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I tend to feel the same way. But when I do use the 3I stuff, I just use as much as I want and ignore the rest. And I feel free to alter canon at whim. I’m a big fan of treating published settings as if they were homebrew.

I beg to differ. Gygax, Arneson, Miller, Chadwick. These guys were game designers. They all had published games before they wrote any role-playing games. When they wrote role-playing games, they didn’t just blindly repeat the wargames rules they’d written before. They adjusted to the scale and...

Power creep in RPGs seems kind of silly to me. You end up adding the same amount to both sides of the equation so it’s basically the same mathematically but with bigger numbers. What’s the point? I don’t think power creep is inevitable, but then, I don’t tend to use many supplements either...

I’m not going to even begin to argue that this’ll work for any other group... But in my groups the GM often treats the Don Juan PC as being smooth even if the player isn’t. No die roll or mechanic needed.

Well, in my 2006 classic D&D campaign, the PCs avoided combat whenever they could. The exception being that when a monster fled they usually knew they had the upper hand and would often give chase. Maybe they did this for other reasons, but the talk around the table certainly indicated that...

It seems that in the two ways that matter—(1) easier for you and (2) more enjoyable for your players—the Paizo stuff was clearly not better. So any way in which the Paizo stuff might be better is kind of moot. I bet if you interview a bunch of authors, you’ll find that a lot of them do find...

Quoting myself. (9_9) I’d say my enjoyment of classic D&D is 50% back to basics. Realizing that this game is just as much fun today as it was when I bought it. The other 50% is new perspective. I no longer play it exactly as I did back-in-the-day. It’s both rediscovery and discovery.

I’ve once again sworn off modules. I think I’ve developed adult-onset attention-deficit disorder. I seem to hit information overload easy these days. After most adventures, I feel like I never really did them justice. For me, modules are for inspiration and stealing bits from—not for running...

Right. Exactly my point. Which, I suppose also explains why I don’t have any problem playing any edition or any system. But ask me my preference and I’m going to pick the system with simpler mechanics. I’ve used battle mats more with GURPS advanced combat and 3e than with classic D&D. In the...

Yep. Like classic D&D. Except it was available then too. (^_^)

See, the non-boring, non-shallow, non-bland stuff was the non-mechanical stuff. You know, perhaps I enjoy “rules light” games so much because the aspects of the game I enjoy most aren’t covered by mechanics in any system. (OK, make that “most”—there are a lot of esoteric systems out there.)...

I checked everything up to and including “RUN a D&D Rules Compendium/BECMI/BX Game”. I might run 1e, 2e, or 3e; but I think I’d have to make enough changes that it would really be more of a variant rather than just some house rules.

Here’s my classic Traveller pages. I think cT Book 0 is both a decent introduction to Traveller and to the hobby in general. One of the great things about cT, IMHO, is the modularity. There’s an awful lot of rules, but you can use as many or as few of them as are applicable to the current...

Groups can role-play in spite of mechanics. Groups can role-play because of mechanics. Mechanics can encourage or discourage role-playing, but they can’t prevent or ensure it. This whole post very well describes how I felt during much of the 1990s. Of course, you have to draw the line...

Classic Traveller is still my favorite. (Haven’t gotten Mongoose’s version yet, so not opinion.) GURPS Space is good if you want to bring your own flavor. Especially one of the better options if you were going in a “more realistic” direction. For a more a more space opera direction, there’s...

The thing is, Vista always demo’d well. It earned its bad rep when people tried to live with it. Which might be an interesting idea for a thread: What RPGs demo’d well but lost their luster after you lived with them for a while?

I’ve seen gamers tear game X to shreds and swear they will never play it again. Then someone says, “I was thinking about running X,” and those same people are the first to hop aboard. I think our bark is worse than our bite.

How long has your group been playing together? Three of us met in 2000 when 3e came out. Since then we’ve lost and gained various other players. What are the ages, genders, and professions of the people in your group? Ages: I’m 39. I’m a little fuzzy on everyone else. I think only one of us...

That was a suggestion from the Tesseract article in Dragon. That “gravity” could be considered a property of each individual. “Down” for you could be different than “down” for someone else. Re-watch the end of Labyrinth for some inspiration.

Two die types. Having one set of 4 dice (e.g.) being able to work seamlessly as 4d8, 4d6, or 4d4 means 4 dice covering the work of 12. (Which I think is what you meant, but which I wanted to try to make more explicit.)