Weighing into an ancient (or at least senile) fantasy debate, I'd like to go back a step. The debate usually goes like this:

An elf punching a dragon to death because of monk-training isn't realistic.

1    You think dragons are "realistic"?

No, but a certain semblance, in certain regards, to reality, which …

Tabletop RPGs have struggled with pronouns more than most places, because they speak through constant examples.

The fighter rolls a '10' on Initiative, and the goblins roll and '8'. He goes first.

A,D&D used the default 'he', throughout all examples, and in the second edition, printed a small box explaining that …

Remember that book or film where the protagonist received a nasty wound, then persevered, and won the day? Well that can't happen in RPGs, and that's a shame. So my solution is Fate Points (FP).

Reasons People Created Hit Points

Hit Points make sense as a standard game abstraction, until they apply to PCs. If PCs …

The Problem

While I'd hope to rock up at the gaming table and just game with friends, the DM had other ideas. Everyone had to write a character back-story. Having three jobs at the time, I didn't feel enamoured with my homework, but a while later, I had read enough about the campaign world to begin writing something …

Oh young one! So you think you have an idea. Well let.me.tell.you: EVERYONE has ideas. Nobody cares if you have ideas. The real results are in work, in the execution. It's about labour, not inspiration.

I've seen this kind of patronising lecture a few times on various RPG boards, and speaking as someone without any …

The Open Gaming Licence (OGL) does not in fact produce terribly open games, so I wish people would stop referring to such RPGs as 'open source'.

No Real Books

The OGL specifically excludes Product Identity.

"Product Identity" means product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including …

Systems can be boiled down to input, process, and output.

 1┌────────────────────┐     ┌───────────────────┐     ┌────────────────────┐
 2│   Monster: AC 17   │ ──> │                   │ <── │ Player: Attack +3  │
 3└────────────────────┘     │      process      │     └────────────────────┘
 4 …

Random character generation is great, especially random Attributes.

Why you hate random Attributes

People think Random attributes will ruin your game because D&D has taught them that Attributes cannot be raised quickly. If one rolls a bad character, they'll have to play 'Jake, the pointless', forever after. This …