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Oh, I get it now. At first I thought you were sincerely praising the dragon art, and I was like, "Meh. It doesn't do anything for me." At least now I know it doesn't do anything for you either, squeen. :-)

The Alexandrian has a post that I agree with, Whither the Dungeon? – The Decline and Fall of D&D Adventures. Excerpt: I’ve talked in the past about how D&D 5th Edition doesn’t teach DMs how to run dungeons. In fact, it doesn’t even teach them how to key a dungeon map (or provide an example of a...

I mean, maybe. Fight a scary bad guy and there are at least four possible outcomes: 1. You win and walk away with his stuff. 2. You win and get nothing but XP. 3. He wins and gets nothing but XP. 4. He wins and walks away with your stuff. If Mordenkainen's Disjunction can turn a hypothetical...

Yeah, thievery has the same pacing problem that assassination and hacking do. Involving the whole party is one potential solution; although it's only viable when all the players are interested in hacking/thieving/assassination. Splitting the party, running an offline solo session, and...

Opinion: assassination and hacking both have the same flaw, pacing. They require lots of interaction and input between the GM and the hacker or assassin. Meanwhile, what are the rest of the players doing? In principle I imagine that hacking or infiltration/assassination could be fun if done as...

This is brilliant. Consider it stolen. In particular I plan to use it in scene framing at the end of an adventure, as in: "You get back to town and purvey your loot. [roll dice] Bard the Bard can get $4500 for the sword and $14,000 for the gems through his wealthy contacts. However, you also...

I don't remember TSR days (I started AD&D around 1992, after the module transition had already taken place) but my guess based on what I've read and also observed about WotC is that module writers basically follow Steve Brust's Cool Stuff Theory of Literature: The Cool Stuff Theory of...

Oh, absolutely. I own a ton of WotC-authored 5E modules that I bought out of sheer curiosity, to know what other people were talking about (e.g. monster appendixes at the back), even though I already knew I had no desire to run them. (There are others that I didn't buy because I wasn't even...

Hmmm. This is an attractive hypothesis, but... I'm not so sure it's really true. Even today's WotC still sells a lot of adventure paths, which are just bloated modules (usually but not always tied to a railroad of some kind). Reflecting on lessons of The Elusive Shift, I suspect module writing...

GURPS Ultra-lite is only one page: http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/ultra-lite/

Ah yes, I love doing this. The best time to give out a Staff of Power or Hand of Vecna or (Fred Saberhagen's Sword) Farslayer is as early as possible, while it's still a gamechanger. By the time the party wizards can all cast Disintegrate with spell slots, disintegrating a monster with a wave of...

I tinker a lot with XP systems, especially in Dungeon Fantasy RPG because character advancement in DF just feels so optional--gravy on top of the pile of loot that comes from a successful dungeon crawl. I've mentioned before one option I've played around with before (letting players pick an...

This comment brings me joy. Said better than I could have said it: Source: https://www.enworld.org/threads/so-why-didnt-the-ogl-contain-the-word-irrevocable.694514/

Thanks for the link, squeen! FWIW the Table of Contents did its job as far as I'm concerned: drew my attention immediately to an interesting article. Now I shall finally know what Prince of Nothing means when he rants about artpunk! See y'all after I digest this puppy.

The worst that can happen is that someone pays you $10,000,000.00 for them. Sounds like a good plan!

Maybe publish them as placeholders and update with content later? Normally consumers would hate that but maybe under the circumstances they will understand. I've seen at least one Patreon "publish" dozens of placeholder adventures with this reasoning in mind.

I presume that what they think they are doing is strengthening their brand by gathering more data about how D&D is used, and reassuring potential licensing partners (think merch, movies, video games) that they're not suckers for paying WotC money when everyone else gets a (purported) "license"...

Here's an interesting application for art, potentially including the random stuff that winds up inserting itself into AI art: pictorial maps and/or inventories. I think the human-created examples in that article are likely to be better for gameplay (this map looks fantastic as a document to...

Not to mention the entire world of open source software including Microsoft and Google, whose various interests WotC has stupidly chosen to threaten with their doctrine of revocable-by-default perpetual open licenses. Hasbro/WotC is not the deep pockets that people are assuming they are.

That was fun to read. WotC is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The original OGL is arguably copyright misuse (licensees get no benefit, no access to actual copyrighted material because it's all PI) and could lose WotC the right to enforce their copyrights if not replaced. But if WotC just...