Recent content by Gorgon Zee

So, I do a lot of optimization for my day job, and a couple of concepts there I think are useful in the context of this discussion. The second is CONSTRAINTS. You must have constraints to optimize within, and although those can be just the rules system, many players optimize within a...

So, I do a lot of optimization for my day job, and a couple of concepts there I think are useful in the context of this discussion. The first is GOAL. Although you could say a character optimizer's goal is to make the most effective character possible, I think that in practice I've seen a...

Wining and losing are what characters do; do not what players do. As a player, your focus is having fun and (I strongly hope) helping others have fun. A player does not win, unless they happen to be in an actual competition (like the Cthulhu Masters). But players can be happy with how their...

I grew up in the British Isles both watching the movies and reading the books. One of the reasons I strongly enjoyed Daniel Craig as Bond was that I felt he had the necessary coldness. James Bond, in the books, shows an ability to be clinically businesslike and switch from romantic mood to a...

Sites used by ChatGPT to form the above article (enworld did not make it ...): adeptplay.com amazon.com amazingstories.com anyflip.com blogofholding.com brandesstoddard.com critical-hits.com d20srd.org dandwiki.com dmdavid.com dnd4.fandom.com dndbeyond.com dmsguild.com dungeonsmaster.com...

So, to provide another version of the same question I used o3 to evaluate the following prompt: You are a professional writer creating an article for experienced roleplayers. Your task is to create an article that describes D&D 4E as a TTRPG. In your article, use headers to organize the...

Mechanical Characteristics of D&D: Class & Level Progression Six(-ish) Ability Scores Hit Points - Damage chips away at a single pool D20 - Roll 1d20 + modifiers vs. a target number AC - Armor makes you harder to hit, not mitigating damage Play Experience Characteristics: Kitchen-Sink High...

The graph shows activity over time, but was actually pretty stable for the last few months. In the past I have used Gen Con catalogs to measure popularity, weighting events by number of people that could attend (PFS and 5E events often have a lot of tables running). It's not bad for...

Looking at google search trends recently, we have shadowdark and cosmere scoring <10, daggerheart coming in at just below 30 and D&D at 90. I cannot add in pathfinder as there's a lot of non-rpg related search for that. In terms of general interest as measured by search terms, Daggerheart is...

No disagreement here. Maybe Firefly might need some sci-fi specific rules, but not enough for a whole system.

Yeah, I'd tend to agree. In the "OSR / D&D-like" world the only one that matters is D&D. Nothing else has really been influential outside the area of feeling like old-school D&D. Some have shown that you can be successful doing it, but not have been influential.

It is very rare that anyone posts a list of 10 items that I completely agree with, with short, well-reasoned arguments for each. I might read more in this thread, but honestly, this is a really, really strong list. All the games on it have seriously influenced many other games and you can...

Me neither -- might I suggest looking at Swords of The Serpentine, a non-OSR, modern game that was built for Swords and Sorcery and could work for you.

I've played Savage Worlds in Fantasy and run Weird West and Space Opera campaigns. It's an excellent choice for pulp campaigns (Fast and furious!). So long as you are at least close to that style, I can see that being a great choice. It worked killer well for the Flash Gordon campaign I ran!

I've been playing RPGs for 3+ decades now, and I can't say I've ever had a favorite system. Indeed, more than that, if you told me that there was exactly one system that was your favorite, I'd assume you just play one genre in one particular style. Which might be fun I guess for a while, but...