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I always thought of AD&D as being wargame inspired, that's pretty clear. But 4E's criticism was that it was heavily influenced by video game design. Anyone who was deeply in to World of Warcraft in the late 00's could see the WoW DNA influencing 4E design. The secondary influence was pretty...

I was very much a 2nd edition AD&D fan. I have fond memories of puzzling out 1E, then referring to B/X to solve mysteries such as initiative and turn actions/order. I survived the attack charts when Dragon Magazine produced a Combat Wheel which my group used religiously to figure out attack...

I am so glad you linked that, I had assumed these were out of stock everywhere. Ordered!

I'm learning the system now and my plan is to run it instead of 5.5E which I am thoroughly burned out on. So far I am liking what Dagggerheart has to offer, and am keen to give it a spin. I'll be devising my own setting for use with it, though.

Sorry to hear, though also amazed to know it went so long. I subscribed back in the mid eighties and loved every issue, it was in retrospect the very-very-very-slow paper edition of a pre-internet gaming forum for the day, along with all the fanzines we were constantly knocking out.

A roll low mechanic has the advantage of creating a limited or closed range, which means you can usually have a more "realistic" result than an open-ended system. With games like Dragonbane, BRP, Runequest etc. I have noticed that the players struggle the most when they come over from D&D, where...

I am still musing about how yesterday I got a mail delivery (on a holiday no less) of several packages containing two new Traveller books (a ships book and Bounty Hunter book), Delta Green's latest hardcover, Daggerheart and a perfect condition copy of Avalon Hill's Runequest Vikings. Then I...

I just grabbed this, it really looks like the sort of system I need right now to offset my terminal D&D burnout.

This is exactly what I was hoping Mongoose would do with Dark Conspiracy once they got it, very exciting!

LOL reading that gave me a nervous tick ;-)

GURPS Beastmaster!

Speaking as an active Pathfinder 2E GM and former 1E GM, I always thought 2E was best characterized as "Written by GMs to make it super easy for GMs, while putting those uppity players in their place as penance for all the years of optimizing min/maxer hell they put us through in 1E." But your...

LOL! Look me up if you're ever in Albuquerque =)

Given Orcus is an old Roman appelation for Death (also: Dis Pater, Pluto, etc.) that they borrowed from the etruscans, I assume WotC can only specifically claim his very specific D&D appearance and function as a demon of the undead?

Given that scenario it makes me wonder if my players cheat lol

Actually my issues with the 2025 MM are different.....and definitely not on balance. I have caved in to my group and been running it for a few weeks now, and have noticed the monsters have more punch (at least partially due to some of the OPs points on design), and while not all monsters are...

Fortunately the 2014 DMG did include good rules for GMs to make NPC statblocks, with customization rules by race. So while it would have been nice to have a quick stat block or two in the 2014 MM, in fact the DMG provided all the rules needed, a good design that somehow did not make the cut in...

Sure, I can agree on that. I think the element of threat is more evident, even in the examples you give (but yeah, who wins initiative and doesn't roll poorly helps a lot). But I've had very little success even when the mind flayer wins initiative in 5E to contrast.

True that. I guess what I was trying to say is: my group is old, experienced, and thinks tactically, and I have more than one rules lawyer in the group. They will find such an encounter trivial unless I stack the odds against them, and this has been an ongoing issue for most of the years I have...

This is a very specific approach to the matter with WotC. To contrast, Pathfinder 2E has handled this exceedingly well and stands out for providing all the tools a GM could need for NPCs of various ancestries (and custom NPC stat blocks in the NPC Core, no less) while also meeting the...