Recent content by timbannock

I played a bit of HG 1e and 2e, and a bunch of Tribe 8, both 1e and the 2e/SilCore version. The systems in both were a bloated mess. They read fine, but once we dove in there was just too many attributes, too many skills, and too much modifier fiddly-ness going on for a system that's meant to...

Oh there will be. Seems like VTTs are where all the money is in TTRPGs right now, and I doubt that will change significantly in a few years. In fact, I'd argue this news, Roll20's buying spree, and Hasbro dumping millions into DDB and its forthcoming VTT suggest we're in the next phase of what...

It certainly embiggens the pool greatly, and with Discord and other ways to curate your gaming social circle, it's fantastic. That said, I don't know if it's just me, but any session past 2.5-3 hours is painful. This really limits the amount of mechanically complex stuff I can jam into a...

Congrats, Adam!

Tactical 5E is just PHB, Kobold Press' Tome of Heroes, some of the mods in the DMG, and Flee Mortals as your primary monster book. Forge of Foes and The Monsters Know will be your other resources for encounter design, but I think the above books would be your full library.

Agree with all of this, but mostly just wanted to reply in order to say how shocked I am with how little they were working with! A team of 35 to get that degree of quality is absolutely insane. Even a mid-tier SFX-heavy American movie has easily over 3x that many people on slightly fewer total...

Exactly this. Some of the most consistently good, nuanced and believable acting I've seen has been in short-form horror movies over on YouTube and Shudder by people with like 75 credits that are all "Guy In Convenience Store #3". On top of that, there are plenty of name actors that will...

Along those lines, even if it's not your bag I strongly recommend looking at Shadowdark and The Monster Overhaul. Both are very different, but one thing both do better than most products is give you so many useful resources for building stuff very quickly and/or on the fly. My preferred game is...

Life is tough and it's short, so do what brings you joy. Learning to be more firm about various aspects, not playing certain games even if it means playing with different players or self-exclusion of people you like, playing in less-than-ideal venues (loud stores or looking at a VTT on your...

Thanks for checking, but nope! The animal-people and animal-mounts were all a bit more alien and not easily identifiable as to what animal they were exactly a version of. It was weird and bordering on grimdark, but not quite grimdark.

Going in a completely different direction, if you want the "social stuff" but without the "bean-counting stuff" I highly recommend looking for a system that is very lightweight. Maybe not "as lightweight as possible" but perhaps very close. The reason is that the impact these sorts of things...

I've been searching for days since I saw this thread and haven't found it because I can't remember the name, so I'll post here and hopefully someone will swoop and save me from continuing to rack my brain. There are tons of artists that release art books of world-building, so that's a great...

I only recently ever got a look at those books because I was thinking of shoehorning them into a Seas of Vodari campaign I was running; I was basically adding any island-set D&D adventure that I could find into it. And I gotta say that while I ultimately passed on them for a variety of reasons...

Just a wild guess here, but I suspect some of this is due to "cool factor." I think the folks in charge of D&D want to push out stuff that is extremely, visually part of the "D&D brand" and that doesn't really get a lot of love elsewhere. Both Spelljammer and Planescape got these special sort of...

I would if I played it.