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The Malazan Books of the Fallen? Gardens of the Moon came out in 1999 but the rest are 21st-century. Agreed on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and the Southern Reach trilogy. Also, I don't think anyone's mentioned The Martian yet. Does Cloud Atlas count as SF? A couple of the stories in it...

K. W. Jeter's Infernal Devices was steampunk before the term was coined. Cherie Priest's Boneshaker and its sequels. Felix Gilman's The Half-Made World is a particularly unique weird Western. Chris Wooding's Ketty Jay books (Revelation Falls et al). Michael Moorcock's Oswald Bastable...

I've read most of them. I haven't read any Brackett or St. Clair or much of Burroughs, Saberhagen, Williamson, or Fox (whose novels were mostly Conan knockoffs anyway). In any case, as good as most of the Appendix N books may be individually, most of them are not standing the test of time...

One of the things that made the 4E fighter stand out for me was that weapon choice actually mattered because of the feats and powers associated with each weapon type. Axes were less accurate but got bigger crits, spears and polearms were better for tripping and forced movement, swords were more...

Sorry, I'm not hearing what harm it does other than it's not to your taste. And you're not at my table, so you don't get a vote. To me, that doesn't look like punishing the player for trying the stunt, it is punishing the player for trying the stunt. Especially depending on how high you set...

And I see it as "What does it harm to let Legolas do this, other than possibly offending Celebrim's sensibilities?" See, it's not my scene the player is trying to "cheese" with "unnecessary showboating." It is, or should be, all of ours at the table. If Legolas is trying to get around the...

Uh huh. This is why in the pre-3E era (at least in my experience), you never, eeeeeever saw a fighter try to trip, or disarm, or try any swashbuckling tricks. Most DMs who tried to adjudicate those sorts of actions fell back on the called shot rules, so the player ended up eating a stiff penalty...

Not unless you count the original Against the Giants campaign, which was only vaguely Greyhawk-ish.

Never played it. I just don't find it very interesting as fantasy worlds go.

No. I have zero interest in 5E. If I want to play D&D-style fantasy, I'd be more likely to reach for 13th Age, PF2, or Beyond the Wall first.

I have never stopped gaming, but I stopped playing D&D during late 3.5E, came back with 4E, and left again with 5E.

Note that 4E allowed you to use either Wisdom or Charisma to determine your Will defense. I always liked that -- Charisma should be able to do more than just be the social-fu stat.

Besides the cultural aspect, smoking was also an easy way for writers to insert little bits of "business" to break up long conversations. And you could reveal things about a character's personality and emotions from their choice of smoking materials, how they handled them, etc.

This sort of thing was really common in 90s games: skill lists that cover every single thing a character might possibly want to do, regardless of whether it might make sense for the game or genre. Gotta have that Underwater Basketweaving skill in there!

The Realist perspective sometimes leads to what's occasionally called the Guy at the Gym problem -- where the mighty warrior who's at or near maximum human physical ability can still only accomplish the sort of feats that a moderately fit 21st-century human can do, because the DM thinks anything...

I mentioned that the Stone Thief is a living dungeon, as in it's actually alive. It travels around beneath the surface, occasionally popping up to eat buildings and towns for more material to extend itself. Which, of course, should include places that are important to the PCs, to motivate them...

Obligatory vote here for Eyes of the Stone Thief. Since it's a living dungeon, it's designed for multiple visits and it can shift around between visits. It can pop up wherever the PCs go (and if they piss it off enough, it will actually start hunting them). 13 levels and over 350 pages of...

Yeah, there are a couple fan-made datafiles for Dazzler floating around out there, and they all work by giving her a Limit to shut down her light powers when there's not enough sound around for her to convert, plus letting her use a reaction to step up or create a stunt die if she's hit by a...

Another odd thing about the Rank system -- it's apparently assigned based not on the character's comics power level, but on their sphere of influence. Like, Daredevil is Rank 5 because he mostly sticks to one neighborhood, Spider-Man is Rank 10 because he's best known as New York's hero, but...

They don't. An opponent who can challenge a Rank 25 character is completely untouchable by a Rank 5 character, and will turn the Rank 5 character into paste with a single attack. As for noncombat challenges, the game uses difficulties that scale by Rank. I know some people hate this approach...