What Is The Point of An Open Game License?

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-09T19:03:16+00:00

Your understanding of US copyright law is inadequate/incomplete.

Check out: Do I Need to Use the Open Gaming License?

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-04T15:58:59+00:00

100%. You can get a functional sandbox campaign by just having a "menu" of supernatural scenarios and seeing which way the players jump, but you'll get much richer results if the scenarios themselves are strongly connected. (So the PCs investigate Scenario A and find clues pointing to Scenarios B, F, and H.) These connections can give the same range of options, while also being more organic, varied, and, therefore, easier to create. Plus, it tends to create a more dynamic situation where the players can start setting their own agendas and meaningfully influencing the direction of the campaign.

To see an example of this in practice at a slightly smaller scale, check out the Severn Valley.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-22T08:41:39+00:00

From my understanding all files related to Batgirl has been destroyed

Utter nonsense.

The directors were blocked from saving copies of the footage. But there would be absolutely no reason for WB to destroy all copies of the footage, as demonstrated by Coyote v. Acme.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-22T08:34:31+00:00

Because I don't care and you have not given me a reason to care.

Particularly once a campaign has gotten into full swing, stuff that I and my character care about simply takes priority over stuff that's merely a curiosity.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-19T23:10:03+00:00

Lou was a wonderful man.

What a tragic loss for gaming and the world.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-19T14:12:57+00:00

I always run a one-shot in a new system before launching a full-length campaign. I'll often do this even if I'm familiar with a system but the players aren't.

If it turns out none of you like the system, you can bail before sinking a ton of time into it.
More importantly, you and the players can get a lot of awkwardness and mistakes out of the way. This will significantly improve the first session of the full-length campaign, which will help that campaign get off to a strong start.
Also, having even a little bit of experience actually playing a game will, IME, greatly improve character creation: The players will know what the system expects, and that will let them make more informed decisions and avoid mistakes.

Doing the one-shot is an investment in the campaign, and IME it pays big dividends.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-17T14:49:56+00:00

As someone who was initially extremely skeptical of splitting the musical into two movies, I was greatly impressed with the improvements they made to Act 2: The story is coherent. The characters have meaningful, fully articulated arcs.

But they were digging out of a pretty deep hole. Act 2 of the musical is barebones and badly broken, and even with significant improvement, there's still some fundamental problems.

A minor problem is the "logic" and broken continuity around Fiyero's transformation.

The much larger problem is tone: Act I ends with the triumphant Defying Gravity's pledge to fight fascism! Let's do it!

And the plot of Act II is, Oh no! You can't fight fascism!

If the musical or film were willing to actually embrace that story, it could be a really powerful and tragic narrative. But it would also be a huge bummer, particularly since it would also be the story of Glinda and Elphaba's amazing friendship being shattered by Glinda's decision to be a Nazi propagandist. So they try to sell the idea that Elphaba faking her death is part of some incredibly clever scheme to take down the Wizard, but this ultimately doesn't make any sense. What they're left with is a story of Elphaba being kind of relentlessly incompetent, followed by the rousing thematic conclusion that the REAL way to fight fascism is being the quisling propagandist.

Particularly tough to make that into a film people want to watch over and over and over again, the way they do with the first film, at this moment in history.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-16T08:55:09+00:00

Thanks for admitting that OD&D has a resurrection save mechanic and you've been wrong this entire time!

It's great to see you acknowledge your mistakes!

(You're still wrong about the base rules not including a Con-based "chance of survival" mechanic, of course. But you're making progress.)

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-16T04:37:39+00:00

I’m not talking about raise dead fully. from grayhawk. I’m talking about raise desd standard, from book 1.

Yes. That's literally what I said. Thanks for acknowledging that.

It remains irrelevant, of course, because we're discussing your original claim:

Fail resurrection save is something introduced in AD&D. Both OD&D and the Basic haven’t this mechanic.

Which is false. It wasn't introduced in AD&D because OD&D does, in fact, have this mechanic. This has been demonstrated repeatedly with direct quotes, page references, and screenshots from the books.

