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Yeah, that's one of the problems with banning magic item stores, especially if you also insist on handing out randomly generated treasure: the party is inevitably going to accumulate a pile of magic items they've outgrown and/or have no use for -- which contributes to magic items feeling boring...

The only way this game is crunchier than D&D is if you ignore D&D's 100 pages of spells.

Yeah, the "problems" with guns come up when you start treating them like Wands of Instant Death and then feel you have to balance them with long reload times, expensive ammunition, etc., until they become useless and no fun. Meanwhile, in most fantasy media that includes guns, they're just a...

Excessive planning, excessive timidity in exploration (the "poke everything with a 10' pole" style of play), and combats that are just there for attrition and/or XP.

Yeah. In situations like this it's all too common for martial characters who don't have reach weapons to get stuck with no way to engage the monsters, leaving them with little to do beyond plink away with a javelin or bow.

If you're talking about magical effects that PCs can never have, note the casual mention of the monsters in the ziggurat being charmed to stay put. Charm monster is not a permanent effect in 1E, and it's not one of the spells that can be augmented by permanency. And even if it could be, every...

I don't play 5E, and nothing I've seen of the "fixes" makes it any more interesting. So no.

It's the trickle-down theory of RPGs.

One of the things I learned running 4E is that I'd rather have one 60-minute fight where there's a lot going on and everyone has opportunities to do cool stuff, instead of six 10-minute fights that are just rolling and marking off spells and HP.

If you're referring to the Pathfinder 2E playtest, that was free. Paizo also printed and sold a physical copy of the playtest rules, but that was aimed at collectors and completists; you did not have to buy it to participate in the playtest.

Not at all. I stopped playing in the late 3.5 era, and quit again in 2014 (unless you consider offshoots like 13th Age or Pathfinder to be D&D).

4E fighters can actually do respectable damage -- not as much as a barbarian or a ranger, maybe, but they're the hardest-hitting defenders in the game.

Note that many of the journalists who have been laid off by G/O in the past have gone on to set up creator-owned, subscription-based news sites -- e.g., the Deadspin refugees created Defector, Kotaku writers have created Aftermath, and some Jalopnik alumni now write at The Autopian. So if you...

I assume that's the royal we. Because I don't sit down to a Star Wars game expecting to play a character on the order of Aunt Beru, Willrow Hood, or Elan Sleazebaggano. Not in 1987, and not now. Nor do I expect many people play a superhero game expecting to spend twenty years of adventuring...

In the DC Universe game, characters are built using a pool of dice. At the lowest tier (which cites Batman as an exemplar), a starting character gets 65 dice. At the highest tier, where you're supposed to be a hero like Superman or the Flash, you get 85 dice to make your character. Meanwhile...

For some reason, West End really hated the idea of players being able to make characters as competent as the ones from their licensed properties. In the Hercules & Xena game, for instance, if you sat down hoping to play Hercules or Xena, or even lesser characters from the shows like Gabrielle or...

Like when Fafhrd swims up a cloud bank to reach a flying ship in "The Mouser Goes Below"? Or his rocket-powered ski jump in "The Snow Women"? Or the running fight with assassins while sliding at high speed down the face of a glacier in "The Seven Black Priests"? Swords and sorcery characters...

In fact, having one pool of abilities for both PCs and NPCs is arguably more video-gamey -- you can see it in MMOs, for instance, where there's only so much of the budget that can go to animations and power design, so NPCs end up using copied versions of PC abilities. Plus, using PC-available...

I guess I should be able to hit like Ohtani, read a defense like Jalen Hurts, and vault like Simone Biles if I just train enough. It'd be inconsistent and unrealistic if people had different capabilities, after all.

It's not particularly difficult once you wrap your head around it, but then you can say the same thing about building a character in Champions, which to me has always felt like way too much work. I liked DC Heroes back in the 90s, but again, I don't think it holds up particularly well today...