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When I was 10, I started playing in my first game with my mom as DM in 1980. My dad played in our first game too, but he didn't care for it, so after that it was me, my sister (9) and my brother (8) as players. We're devout Christians, but the backlash to D&D was something that I only ever...

I started with Holmes basic, which only had rules for a few levels but had references to higher level spells etc. So it felt very much like a beginner set. I switched to AD&D as soon as our PCs hit a level not covered by the rules..

The problem in the original post is that is that Falcon is mixing genres. He essentially says that Gandalf is a nimrod because he doesn't cast a lot of spells like a D&D wizard. This begs the question of why should we expect Gandalf to act like a D&D wizard. The answer is that we shouldn't...

Really?! <-- adverb

I prefer emphasizing the mod, since it's what is used. I would actually prefer to not even have a 3-18 attribute in the game at all. Just call the mod the attribute and be done with it. You can still use 3d6 or whatever to generate it. The only reason I can think of to not do this is D&D...

One of the rules for living through combat is "don't ever get in a fair fight." If you're at 1hp and not doing your darndest to disengage, you've screwed up. Yes luck can play a role, but the situation you describe is not bad luck.

Seriously? You get some shockingly bizarre worlds that way. There have been enough threads here about what happens when you apply this or that rule to a society to turn me off that idea forever.

This was my first thought as well. OP, are you sure that he understands how D&D works? I'd say step one is to sit down with the player and clarify this, then give him a chance to correct his behavior. Step two would be another sit down, if necessary, to let him know what kinds of problems...

Only a few of these are something you commonly encounter. 15% for waiters, yes. I do 20% because I try to be a nice guy, but 20% isn't a standard. And I definitely do vary it if I'm displeased or impressed with the service, anywhere from $0 to several times the bill. Haircut for a guy is...

Yes! And use the old Rolemaster critical hit table. Five minutes into my very first game of Rolemaster, a PC took a critical hit from portcullis dropping on him, and got the (I think) top result on the table: "Impaled through the eye, instantly dead." Most results are far less deadly, but...

Go Dragonball Z. Now that you have godlike power, here are the new bunch of folks who need your help, and here are your new enemies who are roughly a match for you.

WOTC can sell games. Magic: The Gathering shows this all by itself. RPGs are just much harder to sell.

I was kind of excited to read the story in CNN. With a master's in electrical engineering I could see immediately that the initial premise about how the drive worked was nonsense, but measurable results are measurable results. I'm still hopeful of seeing a cool, working discovery along these...

The only way I can see to do it is to keep participating, stay on topic yourself, reply to on topic posts, and relate offtopic conversation back to your original topic.

That's a good point about the "culture and mind space." It's also true of any RPG. When someone wants to play D&D they want to play D&D, and not Vampire or GURPS or Ars Magica, and they have expectations of the type of experience they will get. So when you want to innovate it's important that...

"Intellectually dead" is not reasonable statement. By the same logic, chess is intellectually dead since the rules haven't changed significantly in a very long time. In D&D as in chess, I would expect to see "intellectual life" in how the game is played, not in changes to the rules.

Your point is true as far as it goes, but it leaves out an important point. Neither the players nor the DM have full power over the game / world. They share that power and come to a consensus that everyone can live with as to what happens. To form this consensus they frequently resort to...

Apologies in advance, but this is such a pet peeve for me that I'm going to forgo my usual diplomacy. This point come up repeatedly in RPG forums and it's definitely the dumbest argument made in such discussions. Just because the game has fantastic elements does not make it reasonable to throw...

This is exactly the old "D&D as war" vs "D&D as game" argument that's been hashed out here over and over again. Most editions of D&D were the former, where part of the game was managing resources over multiple encounters. 4E was more of the latter, with a lot of resources resetting each...

Stacking dire porcupines would probably make them pretty mad. I would advise against it. Not even a good area for experimentation.