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Apropos of complexity, I am not so sure that the pendulum, as it were, has swung away from complexity that much. Mid-to-high-complexity games, from D&D to Pathfinder to Warhammer, still have massive player bases, after all. Shadowdark has been pretty popular - but so have Daggerheart and Draw...

To my mind, money in an RPG is a tool to facilitate any or all three of: Score-keeping behaviour (numbers go up big! Yaaay!) Giving the players interesting decisions to make. Helping the world feel lived-in, alive, like a place that exists independently of the gameplay. The more you want to...

Just so I'm clear, are you complaining about spell saving throw DCs being missing? The saving throw DCs that you find in a big red text box at the bottom of the class board?

Hit points are the worst game mechanic except for all the other mechanics that have been tried from time to time.

The logic of spell point progression is the base cost of 2 for a 1st-level spell, then a 1-point increase per spell level, except at spell levels that correspond with tier breakpoints - character levels 5, 11, and 17 for 3rd, 6th, and 9th-level spells - which have a 2-point increase. The spell...

This strikes me as an unproductive, reductive truism, in that it's true but unhelpful if we stop further analysis or discussion at this point. We may as well all just stop playing D&D and start playing Tetris if the only thing that matters is that we "enjoy it". Clearly, playing D&D is better...

Spells such as create food and water still exist in Level Up!, and not only does the ranger class still exist in Level Up!, if anything the class has even more widgets with which to interact with exploration or logistical play than does the 2014!5e ranger, much less the 2024!5e ranger. As such I...

First, I'm annoyed that I feel compelled to repeat myself here: an optional "logistics matter" rules module is contingent on D&D wanting to remain a "biggest tent possible" game. D&D has certainly gone further in moving away from that ambition in the 2024 rules update, but to my mind the very...

I'm broadly of the view that D&D could stand to pick a lane on this kind of thing, which I would imagine means leaning into heroic fantasy tropes with much less concern for logistics except as an occasional challenge, in much the same way that food is presented as a concern occasionally in, say...

What some OSR circles have (unfortunately IMO) taken to mean by skilled play is rather like a narrated-exploratory play loop, appealing primarily to playgroups who value aesthetics of challenge and exploration in their RPG gameplay: The DM/GM describes what the player characters perceive in the...

"I used to be a medieval knight, like you; then I took an arrow to the knee."

I dunno, letting your players define the setting to that level of scale feels like painting a scene to me. More of a difference in degree than in kind. But I suppose you're correct to suggest a difference between how it feels in gameplay proper during a session versus as backstory elements...

I did this in the D&D game I'm running mostly for kids, and at a pretty high level of world-building, too: Thanks to my son's background for his character, the world was subject to a devastating plague in the recent past. Another player portrayed her character as an escapee from a...

I'd concur that the purpose of a retroclone is, by definition, to port over rules and mechanics with great fidelity, and have voted with that in mind.

Wasn't there a game brought up here on EN World where the player characters are collecting ingredients for magical jams (very cozy concept), only the magical jams are what's keeping their valley in the light of the sun or otherwise holding back eternal night or some such (definite stakes)? I'll...

I'm indifferent, leaning towards kind of liking it. I'd probably prefer either a detached crystalline wing that was more obviously psionically-powered, or rather that all the gem dragons shared something like this opposite wing form. My son likes the design.

As it happens, I shared a story about this sort of thing in depth a year and a half ago. My wife passed in the summer of 2021. She'd been playing in two D&D games since her cancer came back in the spring of 2019. When she passed, the "kids" game - players were my wife, our son, one of my wife's...

Gotta say, this looks pretty cool. Might be a good way to get some friends who aren't into D&D into RPGs.

This is simply false. The SRD is a tool for developers who are creating third-party content. I mean, you do you, but I find having to navigate through pictures, blog posts, and other content to get to a recipe to be infuriating. I thus cannot find the words to express my disagreement with the...

Poor Anthony..