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Ok, so, we have a species from another dimension (we've seen a few of those in the past, like Species 8472 and those creepy aliens from "Schisms", the solanogen-based lifeforms) that hijack living bodies and seem to have psychic powers. Imprisoned in an pan-dimensional prison by an advanced...

Oh man, that reminds me of something that happened in Pathfinder 1e. They had these items called "weapon cords" you could attach to your weapons so that if you were disarmed, you could pull them back into your hand. Gunslingers were then trying to maximize their use of guns by using weapon...

I always wondered why the dagger and the hand axe were specifically the only weapons one could employ in the off-hand. It seems awfully specific, and why exempt (as examples) the club or jo stick?

Oh probably not, but then again, in his later years, he did become fascinated with anomalous things. I was a big fan of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World as a kid.

At least with 3.x, the xp you got from encounters was directly based on your level, so that you could in fact "catch up" (this is why item creation wasn't that big of a deal as most thought it was). In AD&D, the differences between levels is very slight, which is why multiclass characters are...

If you want people to play humans, then give humans something people can't ignore. I had the opposite problem in 3.5- nobody would play anything but humans, because the benefits of most other races were so niche compared to the bonus Feat as to be unnecessary. *I saw something similar in my...

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." ~ Clarke's First Law of Prediction

Sure, but if magic items that grant Wishes have the potential to wreck one's game (imagine that!), you can just...not have them show up as treasure?

Speaking of the rule for raising ability scores with Wishes, I've always wanted to know how that came to be. Was there really such a preponderance of Wishes in Gary's game that required such a rule, or did he wake up from a nightmare in which Rob Kuntz figured out a way to get infinite Wishes?

I think the 3e approach to level drain ("negative levels") solved a lot of issues- you didn't forget your abilities, they simply became weaker. You could lose spell slots, but you didn't forget what spells you could cast, and so on. I don't have a problem with effects that reduce one's...

Because our understanding of things is always changing. History is full of people who thought this or that thing was "impossible" only to be eventually proven wrong. We can say that things are impossible according to the laws of physics, for example, but we do not know everything there is to...

But that specialness only extends so far- for example, being a half-elf makes you easier to bring back than a full elf. But being a half-orc does not. You know it just occurred to me that I don't think the 2e Rod (which has nearly the same text) was ever updated to reflect new classes (like...

I didn't vote, but mostly because, while I have no evidence to suggest ghosts are real, I can't deny that they could be- it may be highly improbable, but I believe it's wrong-minded to say that something is flat-out impossible.

It wasn't even universal for all 1e adventures, as they eventually started including suggested party sizes, for example:

I mean, yeah, that also makes sense (orcs have no souls, lol). But it doesn't quite explain why it's harder to revive a Halfling than a Human.

Here's the thing with party size- the more people there are in a combat round, the longer the combat round takes. This becomes problematic as characters gain more attacks and more abilities to sift through. Even in AD&D, having 2 attacks per turn wasn't impossible with things like bows, spell...

Well if we're talking about "weird things about powerful AD&D magic items", here's a fun one: The logic behind the charge costs is puzzling. At first, you think "well, the closer a class is to being considered "good", the easier it is to raise them. No wait, Clerics can be evil! Ok, so the...

The accuracy isn't the problem, it's the hit points. Somebody upthread talked about starting new characters at level 2-3 to hang with level 6 characters. A level 3 Fighter in 5e might have, say 31 hit points. They'd better be a ranged build and stay far away from melee, because a CR 4 able to...