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Congrats! I've been hoping from the beginning you'd get Robin on board!

The Forge was an RPG theory forum - may still be, haven't looked lately. They produced many lasting innovations and some useful terminology, but also ruffled a great many feathers. Some statements by some notable names over there were... needlessly inflammatory... and turned a lot of people...

I'm still rather boggled that clerics can summon steeds now. I'd rather see it be a class feature of the paladin - it's one of their classic perks.

The Dying Earth isn't really very systematic either. It's specified that a wizard can hold maybe four spells in his head at a time, six at the maximum. But we really only see a few examples of actual spells, and there's no real guidance about what sorts there are. Then in the last book, Vance...

Some games managed to do without the coin toss. :) Though I wouldn't call Amber Diceless minimalist, all the complexity (such as it is) is in character creation. The actual gameplay is extremely simple.

Holy controversial assertions, Batman! Meaning no offense to D&D, but IME the more obviously a fantasy book owes a debt to it, the worse it tends to be. The game just plain has different priorities than a novel, and rightly so.

I'm good at calculating probabilities, but I'm not clear yet on what you want calculated? Can you give me a specific scenario you want the odds on?

He's the only completely honest politician.

Where does the magic in 'A Wizard of Earthsea' fit in? I don't think it's too powerful.

Totally. Remember "name level"?

It's entirely possible I'm missing something, as I'm not familiar with the game. But on the surface at least, these make sense to me. You spent an action to move, they didn't. Avoiding all physical damage sounds pretty good? And surely parrying an opponent is very much a matter of relative skill?

Light. Minimalist is good for a one-shot, but isn't enough for an actual campaign.

Beat me to it. A game that produces dissonance will not remain my favorite for long. (Barring early days when I didn't know of any alternatives.)

I just ran across a hilariously stripped-down version of D&D called, tongue-in-cheek, "6E". It's only 11 pages long, and looks quite playable!

This one makes my point even better. You're communing with a GOD. You should have to make checks to see if you even remember what you were going to ask! And legendarily, asking for direct answers this way often leads to trouble - the Delphic oracle being a good example. The one-word response is...

A lot of the problem with these sorts of spells, it seems to me, is that they work too reliably. If things like Speak With Dead required rolls to work or carried any kind of risk, the party might be inclined to save it until after mundane skills had been tried. In almost any fantasy story or...

By "forgiving" I mean something like, "In this situation I feel really inspired by my old mentor" and use your relationship with him. Which might make sense for a game that revolved around relationships, but be a bit more questionable in one where they were more peripheral. How many prime sets...

Thanks very much guys! I probably won't get a chance to run it for a few weeks, we'll see. I'll probably have more questions!

I forgot to mention my single favorite game: Fate Core! (Though there's a spiffy new version called Fate Condensed that I highly recommend.) My group has gotten years of fun out of Fate. And if you don't want to commit out of the gate, there's a very complete online SRD!

I'd forgotten about this one! Yeah, it looks fun! So... If you're anywhere near the Pacific Northwest, I'm totally down! Or if we can figure out how to do it online.