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Note that many of the journalists who have been laid off by G/O in the past have gone on to set up creator-owned, subscription-based news sites -- e.g., the Deadspin refugees created Defector, Kotaku writers have created Aftermath, and some Jalopnik alumni now write at The Autopian. So if you...

I assume that's the royal we. Because I don't sit down to a Star Wars game expecting to play a character on the order of Aunt Beru, Willrow Hood, or Elan Sleazebaggano. Not in 1987, and not now. Nor do I expect many people play a superhero game expecting to spend twenty years of adventuring...

In the DC Universe game, characters are built using a pool of dice. At the lowest tier (which cites Batman as an exemplar), a starting character gets 65 dice. At the highest tier, where you're supposed to be a hero like Superman or the Flash, you get 85 dice to make your character. Meanwhile...

For some reason, West End really hated the idea of players being able to make characters as competent as the ones from their licensed properties. In the Hercules & Xena game, for instance, if you sat down hoping to play Hercules or Xena, or even lesser characters from the shows like Gabrielle or...

Like when Fafhrd swims up a cloud bank to reach a flying ship in "The Mouser Goes Below"? Or his rocket-powered ski jump in "The Snow Women"? Or the running fight with assassins while sliding at high speed down the face of a glacier in "The Seven Black Priests"? Swords and sorcery characters...

In fact, having one pool of abilities for both PCs and NPCs is arguably more video-gamey -- you can see it in MMOs, for instance, where there's only so much of the budget that can go to animations and power design, so NPCs end up using copied versions of PC abilities. Plus, using PC-available...

I guess I should be able to hit like Ohtani, read a defense like Jalen Hurts, and vault like Simone Biles if I just train enough. It'd be inconsistent and unrealistic if people had different capabilities, after all.

It's not particularly difficult once you wrap your head around it, but then you can say the same thing about building a character in Champions, which to me has always felt like way too much work. I liked DC Heroes back in the 90s, but again, I don't think it holds up particularly well today...

From what I have seen, teams of mixed-rank characters don't work very well. If you want to do Black Widow teaming up with Thor and Iron Man, the GM is going to have to give Black Widow opponents and challenges specifically tailored to her, and excuses for why the thunder god and the...

The 13th Age monk is built along those lines; each form gives you three increasingly powerful attacks (opening, flow, and finishing), which are intended to be used in sequence.

In 5E, the mundane fighter can kill a giant by, essentially, sticking it repeatedly in the shin with a needle, but cannot trip the giant or force it to move. Realism!

The Death of Bowie Gizzardsbane.

As someone who's run 13th Age extensively, I can tell you it satisfies point 4; coming up with stats for interesting monsters and leveling them up and down for whatever kind of challenge you want to present is a snap. And there are plenty of fun adventures; Eyes of the Stone Thief deserves all...

Especially since John W. Campbell, one of the most influential editors/publishers in Golden Age SF, was an eager promoter of psi "science' and in fact coined the word "psionics."

I don't think Eddings's style has aged particularly well, and his personal history has cast a pall over his books. (See also: Marion Zimmer Bradley and Anne McCaffrey.) Anyway, another vote for Lord of the Rings.

A hundred pages of spells (and dozens more spells in every supplement), and the majority of them are so situational or so poorly designed that they will almost never be used.

For recent(ish) media about pirates, there's also One Piece. Which, again, is not about robbing ships, it's about roaming the seas in search of adventure.

Or the Director's Cut system (Broken Compass, Household, Outgunned), where you can be rolling up to 9d6 but you're looking for sets of the same number instead of adding them up.

I get intensely bored, both as a DM and a player, by the constant stream of repetitive actions you get in a dungeon: listening at doors, checking for traps, looking for secret doors. It slows play to a, well, crawl.

13th Age barbarians roll two dice to hit while raging, and if both dice come up 11+ and at least one is a hit, it's automatically a critical. How much simpler can you get than that?