Recent content by Celebrim

It depends on what you want it to make and how picky you are. My problem is that I have a tendency to imagine this all in my head, and I want the image creator to be able to take my visual description and make something that looks vaguely like what I imagined. It's pretty lousy at that...

I started with 1e, moved to 3e and I'm pretty happy there. Just like nothing moved me away from my 1e house rules until 3e came along, it's going to be really hard to move me away from my 3e house rules. I also run D6 and BRP. But I had a ton of fun with Goblonia a few years back at a...

Pound of Chessex and 5-6 other sets - however many that comes out to. Playing online only the last 4 years has dampened my passion for dice. I'm missing face to face, the rattle of dice, the breaking of bread together. But my players are spread out over about 60 miles now and we haven't...

Sadly, my group has dispersed enough that we don't meet face to face anymore. So the ancient rituals of table snacks are no longer performed.

Almost certainly, but that was a major incentive to interact with the environment that was missing from later editions. I didn't like what gold for XP did to any adventure format that wasn't haven/delve (what is today called West Marches), but I did miss that enthusiasm for poking around to try...

I never had problems about getting my 3e Era players excited about magic items. What I missed was the 1e Era excitement about finding gold.

applause Preach it brother.

I'll note that this proof D&D already has nothing in common with a medieval society. That sort of leeway in a medieval society only exists if you are of the knightly caste, which itself has its own rules and expectations about how you behave. D&D - especially post Gygax D&D - consistently seems...

Just to give an example of what I'm talking about, compare the flexibility of the 3e Paladin to the "Book of the Righteous" Holy Warrior. Now think about the fact that you could take the concept from the "Holy Warrior" class one step further, to create say 900 different customizable holy...

Player narrative has a tendency to be just color unless something validates it. I won't disagree with that.

Then I would encourage you to go read that thread again, because so many people were responding without listening to a single thing I said. I don't know how many people were going on and on about complex look up tables and other things irrelevant to my point. I mean I feel we're in pretty...

It's not that surprising that you'd be opposed to flexibility. The more powers you make, the more things any given character can't have access to. You end up ultimately in the 1e/2e AD&D situation where you start finding that you need a new class for every single character. Classes...

Each time a class is made, dozens of character concepts die. The more you silo abilities and powers, the more ways to play slip through your fingers. Rather than making more bad classes to cover niches left out by narrow rigid classes, you should be demanding more flexible classes.

There is a complex trade off going here. My current set of players are mostly happy with challenge as an aesthetic and do want to face a good mix of obstacles and triumphs and do what to feel their triumphs are earned based on overcoming real difficulty, so in this case I don't really have to...

You know, I once quit a campaign as a player because I thought we were leveling too fast and gaining too much treasure for it to be fun. I think you are describing a particularly subjective experience. My general theory on RPGs is to be the GM I would want to have as a player; and to be the...