NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7036481" data-attributes="member: 82106">[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] in College Professor Mode is pretty good <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I don't think you CAN construct a game that can do justice to all of Appendix N. It was inspiration, not emulation. Middle Earth's magic for instance simply doesn't work in a way that would be very amenable to use by PCs at all. Magic in that world is a skill which taps into primal forces of creation, or else has extreme spiritual consequences and is effectively divine (or diabolic) in nature. Charming someone for instance in JRRT's world view would be a heinous crime. Only servants of higher powers can access magic, or else you have to reach levels of craftsmanship and erudition that require 1000's of years of practice.HPL's cosmic horror simply isn't compatible with any sort of 'adventuring' paradigm. The investigators of CoC are pretty good RPG characters, you can play out that genre, but you do have to expect it to play out along certain fairly fixed lines. Something as open-ended as D&D could never fully embrace that sort of game. I think D&D isn't too far off with REH, but certainly the playing of spell casters is right out. Once you eliminate them from being PCs then you just run into the problems that were touched on above, D&D is all about careful crawling and exploration while cutting risks. Conan is all about grappling with tests of character in heroic fashion, which usually means taking crazy risks. If you tried to play a D&D character as Conan, you'd be ganked in no time. This is one reason why the Paladin is a problematic character archetype in D&D.Truthfully, D&D stole some superficial elements from the Appendix N works, maybe most from Vance as has been oft noted, and grafted them into its procedural challenge paradigm. D&D is much too thoroughly gamist to really faithfully emulate any genre.</blockquote>

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