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Um, no. In AD&D, stats had a much smaller effect on accuracy that kicked in around 16 and never went above 2 (except a +3 at 18/00 exceptional strength) In 3e, non-finesse melee fighters did get to add to accuracy and damage with a single stat. But not spellcasters, whose high casting stat...

Interestingly, SW didn't just arbitrarily make the squares bigger--they converted the 30 foot standard move into 10 meters, which meant it was only five squares. It helped make ranged combat a stand out a bit more, which was nice given the blaster-focused setting.

*I'd much rather count in ones than in fives. On a grid, one square/hex = one unit of movement is intuitive, and even in theatre of the mind, I mostly think about how many 'steps' a character can take. *Calling them "squares" or "hexes", though, is stupid. It yanks us out of the game world...

So looking at this interview, it looks like Zeb was aware he pronounced the word wrong* and the Sig-ill pronunciation was sort of an in-joke. Not the random mistake that I had thought. *"both technically correct" my ass! I just looked at five different dictionaries and they all only listed...

IIRC, the reason Sigil is prounounced with a hard G is because the person who originally named it (or at least the person who gave TSR's official pronuciation) mistakenly believed the original word was pronounced the same way. Given that, I think it should be in the Bulette category of the...

So why not restrict Dragonmarks gto help preserve the flavor of Eberron, rather than leave them unrestricted and making it more generic. Then add a sidebar that says "ask your GM if you want to ignore these racial restrictions."

If your goal is to increase specialization, then having different spells based on different stats will do that: in order to be effective, characters will pick one or two stats and focus on spells related to those. But if your goal is to simply prevent imbalance and create greater parity...

The real problem here is that we're discussing weapon damage type as though it was a separate thing from other damage types. Sure, skeleton is the only place in the playtest where slashing type damage comes up, but other creatures are called out as having immunities or restistances to fire...

Don't forget, "plus" "minus" and "times" are prepositions!

I'm not trying to say that wandering monsters are bad. In many cases, they can be great (I'm using them in my current campaign, in fact). My point is that they're a tool that makes more sense in some stories than in others--and that relying on the threat of wandering monsters as the primary...

Wandering monsters add verisimilitude in the wilderness, and in enemy bases--and basically nowhere else. The only other place they fit is ecosystem-style megadungeons, which themselves lack verisimilitude. In older editions, wandering monsters actually killed the verisimilitude in some...

Maybe looking to punish players for resting early or constraining player choice about when to rest aren't really the best uses of incentives. Players have goods reasons to stop when they do, and hitting them with wandering monsters doesn't really change the incentives (if you'll need combat...

Scheduled rest areas are, as many posters have pointed out, an awkward solution that sacrifices story concerns for the sake of game rules and game balance. But to all those people who have suggested that the problem is solved by wandering monsters and threat escalation--well, that's also a...

There are two kinds of monsters that work well in D&D: The fantasy monster, and the science-fiction monster. The fantasy monster works because it is familiar. It reminds us of the stories we read when we were children, of folktales passed down from ancient times. A red dragon is a fantasy...

On the contrary, I'd say "yes, and" is amazingly important for RPGs. DMs without enough "yes" or without enough "and" run some pretty boring games. I've long maintained that the best thing someone can do to be a better GM is to take an improv class. Not only is the "yes, and" lesson an...

The other question to ask yourself is this: What happens if they abandon the adventure right now? What happens if they leave the note behind the secret door and never learn what it says? (And I don't just mean what happens if the BBEG is left to carry out his plans without interference...

When it comes to resource management, the problem is that rules for grittiness and the feeling of grittiness can be mutually exclusive. When you describe characters as wandering through the desert, running out of food and water, crushed by the weight of your gear and the relentless heat of the...

So as I see it, there are two distinct forms of disadvantage that exist in RPGs There are intrinsic character traits that negatively affect the way he behaves, and there are external realities that impede his success. In literary theory, these would be termed flaws and handicaps respectively...

That's a pretty reasonable call for ray of stupidity. But I'm not sure why the DM would rule that way about glitterdust. If he doesn't want you countering invisibility, then he shouldn't let you take that spell in the first place. If the invisibility was supposed to be a retreating tactic...

The Warhammer Fantasy RolePlay 3e starter box. $100 if I recall.