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Tactical infinity is the thing that separates RPGs from wargames or board games where you might still be in control of a personal avatar. The lack of it is why HeroQuest and Gloomhaven are not RPGs (even if you do improvisational playacting and get "into character" while playing them). Think of...

Technically, paladins, rangers, druids, priests of specific mythoi, bards, and specialist wizards were all optional. See the intro text to chapter 3 and Table 13 in the PHB (pg 25 in the original edition, pp 34–35 in the revised edition).

🤫 Shh! Not so loud! 🤐 Do you want to get us all sued by those litigious Tolkien Estate IP-tyrants!? It's mithral!

The latter, of necessity. When talking about RPGs, we can a priori exclude contextually inappropriate definitions of roleplaying — the CRPG sense or the pop-psych therapy sense or the adult bedroom sense or any other everyday use of the word — and limit ourselves to just the contextually...

To be fair, that table in the 2e DMG called it "Elven steel." :)

Here's the problem with that. If you use a cribbage board to play a horserace RPG, you're not playing cribbage, you're playing a cribbage-adjacent RPG that you've invented. It's the old "Monopoly insurance fraud" chestnut. What makes Monopoly "not an RPG" isn't the fact that there's no...

Thinking back to my 2e days, we used the "points plus dice" method of stat gen (stats start at 8, roll 7d6 and assign whole dice to each stat), critical hits, hovering at death's door, WPs and NWPs (including the Ninja's Handbook martial arts), psionics, and kits; and we largely ignored racial...

I don't think I can agree that the player is the avatar in a LARP. Even if the player is portraying a version of themselves in a LARP, it's going to be a fictionalized self interacting with a fictional world. And to my knowledge, most LARPs don't even work like that — most LARPs have the players...

I define a roleplaying game as any game where (1) players control personal avatars existing in a fictional milieu and (2) said avatars enjoy some degree of tactical infinity, which is in turn defined as the capacity to attempt any conceivable action, constrained only by the fictional positioning...

Druids didn't really solidify into the "generic hippy-dippy nature-caster" niche until 3e. In 2e, the text of the DMG was explicit about only humans and half-elves being druids because druidry was a human religion. Halflings actually lost the ability to be druids between 1e and 2e to conform to...

1e and 2e did it differently. In both cases, the multiple attacks were supposed to be staggered through the initiative count rather than all happening at once like in BECMI or 3e. I don't remember ever seeing anyone actually follow that rule, so I'm fuzzy on the particulars, but the idea was...

Whataboutism is just a false dichotomy with extra steps.

What we do when we gather with friends around a table and play a game together is difficult to characterize as an "inanimate thing" — but it's also beside the point. The point is: "It's just elfgames, bro" is emphatically not the same thing as "remember the person" or "don't tolerate bad...

Prosaic observations of online discussion are the least interesting aspect of online discussion, especially when they're repeated ad nauseam. I'm always viscerally repulsed by the "elfgames" angle. It never comes off as a neutral reminder to stay chill. Instead, it always reads as trivializing...

BG3 is just following in the footsteps established by Mass Effect and especially Dragon Age. It needs to be both D&D and a "mature" BioWare-style heavy-dialog-tree third-person CRPG.

Oh, I've got a few hills. Perhaps I'll just keep it to the extra spicy for today. My top two: 2) Rules engines are always separable from game settings, and it's only the setting that does any real work emulating a genre of fiction. Rules engines do modes of gameplay. In the same way that you...

Side-based group initiative; by-the-book combat sequence (Declarations, Morale, Movement, Missiles, Magic, Melee, Miscellaneous — first one side and then the other goes through the whole sequence when initiative is normal; both sides go phase-by-phase when it's simultaneous, breaking ties with...

Not "despised," just "disliked relative to fighters." I don't have the timestamp to find the exact quote, but Tim Kask (does he still post here to ask?) mentions at one point in this interview how, at least up through the time when the DMG was being written, Gary thought it was weird that...

Correct.

Most of us who began with classic D&D, I think, naturally transfer our familiarity with the 2-for-1 buy-up from BXCMIRC&c. (or the more complicated and closer-to-original rules from Holmes) to the original text from Men & Magic (and Greyhawk), and read that into the text without ever dreaming...