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I'm not sure if already posted about it: I'm currently reading 'the Unconsoled' by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's been compared to Kafka's work and 'Alice in Wonderland', but so far I'd say it's simply a novel following dream logic: Morphing locations, strangers that turn out to be old friends on closer...

What do you need the stats for? The only time I used commoners in 4e they worked like an environmental hazard, i.e. a fleeing mob that impeded the PCs.

Since I'm not supposed to bash shows I don't care for: - I enjoyed Jessica Jones and Daredevil (haven't watched any of the other netflix superhero shows, yet) - Agents of SHIELD has kind of grown on me. It started out okay but gets better with each new season so far.

In Ars Magica the majority of adventures are also about politics and intrigue. Whether it's about dealing with the local nobility, the Church, Faerie courts or other covenants in their Tribunal, you always have to tread carefully and make deals. It's really rare that don't have to think about...

I don't think there's much of a point in trying to go beyond the basic definition of an RPG. As the article says in the introduction, an RPG is a game involving roleplaying. And that's really all that's required. Adding any additional requirement is going to result in one or several RPGs that...

While the list is already impressively exhaustive, I'd also have added (& voted for) Tribe 8

Trail of Cthulhu: Imho, it's 'Call of Cthulhu' done right. I really like the strong focus on investigation and storytelling and the vague monster descriptions & stats. The thing is: The CoC made for some great reading and promised great gameplay but for me they somehow always failed to work well...

You bet! And it's long overdue, too. I'm just a bit sad they didn't just continue their series of free articles (Planeshift). It's a big advantage if they can reuse the extensive artwork that has been created for Magic. At least theoretically that means they can spend more resources on the...

Interesting. In the Guild Wars CRPG they were also called Tengu. I always wondered about that because to me they were clearly D&D's Kenku.

Yep, I was immediately reminded of a Mythos-style ghoul.

Clearly an attempt at min-maxing: "Well, my Int stat may be low, but I've got the 'intelligent' ability. Surely that must give me an advantage here?"

I recall an adventure where the GM was trying to tease us by granting our heroes a view into a treasure chamber containing the objective of our quest through a tiny barred window. As it happened I had found a potion of gaseous form in our previous adventure, allowing us to grab the mcguffin...

Don't forget that there are plenty of monsters (especially Elite and Solo) that can make several melee attacks with their attack actions. If a monster can attack several heroes it probably won't mind hitting itself with one of them.

Is it, though? This is exactly the kind of attitude I've seen in plenty of Paladin PCs. They don't mind committing genocide if they believe a species to be 'inherently evil'. Thanks to D&D's crappy alignment system this works perfectly fine. And what does this tell you about D&D's villains? Most...

That's not quite true. I actually consider villains that are simply 'Evil' (with a capital 'E', no less) considerably less interesting than villains that are just misguided. Villains should have comprehensible motivations. If you want to be really clever, create villains with goals that aren't...

I disagree. First, I actually believe that D&D has never been a good introduction to roleplaying games. Among all the different RPG systems it's the one that shows its miniature wargaming roots the most. If you weren't introduced to roleplaying by someone else, you'd have had a hard time to...

No. I'm playing RPGs to play characters that are different from myself.

Define 'minor'! Iow: Nope. A few ideas from 4e were used in 5e, but in all ways that count, it's a different game. Regarding this e-sports thingy: Yuck! Luckily, I will be able to completely ignore it just like all of the other icky things they did with the D&D trademark, e.g. the movies.

One of the truly great RPG designers who was far ahead of his time. He will be greatly missed.

I never cared much for Basic D&D. I'd play it if no AD&D group was available, but didn't really enjoy it. It was too simplified for my taste and I thought having races (elves, dwarves, gnomes, ...) as character classes was really stupid. One of my friends was a fan, though, and always tried to...