I’ve always admired Paizo and their stance on open content. They spearheaded the ORC license on behalf of the entire RPG community in the face of WOTC’s attack on the RPG industry. Their Pathfinder organized play adventures are so much better than D&D organized play adventures. And they have been putting out consistently good adventure paths over the years. And (at least with their organized play adventures) they have the major encounters keyed to commercial battlemats which they sell, which saves so much time in finding a good map or creating your own.
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Continuing Mission, the leading fan website for the Star Trek Adventures RPG, posted this week about my STA: Captain’s Log convention kit. You can read about it and get the files here.
Minor updates on my last Top Stuff I Want To Run Someday post.
Since my last post, I’ve stumbled across Apes Victorious, a Planet of the Apes-style game that uses B/X D&D rules. I might run it someday as-is or maybe convert the rules over to Fate or Traveller. For adventures, I’d use a combination of hex-crawl, procedurally generated encounters mixed with Mutant Crawl Classic adventures (which would be placed in the Forbidden Zone).
Inspired by reading this great article on B/X D&D playstyle, I thought I’d jot down my thoughts on Old-School D&D (and in particular, Basic/Expert or B/X D&D) vs. 5e, and include some easy ways to get 5e to run more like B/X D&D.
I’ve been playing D&D off and on since 1979, and I’ve played all the editions. I’ll rank order my favorite editions from a GM perspective. I’ll also comment on the edition from a Player perspective.
My top four favorite D&D games were from the ‘D&D as War’ approach. Things were deadly, scary, and character death was a real possibility. If you encountered an Ancient Red Dragon, you had better run! My least favorite three D&D editions were the 3rd to 5th edition era, all of which approached the genre using a ‘D&D as Sport’ approach where you are expected to have balanced encounters, and monster stat blocks had about 10 times the amount of text and creature special features of the early edition, making things harder to run and slower to play.
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