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It may also be worth noting that the Torchbearer GM's ability to kill characters is heavily circumscribed. There are only three ways a GM can kill a character in Torchbearer: 1. If a character has a full condition track (hungry & thirsty, angry, afraid, exhausted, injured, and sick) and the...

Take what I say with a grain of salt, but I don't think Torchbearer encourages "GM vs. the players." The game is mean to the characters so the GM doesn't have to be. GMs should be fans of Torchbearer player characters, but part of that is putting them in adverse situations to see what they do...

Neat thread! I ran the Moathouse in Torchbearer for one of my groups in 2013 or 2014 and we had a blast with it. I statted up the monsters as prep, but otherwise ran it more or less straight from the module. In my (admittedly biased) experience, running/converting modules on the fly in...

The PAX shows are great, but when they even release attendance numbers, they release turnstile numbers. That means if you attend PAX East three days in a row, you get counted three times. If they report 70,000 visitors, it's really somewhere in the neighborhood of 23,000 unique visitors, and...

Sure. It's actually both. When the players describe their actions, the GM has two options: 1. First, the GM can decide that the players have come up with a Good Idea. If the GM decides the players have come up with a smart approach to a problem--a smart use of their gear, spells or bodies--he or...

I look forward to hearing what you think, good or bad!

Travel is part of the adventure phase!

Thanks for the interest guys! For the record, I want to say that I wouldn't consider Torchbearer a game for people that don't like Basic D&D. Luke and I both love D&D. He just finished running a year-long B/X game and my copy of Moldvay is one of my cherished RPG books. We've also been playing...

This is pure speculation on my part, but I think you have it backward. I think we're seeing the new Essentials approach because the market was not bearing up the old model any longer. That's not to suggest 4E is not doing well (I don't know one way or the other), but rather that it's getting to...

It depends on which Essentials Fighter is being played. The Knight gets access to stances like Cleaving Assault which works much like Cleave, or Hammer Hands, which allows you to push the enemy and then shift to stay with them. But I'm pretty sure the character in question is the Slayer version...

Uller, it looks like the Rogue was not using his Sneak Attack. He gets an additional +2d6 when he has Combat Advantage, and he should be able to achieve it almost every round. The Rogue from the Red Box is not quite as beefy as the Rogue built using Heroes of the Fallen Lands, but based on a...

Those results seem strange to me. I ran a 1st level adventure for my group using all Essentials classes on Sunday, and the Thief alone was doing an average of 20.5 damage with each hit. Add in a Slayer and a Hexblade, and our encounters went very quickly. I think the longest encounter went 6 or...

Hi Jim, Interesting stuff. I too found Aria and Aria Worlds to be fascinating books, though deeply flawed as part of a game. I've always found those books to be inspiring, though, and drew on their ideas when creating the World Burner for the Burning Sands: Jihad supplement for Burning Wheel...

I'm in a weekly Burning Wheel game and a weekly 4e game.

This is all the ones I could think of, in no particular order (I've played them all at least once, and many much more than that): D&D (BECMI), AD&D 1, AD&D 2, D&D 3e, D&D 4e Star Frontiers Villains & Vigilantes Ars Magica 1e Cyberpunk Shadowrun 1e MetaScape TORG RuneQuest...

Hey man, I'm the editor and a developer of the Burning Wheel line, so I'm biased. But here are my thoughts: There is a great deal of variety within the lifepaths themselves, but the dwarves, elves and orcs draw heavily from The Hobbit, LOTRO, and the Silmarillion. The standard lifepaths give...