The best DMs, put simply, are fans of the players and their adventures.

Yeah, 30 years of the hobby existing has done a lot to deify the DM into this ridiculous mystical role that's like half-king, half-Gollum, 100% inspiration. Dare ye not to touch upon his pizza, lest he smite thee! Except it's your friend Ted and you know he drives a shitty old Ford Probe.

Maybe there's a dungeon full of loot every direction your players go in but they think it's something different each direction because you only prepped one dungeon.

I want to throw dice at people making Monty Python references. Say something funny on your damn own, nerds!

What's always amused me is that 3rd edition was also built around miniatures and a map (they're both listed under things you'll need to play and all the spells use very specific grid and cone measurements) but the internet backlash against 4e has swept that detail under the rug.

Cookie, you should look into a game called Dr. Magnethands. It costs nothing, it has all the fun of playing an adventure with your friends, and it takes like 20 minutes.

When all you've got is a nail, a rust monster can fix that for you.

This remains true of every edition of D&D. It's a game about treasure acquisition and monster killing, to the extent that early editions straight up turned gold 1 to 1 into XP. People looking for games focused on other stuff are best off checking on the literal thousands of other RPGs.

See, that's the problem with that book. Trying to explain why things in it are the way there are always starts with "It's possible that…" Like Gygax shoulda said that if it was his intent, because intent aside, his output was that Chaotic Good parents can raise a son who is Neutral Good, and by the time he can talk…

That's all great. It's also all in the 4th edition DMG. All I'm taking issue with really is the mindset that 4th edition is basically "Whoops, we accidentally made a beep-boop video game on these pages" when generally speaking it has every bit of freeform DMing and player agency that every game in the line has had.

Doesn't this really just imply that 7% of Americans like to fuck with surveys?

Anything anaerobic. Like a sandwich that goes bad in a tight ziploc bag. That dysentery smell will punch you right in the throat.

This sort of "Roll a huge number of dice and arrange how you like" sort of stuff is super fun when you're a kid playing D&D for your third time, but when you look back at it you eventually think "Hey, the output of what we were doing was functionally identical to just using an array with an 18 in it."

I've done a thorough podcast review of the damn thing. It's just garbage hiding behind excuses. It's one of the worst things to ever occur in the industry. What makes it amazing to me is after 800 pages of stuff like "Yes, pregnant women are often described as looking radiant, but they actually have a lowered…

Yep, you've heard correctly, it has a really solid resolution mechanic for negotiations and the like. I have all three of those, they're great. Also really good is Powered By the Apocalypse stuff like Monsterhearts and Masks.

I am Jef of the System Mastery podcast.

I read old RPGs semi-professionally (I'm the host of an old RPG review podcast), so yeah, generally out of sheer perverseness.

It was hard to cheat when rolling your stats in 1st edition AD&D since the PHB had no rules on what dice method you used to roll for your statistics. Given all the insane shit in that book that lacked a credible explanation (what the fuck is an alignment language supposed to be?) there was a disappointingly regular…

Depends on which WOD you're talking about, I guess. The real early stuff where 1s removed successes was pretty dire. And Exalted went way off the rails with complex charm math after a while. But a quick game of Promethean or just doing a Vampire LARP can be fairly smooth for sure.

You both had to play a realistic spy and were unable to do so. At first level your class was usually like "Thug" or "Cutpurse" which makes for a weird progression in a spy organization. Like the FBI hires a bunch of dock-bar goons and just waits to see if any can speak Arabic. Also like they regularly would put…