Game design that I'm surprised didn't make it into more books

[theredrobedwizard]

I'd be interested in the historical fantasy and harry potter-ish material. Do you make them available?

Drop me an email; toritaka (at) gmail [dot] com

-TRRW

 

[maddman75]

I don't mean to be negative, but I know some players who are like this. They will never play with a rules-light system (Castles & Crusades, Savage Worlds, etc) if they believe it reduces the amount of customization and/or crunch. They also never/rarely DM, hardly a coincidence.

IME, they generally aren't very good players either. The argument that you don't want to learn a whole new ruleset works if the GM is trying to talk you into playing Exalted or Hero or something. But refusal to look at something like Savage Worlds or Unisystem makes no sense and personally I won't miss them at all.

I use D&D as a recruiting tool. When I need a new group I offer to run a D&D game for a few sessions so we can get the feel of each other, then talk about what we want to do. After that, it generally isn't too hard to get them to play whatever. I just got done running some folks through Forge of Fury, and now we're getting ready to start a new Buffy game.

Edit - By 'good players', I mean the kind of players that are good at the kinds of games that I run. Someone who values 'system mastery' isn't going to enjoy it as much, because for one I generally don't use the system to smack people down. If they're going to do something that is tactically foolish or get them an AoO I'll tell them before they do it. And if they try to do something outside the rules and its cool, I'll generally go along with it. Someone who thinks outside the box and really throws themselves into the game is at an advantage over someone who has every rule memorized. I could sum up my combat style with saying I'll worry about the rules, just tell me what your character wants to do.

So one person's 'good skilled player' is another's incompetent boob I guess.