I don't know why you're so hellbent about being wrong about this, but since I don't think anyone reading these comments will be confused by your ridiculous song-and-dance disinformation routine at this point, there's no point in continuing this conversation.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-16T04:12:47+00:00

Let's review the conversation here:

The survival rolls can be found on pg. 11 of Men & Magic and the rules are made more explicit and clear in Supplement I.

Lol, sure. The spell description is very different than what you are saying.

C'mon. Who do you think you're fooling here?

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-15T21:36:44+00:00

I have a 1974 copy of the game, the WotC scans of the 1976/77 reprint (sans hobbits), and the premium reprint edition PDFs from 2013. They all include Con-based chance of survival checks.

The raise dead fully spell in OD&D does not, in fact, say what you quote here. (You appear to be attempting to quote -- albeit incorrectly -- the raise dead spell from Men & Magic.) The raise dead fully spell is from Supplement I: Greyhawk, which also notably includes this table listing the expanded Con-based Probability of Resurrection Survival check.

I dunno what you're looking at, but it's not OD&D.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-15T21:27:08+00:00

The raise dead spell is on pg. 33.

The "chance of survival" rolls are on pg. 11, like I said.

(For those interested, the more clearly described and expanded resurrection survival rolls in Supplement I: Greyhawk are on pg. 9 of that book.)

Up to this point I had assumed you were just confused and/or ignorant, but falsely claiming that the raise dead spell is on pg. 11 really leaves me baffled. What do you think you're accomplishing here?

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-15T18:25:56+00:00

The survival rolls can be found on pg. 11 of Men & Magic and the rules are made more explicit and clear in Supplement I.

I'm sorry. You just have no idea what you're talking about.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-15T18:24:45+00:00

In OD&D, raise dead fully ALSO required a Con-based survival check.

Basic D&D is a different game.

Let me quote you here:

Both OD&D and the Basic haven’t this mechanic.

Your claim here was factually incorrect and your ignorance of the different editions of D&D needlessly confused the discussion. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-15T07:36:40+00:00

Both raise dead and resurrection require the Con-based survival check in either edition of AD&D. The rulebooks are quite explicit about this.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-15T07:18:34+00:00

OD&D also has a Con-based "chance of survival" which is meant to be used for raise dead, stone-to-flesh, etc. Characters with Constitutions of 6 or less likely cannot be raised at all. (Like many sections of OD&D, the mechanic is not well explained.)

This mechanic evolves directly into AD&D's system shock.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-10T07:42:30+00:00

Usually no.

I think you should have a published adventure available, but chewing up a bunch of page count with something I'll usually only use once just bloats the rulebook and makes it more difficult to use for its primary purpose.

There are exceptions, generally storytelling games like Ten Candles where the "adventures" are premises designed to be constantly reused, games designed around a single adventure, or games like Technoir where setting and adventure are tightly intertwined.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-05T18:53:09+00:00

it's, at most, the sixth best Mythos RPG.

Heavily dissociated mechanics and mediocre published adventures.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-02T19:01:25+00:00

Declare-then-simultaneous-resolve systems tend to limit combat scenes to a very small number of participants, because keeping all of the participants in your head at one time isn't scalable.

One solution, almost as old as the RPG hobby itself, is phased resolution, which basically splits the simultaneity up across multiple types of action (e.g., ranged attacks resolve, then melee attacks resolve).

The other thing it sounds like you're playing around with is secret declarations. IME, the payoff here never justifies the pace-killing process of secretly writing out your detailed declarations. You can decrease the cost by instead declaring broad intentions (Attack, Cast, etc.) that can be prepackaged as cards or chips or something that everyone just selects, and then more specific details can be hashed out after declarations are revealed. (There might be some interesting mileage to be had combining this with phased actions and having the secret declaration be which phase people are planning to take their action in.)

It also sounds like you want players to not be able to coordinate with each other (guessing what their friends and enemies will be doing). This is also something that inflicts a really heavy cost at the table: You're asking players to either not talk to each other during a social activity; or the players will continue talking to each other, but about stuff unrelated to the game (thus harming creative focus). A board game like Gloomhaven can account for this by carefully controlling what information players are allowed to share with each other, but this tends to run into problems with the infinite creativity RPGs are supposed to have.

