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You know how in Battletech moving first is a handicap? Those with the initiative move second, so they can perfectly respond to the opponent's plans? Running an adventure without having anything written down and decided before hand is like always having the initiative. Your plans are nebulous...

Sure seems like you are. I went to check. My shortest full adventure of the current campaign was "Plague of Lies". Notes for it are 24000 words (as measured by Microsoft Word). But my longest was the opening adventure of the campaign "The Dogfish" which has notes at over 90000 words. But I...

D&D 3.0e would be my go to. I have extensive house rules tweaked to deal with the balance issues and cut down the content bloat of 3.5e and it is the most versatile and powerful game system I know especially over the long haul. Other choices would be BRP or a derivative (CoC, Pendragon), D20...

A typical adventure will have 40,000 to 75,000 words worth of notes. And with that I would bet I ad lib 40% of the content of the adventure. And it's not because I don't use my notes. It's because you can't plan for everything. But without those notes, I don't think it would be possible for...

Yep. My only point is the idea that your way of seeing things is just a natural, obvious and logical conclusion of the setting is false. We see things different ways not because it follows inevitably from imagining what the real game world is like if it were "realistic", but because of...

It's not at all clear to me that that is true. Well, because he has spent more time as child hearing stories of trolls, and as a young man swapping tavern tales at the bar, heard more tales of heroism and of daring, than any player of D&D has spent reading the monster manual. He lives in a...

I have never have a PC who was a 25-year-old illiterate from a medieval village. The last illiterate PC in my game was a barbarian from an island full of rare monsters, who'd left and became a pirate. One of my general rules is to assume that every intelligent inhabitant of a D&D campaign...

I was just at half-price books. They had a big stack of "The Game Masters Book of Legendary Dragons" which is basically a bunch of unique dragons with backstories and unique abilities. Sounds like your sort of thing.

If he's different, he's unique. And if you really want to apply some sliding scale of uniqueness, then to be truly unique he must be the only dragon.

They already are, as your example of Themberchaud shows. The question I would have is what are you losing and gaining by such a change? I don't honestly think you gain anything at all. While it's a really good thing if each DM pours creativity into each monster that they create and gives them...

I really do love their work. They are very underrated and deserve the same sort of esteem as Gygax and Gregg Stafford and Sandy Petersen and Marc Miller and Frack Chadwick. I think so many of those early designers just don't get the credit they deserve. That said, after 300 hours running the...

Not sure what your point is. Me too. Still not sure what your point is.

If I ever get ahold of the D6 IP or get drafted as the lead designer on a new edition of D6 Star Wars I will definitely take those ideas into account. It's a more narrative mechanic than was common back in 1987 when the game was designed, but I can definitely see having a tension meter that...

That has occurred to me. This group is very cautious and I would say at times overly cautious to their own detriment. They are risk adverse. I get really frustrated by their ability to evade dramatic sequences even when it would be to their advantage to try. And I know it's not just me...

I agree with all that. Not sure where you are going with this. Like Galadriel, I don't understand what you here mean by the word "magical". Accessing the force is perceived as magic by the unlearned because they don't understand it, and they call the things that they don't understand...

I'm not very familiar with Burning Wheel, but I am familiar with Mouseguard. The metacurrencies in Mouseguard are really quite weak and are as you say there to mitigate somewhat against the odds being stacked against the player. I'm not really a fan of Luke Crane as a designer, but in this...

As I played the game, this is correct. A M-U in melee combat could not cast a spell. In 3e D&D terms trying to cast a spell in melee drew an attack of opportunity, and a successful hit automatically ruined the spell. Concentration checks or combat casting just didn't exist. Spell-casters in...

That's kind of my point exactly. Kenobi had a lot more riding on resolving the issue without conflict than his own personal safety. As such, I would have warned Kenobi's player he's treading a gray line and to be careful, but I wouldn't have treated this as an example of using a Force Power in...

Tell me more. For example, by the time you had played 7-8 years, how big were the top end dice pools of the players? By the RAW there are no caps on how big a dice pool can get. My suspicion is that the game then comes down to Aunt Mae can defeat Galactus if she has 3-5 fate points to spend...

Well first of all, there are no Jedi in this game. This is set during the early years of Rise of the Empire, and any surviving Jedi right now are being hunted down and killed by Darth Vader and his minions. And the entire party is Bounty Hunters working as official and licensed Imperial...