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"Railroading" though is essentially just a feeling players have when certain techniques are employed and they experience it as negative--what are the techniques you use? Like there's a Save The World plot with NPCs pointing the way, there's just going "Nah there's nothing over there", there's...

I don't understand-- how do your players even know that going east instead of west will make them a subadult who wants to be a special snowflake? That is: how do you structure the campaign so that the known path is always obvious?

in every campaign i've been in there's room enough to do both. Anyway, this is, very ironically a derail of my thread about keeping people on rails so...

It's way better: When you go see a movie you have imperfect information, but you still can have an opinion about if you want to see the one about the dinosaur or the one about the murder mystery.

This is a happy accident of the game design: Because so many of the people you interact with can level-drain you if they turn hostile, negotiation and character interaction (and humoring psychopaths) actually become super-important. Which matches the Alice In Wonderland theme surprisingly well.

Yep. Comes in handy, too. First column is AD&D, second column is 5e.

I have never (and may never) run an adventure path or any kind of scenario that wasn't heavily tilted toward "do what you want" there may be consequences for not addressing problems that come up, but the campaign itself isn't built around set ways of addressing them. But I am curious: how do...

My blog covers a lot of different angles of RPGing, although for the past 2 weeks I've been having a lot of guest entries because I'm running a contest, however, the rest of it is, since 2009: Here are all the actual play reports: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/search/label/actual%20play...

Thanks! There are lots of videos of us playing... http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/i-hit-it-with-my-axe/1872-Episode-18-200-lbs-Of-Meat-And-A-New-Fur-Coat ...but not of us specifically playing Red & Pleasant Land. At least not yet.

There's a hair being split here: Alphastream refers to an "OSR market" which indeed is a tiny thing which probably influences nobody selling hundreds of thousands of books. On the other hand "OSR writers"--actual people whose work is termed "OSR", either definitely influenced 5e or else Mearls...

Fluff vs crunch is not a meaningful distinction in most RPGs, especially D&D. It's a wargaming/cardgaming distinction In D&D there should be monsters that are more dangerous if you're wearing blue, for example.

Sometimes innovation catches on. Whether or not "most gamers" want any kind of specific system, most influential designers seem to want to dial back on the crunchfest of recent years. We're gonna get games like that and people will like them or they won't--only time will tell.

Also, the demonological obsession with the Matt Finch's Old School Primer makes no sense: much of the OSR (as represented by the people who put out the best-selling OSR products) have no special attachment to that document. Y'know why we're called OSR? We started blogging and someone else...

You might wanna take a closer look at where things like advantage/disadvantage, bounded accuracy and that d100 trinket table came from.

Whoever thinks this hasn't been paying attention. The OSR is home to the most forward-looking stuff in gaming, without breaking a sweat: Yoon-Suin, Fire on the Velvet Horizon, and Deep Carbon Obseratory all do brand new things. And indie designers form outside the OSR like Kenneth Hite have...

Thank you!

Whether or not it's a golden age for the popularity of the game as a whole, it's undeniably an amazing time for new DIY-RPG content. Stuff like Yoon-Suin and Fire On The Velvet Horizon, for example, are far better than anything that's been produced in ages.

I may have put it in the wrong forum to begin with "General" instead of "General D&D". And: thanks!

In Ptolus--which I understand was the actual campaign you ran for a long time--the final dungeon at the end of the whole campaign contains a lot of basically numerically-intense monsters, like: x levels of fire resistance plus an amulet of lightning resistance plus immunity to necrotic damage...

I don't know if there's a rule like you can't link to your own stuff, if so, mod me, but I figured this was of general interest: D&D in Vice Magazine.