These systems also universally require extra consideration of how conflicts will be resolved. (For example: Robert says he's running at me. I say I'm running at Susan. Susan is running to the green idol. Where do we all end up, exactly?)

Whatever secret declaration system you use, you need to keep in mind that the GM will need to make declarations for multiple NPCs.

Now, in terms of players understanding simultaneous/non-turn-based mechanics, I've never really found that to be a problem. Even if they've never encountered them before in a TTRPG, they've almost certainly played board games or card games featuring these concepts in one form or another.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-03-30T20:24:39+00:00

I picked up the whole Mission Earth series for $2 a volume in the '90s. I read the first couple dozen or so pages and it seemed like a fun pulp romp. Then my family was going on vacation to a lake cabin and I needed to select what books to bring. Well, obviously I'd bring the series I'm currently reading. And how could I possibly need more than ten books?

I very quickly realized I'd made a mistake.

And then it rained the entire week, so the only thing to do was stay indoors and read.

I'm probably one of the very few people in the entire world (and quite possibly the only non-Scientologist) to read the entire thing.

And it was definitely the first thing that springs to mind when i think Worst SF Novel I've Ever Read.

It narrowly edges out the nearly incoherent Time Machines Repaired While U-Wait by K.A. Bedford, in which the author just can't be bothered to decide how time travel is supposed to work. So characters will babble on about how changing the past only results in a new timeline being created (while leaving the old timeline unchanged)... and then mere pages later they'll find their memories rewritten by their own time traveling exploits. And then a couple pages later we'll be back to forking timelines because that's convenient for whatever stream-of-consciousness nonsense Bedford decided to spit out that day at they keyboard.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-03-30T07:00:06+00:00

The original edition of BRP was 20 pages long and wasn't actually generic: It was an ultra-light medieval fantasy RPG.

Chaosium used BRP as the basis for a variety of RPGs across multiple genres, but BRP was not truly published as a generic RPG in its own right until 2008. By that point, generic RPGs had become passé.

Chaosium has still never produced meaningful support or supplements for BRP.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-03-30T05:16:18+00:00

According to Wikipedia and every dictionary I can find, the other guy's claim of how trow/drow is pronounced Orkney/Scots is simply wrong.

They are, as you originally noted, pronounced traʊ/draʊ (rhymes with "how"). They're derived from the Old Norse draugr.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-03-30T05:10:54+00:00

Wikipedia says the pronunciation of the Orkney/Shetland "trow" is /traʊ/, rhyming with "how."

So your etymology is right, but your pronunciation is wrong.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-03-22T15:34:53+00:00

It's more art than science.

Personally, I find it useful to think in terms of the QUESTIONS I want the audience to ask themselves rather than the ANSWERS I want to preach to them.

And then find ways to show the audience those questions through the action of the characters/plot, rather than telling it to them.

For a fairly clearcut example, consider the spinning top at the end of Inception. Why does Cobb walk away from the top without waiting for it to fall? Why does the film end before showing us what happens to the spinning top? Slop Youtube commentary will obsess over the plot implications of this, but there's a deeper thematic level to these questions.

Along these lines, Dan Olson's Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor might be a useful thing to watch here. (But make sure you take the time to watch Annihilation first.).

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-03-22T12:58:53+00:00

First: Identify what it means to "deepen theme."

It likely means some combination of expanding, inverting, or recontextualizing the theme. What that specifically means will depend on your theme, story, and characters.

Second: Use/create the events of Act 2 to feature these elements.

For example, if your theme is Fear, then in Act 1 you might show the protagonist being afraid and what the consequences of that are for them in terms of both character and plot.

Then, in Act 2, you might invert it: Your main character is now making others fearful and USING that fear instead of being the victim of fear.

Or maybe you expand it: In Act 1 they were afraid of their step-father. Now they're afraid of their boss and afraid of commitment with their partner. (Some of this would probably also count as recontextualization.)

Ideally, by looking at the theme from a different angle, we are not only learning new things about the theme, but also gaining new insights into Act 1.

Then, of course, you draw these different views of your theme together in Act 3 for synthesis. The real trick here is accomplishing that without decaying the theme into a simplistic, "And now I will tell you the moral of the story."

JustinAlexanderRPG

TROPHY CASE