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I'm planning a weekly campaign that's about a two-hour drive each way. We might take turns hosting, which will make things easier for us, the people two hours away... and maybe the people an hour away in a different direction, if we can get them.

The difference is, if I've put the ogre on the left side of the fork in advance, I've also put ways for the PCs to find out there's an ogre there, or at least there are ogres in the area. If there's a choice the players have to make, that choice is meaningful. Otherwise, it's the illusion of choice.

They're just being faithful to continuity. Forget this episode being the reason that M'Benga isn't the Chief Medical Officer under Kirk-- this episode is the reason that the ship's therapist is a bridge officer position a hundred years from now.

That's exactly what I'm aiming for. We work together before the game to establish why the characters are adventurers and why they're adventuring together, and I present them-- diegetically, organically-- a list of opportunities for them to explore, and they can go explore them or make their own...

Thing is... as much as this episode interrogated that trope, I think it rejected and rebuked it as fiercely as anything else Star Trek has ever done. M'Benga killed three Klingon officers with a knife. They were enemy combatants and war criminals in a declared war zone, his actions saved...

This isn't illusionism. When the player decides their character uses a glaive and the umpire doesn't "sure check" them, they're both deciding that glaive-wielders and magical glaives are going to be a little more common in the campaign world. If I put a magical glaive in the hands of a minor...

Three or four parts plain tomato sauce to one part banana ketchup and one part sweetened condensed milk. Salt and heat to taste. Serve over thoroughly cooked spaghetti noodles and top with sliced browned hot dogs and shredded jack cheese. Changed my life, man.

As a matter of fact, I do see it as very similar to fudging the dice: it's a very simple and convenient tool for keeping the game going in the direction you want it to go, until your players notice it. And another way it's a lot like fudging the dice is, once your players have caught you doing...

You only harbor this ridiculous bias against ketchup because you've never had it made out of bananas. Banana ketchup is the ultimate condiment that can be used in or on anything that normally calls for any tomato-based sauce.

"I am having my share of enemies, yes, but none who are going to this much of trouble to be taking me alive. Prisoners, yes, maybe we are. Prisoners or guests, our hosts are wanting something from us, and wanting it badly to have us summoned. If they are pretending to offering us a choice, we...

Literally only 3.0 and 3.5. B/X went up to 14, BECMI went up 36, and AD&D went up as far as anyone wanted to take it, as long as you were human and not a monk. Late AD&D did "epic" stuff starting as early as 9th level, but only really ramped it up in Dark Sun with the Dragon Kings supplement.

For all of its myriad faults in its game design and cultural sensitivity, Oriental Adventures was an essential part of AD&D and should have been considered a core rulebook. The classes and monsters and proficiency rules-- admittedly, the races were weak and "honor" is little better than...

The first claim is pretty subjective, but I'll stand by it. Just look at the new classes in Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy, then pop over to d20PFSRD.com and look at some of the third-party classes or class archetypes and imagine them simplified and available right next to them. It's a...

Point blank, the best sources for practically limitless content-- any kind of content-- for specific OSR games isn't the OSR itself, it's the third-party ecosystems for PF1 and 5e. It just takes more effort to translate and implement than the pure stuff. Of course, a lot of the best OSR stuff...

"We file the reports." Pike knows Chapel and M'Benga are lying, but he can't prove it-- and isn't sure he wants to prove it, for the reasons I've proposed. How we can tell that Star Trek is a utopia is that it matters that they lied about it, and that it matters that Pike can't prove it.

Oh yeah? Name an admiral from the entire run of TNG that wasn't at least as corrupt as this. The utopia of Star Trek is that a man like M'Benga is not the hero for his actions and that a man like Pike has to put Doing the Right Thing above his career or his personal loyalties. Star Trek isn't a...

There would not have been a formal court martial in any event. Their "peace ambassador" being stabbed to death with his own weapon in a Starfleet sickbay would look like a love tap compared to the black eye M'Benga's court martial would give them. Paperclipping the Butcher of J'Gal is only the...

The fact that M'Benga got away with "murder" is the point. There's no question that the courts would be on his side if Starfleet pressed the matter; there's no doubt they wouldn't be if they knew the whole truth. That allows us to ask the question of if they should be. And I am of two minds...

Yes, there is definitely extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the universe. It is possible they've visited Earth or contacted humanity previously, but I find it incredibly unlikely that any human was made aware of this contact without making every human aware of this contact.

M'Benga never says the ambassador started the fight. Only that he didn't.