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Neither, so I didn’t vote. I play for the adventure, the exploration, the solving of puzzles, the finding ways to reach goals. If I can do all of that without ever getting in combat, so much the better. If I get a good story out of it, that’s icing. Or perhaps your vote didn’t represent your...

And when it is (rarely) in doubt, a quick, “Was that in-character?” clears it up just fine.

Good thing I don’t have such a rule, eh? Switching between in-character and out-of-character at whim has been a staple of every group I’ve been a part of. Personally, it’d drive me nuts if out-of-character chatter were eliminated or even heavily discouraged.

I voted no, because I’m not particularly crazy about it. But since I tend to see XP as the currency of the game more than as really representative of experience, I don’t conceptually have any more difficulty with it than with undead level drain. (Which I’m on record as supporting.)

To paraphrase an answer I heard to the question, “Just how many guitars does one man need?” I always need just one more bit of RPG paraphernalia.

Having worked for a licensee, I generally think licenses are predisposed towards not creating quality products. I’d generally rather pick a close-enough system and do the adaption myself. That said, although the Decipher game has lots of problems, it worked fairly well for my group. I’m...

Hmm. That seems essentially what I wrote, though better said.

When using notes or IMs, I suggest being careful to inform the other players of anything they observe. When you find out a conversation happened that your PC would have observed but that you never knew about, it can be annoying. Just because you don’t understand the language doesn’t mean that...

I try not to look at the attack roll and damage roll in d20 as separate things really representing what they’re named after. But the point I want to make is that GURPS had separate “passive defense” and “damage resistance” for armor. (Though I may be misremembering the exact terms.) Though, I...

All my groups basically just ignore them. We don’t explicitly house-rule them out, but we never actually use them either. Although, I do remember some discussion of the matter back-in-the-day. We read something about how they couldn’t be used to detect alignment. That a character would never...

These days, I carry it even farther. I think players should be encouraged to give each other advice on playing their characters. e.g. Just because a character isn’t present or is dead doesn’t mean the player must be muzzled. It only means that player can’t speak or act in-character at the moment.

Yeah. If I were cleverer than I am, I would have really been making a point via rhetorical poll.

Only the most naive are going to argue that you need to interview the entire population. Anyone with any basic knowledge of statistics knows that a minority is sufficient to generalize from. I don’t think these points are seriously in contention. I’ll freely admit to never studying...

Me too, but I’m now playing pre-3e D&D again. I found a lot to like in pre-3e D&D once I choose to accept their lack of mechanical differences. I think doing so taught me things that help me enjoy 3e D&D more as well. I don’t think he was presenting a dichotomy. Rather he was listing two...

More interesting might be something of an inverse: Which editions have you played, but never had an enjoyable session playing?

Anecdotal as it is... Possibly the greatest differences I’ve seen in approaches to the hobby among the gamers I’ve known tend to fall along the lines of those who frequently attend conventions vs. those who almost never attend conventions.

I used to feel much the same way. That’s when I stopped playing D&D of any stripe. At the time, I thought I stopped playing D&D because D&D had problems. Now I’d say rather that it wasn’t the game I wanted to play. When I finally came back to it, I found myself adopting more of a “let D&D be...

I suppose it might be a better question, but the number of encounters is quite different from the number of battles.

That looks like a huge list of reasons to convert the strip to 4e to me. There’s comedy gold in them thar hills.

A generic system doesn’t give you information about dragons. It gives you the tools to build your own idea of dragons. (Although a supplement might give you specific examples.) A specific system would give you, e.g., Pern dragons. D&D gives you this complex system of chromatic, metallic, and...