Recent content by Retreater

This is like arguing that a parkway should be called a driveway because people drive on it, and a driveway should be called a parkway because people park on it. Maybe "Kickstarter" isn't to "kickstart" a company, but to reduce the risk of a new product? It does take a lot of capital to produce...

Well, we can also point fingers at EN Publishing, Goodman Games, Pinnacle (creators of Savage Worlds), Chaosium (makers of Call of Cthulhu), Troll Lord Games (Castles and Crusades), Steve Jackson Games (the Fantasy Trip, Munchkin), established fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, numerous board...

If we're talking about the "only the DM buys them," let's add to adventures: campaign settings, monster books, splatbooks, miniatures, 3D terrain, extra dice, spare copies of the PHB, as well as most snacks and refreshments, pencils, gaming tables, DM screens, subscriptions to VTTs and services...

Because now it's for every class, and every player. Usually a group has 1-2 players willing to keep up with details like spells, not 4-5 (IME). And in the example of 4E, it's hammered home "you NEVER waste your turn on a Basic Attack." That means that every character's action is a complex...

I might be confusing it with how I modified it and forgot what I changed. It's been 5+ years since I ran it. Fair enough.

Candlekeep, Radiant Citadel, and Golden Vault are anthologies of tiny adventure sites; I'm not counting lairs or 5-room dungeons as entire adventures ... unless we want to look through hundreds (thousands?) of Dungeon magazine mini-sites to see if they're retreading ground? Netherdeep is a...

Giants are attacking unprovoked because the Ordening has been disrupted by an outside force, so the parties must go to a Hill Giant Steading, a Frost Giant Jarl's glacial Palace, and a Fire Giants volcanic fortress, using different devices to teleport between them? Sounds kinda like Against the...

Temple of Elemental Evil Against the Giants Three of those weren't created for D&D. Additionally, all of them are just one-shot books that don't have any impact on any other books. Because it existed for decades before D&D, wasn't created for the purpose of gaming adventure, is now used by...

Nearly every adventure produced has been a retread of a previous adventure. Whether a reboot (Curse of Strahd) to just an update of classic adventures (Tales of the Yawning Portal). We've seen resurrections of villains from previous editions (Acerack, Tiamat, Soth, Vecna), but really no new...

Granted, I was listening to the interviews at 1.75-2.0 speed, but I kinda recall he did. Early on he lambasts AD&D 2e as being a mess, basically calling it garbage. I'd go through and cite the times in the videos, but when he's criticizing the works of creators with success and fans...

Perhaps I'm using the terminology incorrectly. My concern is that it's not just one special ability that needs a full paragraph description of very precise language. It's four ... or more (at 1st level). It's having nearly everything your character can do be a different bonus (or penalty)...

"Opening scene, the Rebel Blockade Runner the Tantive IV races in the sky above the Outer Rim desert world of Tantoonie. In hot pursuit and bombarding the Tantive with laser blasts, a Star Destroyer of the Evil Galactic Empire. " Oh, you want a summary of the YouTube videos? I have only...

That is certainly something that is difficult to convey in a published adventure, especially one in which page count is a very limited resource (according to the review I linked). It's easier to put in "DC 15 Charisma check" or link to a stat block in another book and add "fights to the death"-...

Is it any messier than publishing? That's like saying we haven't figured out how to write the best book yet. What is the audience? What is the genre? Is it a technical manual? What is the language? Should it be a hyperlinked PDF? Should you include interactive components? What about the font...

I saw this today and your post reminded me of it. I do remember enjoying the game a lot more before judging myself by the metrics of online communities (which I started over 20 years ago).