. It's just hard for me to think of things for them to do- i don't think traipsing through caves but now it's a balor or...

Yeah it kinda makes me treat the character more like the 371st Rifle division in a game where i throw those things away like chips- there's not much personality, i just end up playing purely tactically.

Also, resurrection makes it easy on EVERYBODY and while I don't like killing PCs in general, killing NPCs and people helping them as well as those they love is something i really want to have in the holster.

I don't- i kinda treat that the same way you treat players actually paying attention to the hooks and engaging with the stuff that's happening in the world instead of say, doing investment banking. If the players are having the characters do nutty things because they know i'm not going to try...

This is true. I think everyone sits somewhere on a sliding scale of what they'll allow. For example, I can't think of even the strictest DM who, if the person on first watch failed to spot a group of ambushers, would have the sentry be garotted and the rest of the party murdered in their sleep...

My experience with very easy-death campaigns is that people tend to treat the characters mostly as game pieces and you get "Bob the fighter died- here's my new fighter, he's Bob with the letters reversed." unless the player wasn't vibing with what the first character could do. It's a totally...

Resurrection options, in-fiction are kinda weird, and I think that's a bit of a different discussion than, as a DM or as a meta-game, deciding that killing PCs isn't something on the table most of the time. I don't think it's a weird position to be trying to avoid killing PCs while also not...

I have no problems when people getting whacked in troupe games but when people get invested and really develop someone, i am very reluctant to kill them- I don't think it helps the game much. That being said, i play the rules as they are for the most part. The goal is not to rub the fact that...

Yeah, I really enjoyed 4e and what it was trying to do, but while I could handle the bandwidth of that, 4e's way of showing how much more powerful characters got over the levels did make it hard for a lot of people to keep up- the increased complexity just falls over with a lot of my RPG-playing...