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Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist, or maybe I just don't have any better hobbies, but I think these are solvable problems. Even on a cultural level, but especially on an individual table-by-table level. I've had some luck with my "house rules", and I've had some luck with Brown M&M*s in my online...

So it's a bad pitch that nobody wants to play, but they're going to join the game anyway and ruin it for the person who wants to run that game and the theoretical players that actually joined that game because they wanted to play that game? And  somehow that's supposed to make them less of an...

At the risk of sounding like a smug, pompous know-it-all--I don't want to come across that way, but I am one so I can't always help it-- the problem with 3.X style games is that treasure is too vital to character progression to either "feel special" or leave to chance, while in 5E style games...

Oh, sure,  now you're interested in having a coherent baseline... :geek: Seriously, this isn't some statistical anomaly I'm talking about. I'm talking about every single game I've tried to run for anyone but my dedicated home group. Every time I've tried to run Street Fighter online, with an...

So do the players who insist on playing a character that doesn't fit with the game's premise. At best, they want to "play D&D" without other players interfering in the experience.

How on Earth do you think players create characters without defining at least some of those in the process? Especially if they've all talking to each other about their character concepts and how they fit together? When I say "no backstory before play", I'm including the character creation (and...

When did I do that? I'm a firm believer in Session Zero; my whole character creation paradigm doesn't work without it, because Session Zero is the term for when things like "rolling up characters together" happens. "No Backstory" is a bit of an exaggeration and a misnomer. You can have a...

My fault; nobody else actually calls it that. Fixed progression. The game would be Gestalt with limitations on multiclasing on top of the gestalt rules. Not a strict 1-20 progression, but something like having more than 2 base claasses or more than 1 Prestige Class costs something. (With NPC and...

The fact that you think your character needs to have an extensive backstory that doesn't involve the other PCs to be interesting is the problem. The fact you think your character can be interesting based on a bunch of "story elements" that don't involve the other players at the table is why I...

I'm usually the umpire and I usually prefer to be, but I get to sit on the other side of the screen sometimes. I spend a lot more time trying to design games than I spend either running or playing them.

Another reason I don't allow "backstories" in my games-- you create your character at the table, and your character's story is what happens at the table, so everyone gets to enjoy their characters being awesome at the table. Wouldn't believe some of the names I get called for telling people to...

Yeah. Probably never going to be my cup of tea, but I'm reacquiring the books. I'm starting to consider my perpetual "work in progress" to be a mashup between Sword World and A5E with a bunch of "90s Old School" in it.

It seems that people who don't understand your problem from your end are taking offensive because your phrasing implies that you don't understand (or care about) their problem on their end. You're conflating a behavior that bothers you with bad faith motivation on your part; they're insulted...

It occurs to me that many fantasy RPGs (including some D&D offshoots) have a system wherein, instead of having a bunch of separate ancestries for mixed heritages, they have a little subsystem for being "half whatever". There's little practical reason why this couldn't be used for "cultural...

Try it in 3.PF, where you can also ban the core  classes.

Not going to comment on "circus troupe", but I agree with you about preferring a humancentric campaign. As an umpire, I have a strong preference for at least half the PCs to be human or half-human, and the rest to either be common or setting-specific races, with or without the one PC that has to...

HARP does it best: the players choose group objectives together, and gain shared XP for making progress toward them, and then PC objectives individually that each PC gets XP for making progress toward. Always best to reward the behavior you want to encourage in game. And the best behavior to...

I'm referring to the first edition; I haven't purchased the second edition (yet). I'm being coy out of an abundance of caution because talking about the game and talking about the publisher are against the rules in a lot of communities, either because of political unpleasantness or ensuing legal...

I have always (almost exclusively) played multiclass characters, so I've played a lot of Thieves... but it was never really my "primary" class so I didn't get to play with its Kits much, outside of the Swashbuckler. Played a lot of Assassins, but only when I could use the 1E version or the...

I swear, there was a time in the relatively recent past when I  knew all of this. I can't remember anything right this week.