This is a huge set of questions; answering each one could fill pages. I'll concentrate on the last question.

An interesting thing happens in higher level games when you introduce scarcity to the equation without altering the exponential costs. Much of the buffest equipment is completely unaffordable or unavailable, but while a great many of the best spells can't be afforded either, the majority of spells are still usable. The upshot, I believe, is that higher level fighters and thieves lose much of their comparative potency; in contrast, powerful spellcasters remain extremely effective.

So, a scarcity-based campaign is doable, but it requires that you carefully restrict the resources available to spellcasters. How hard is it to get new spells? Is the casting of magic spells illegal or heretical?

For the simplest possible answer to the question of how to balance effectiveness vs. economics, the only sure-fire way is not to mess with things. Instead, pick a level range (3-7?) where you feel the game is reasonably well balanced, and then design your game to expire once you reach the limits of that range.

My comments can take it; go ahead and use pages. I am particularly keen to hear about cliché usage.

You're absolutely correct about fighters and thieves losing out to spellcasters without equipment. Having access to the equipment is built into the balance of the character classes. So my question become whether one can try to rebalance the classes, either by also limiting high-level casters or by expanding the abilities of non-casting classes. (Either is viable, e.g., you can compensate for a lack of equipment by creating new feats for high-level fighters.)

Campaign expiry is probably quite practical, so long as every campaign isn't six months long and over the same level range.

I like the social controls that HeeHoo suggests, especially if they're tied to real world issues. Magic is outlawed because Black Magicians use human organs as spell components (some spells can only use them, others are much rarer). Edged weapons are prohibited because your native race is a conquered people, and you're subject to arrest if you're found with them. Worship of your god is punishable by death. Knowing thief skills is against the law.

One way to play with balance is to put a bunch of PCs from the same class together and run an all-ranger campaign (or some such). Make the players differentiate themselves not by "I am the fire mage", but by some facet of their personality. If level advancement stays roughly equal, then if the system breaks, at least it breaks the same way for everyone.

You should run another sci-fi campaign. Use D20 so you have some rules, I'm sure all your D20 players are spoiled and don't want to do something with light-n-inconsistent rules. (But not D20 Modern, argh!)

I recently played in a D20 Call of Cthulhu con round, which sounds like an abomination (how can D20 hit points possibly be consistent with a scary atmosphere?) and indeed it is. The GM basically got around that by making monsters/baddies only appear in uncountable hordes, so you knew if you fought them you were gonna die. The system was much worse than the old CoC, the hardback one with "Pardon me boy, is that the lair of great Cthulhu?" lyrics in the back.

Michael:

One of the problems that I, at least, had with my old Cowboys & Dragons game was that the non-spellcasters, rogues, fighters, rangers alike, were all pert' nearly the same role in the game. Since we're a relatively role-playing-light group, asking us to differentiate by personality is of somewhat limited effectiveness.

It's also harder on me, trying to think of ways to keep similar characters individually effective and special. And I'm nothing if not lazy.

Jason: An SF game is moderately tempting, but it requires heavy mods and balance is more of an issue. (I consider, unlike many of my players, the last SF campaign I ran to be a failure, largely because of balance issues.)

Well, if you want to borrow my game system which resolves everything using a log table, you have my permission. It should theoretically handle all possible gaming issues with grace and, dare I say it, perfection. (Possibly I need a rule that if a player annoys the GM, the GM is allowed to hit him with the log table.)

Actually, I think sci-fi games are very prone to the problem Shadowrun had (ok, one of the problems) that you get too many situations where the expert snurbler is snurbling like mad, and the other players are all twiddling their thumbs waiting for him to finish snurbling so they can get on with the game. (e.g. decking, driving, piloting the spaceship).

D&D-style games only have the snurbling problem when it's the rogue, but it also has the virtue of usually being high-risk, high-reward ('cause he's either sneaking by the guards or opening the treasure chests), so players pay attention.

Shadowrun, I think, built snurbling too deeply into their conceptions of the character archetypes.

I should probably pull out Simon Green's Deathstalker books to get a conception of what space opera without ship-to-ship dogfights looks like; I think that I am convinced that you can't do dogfights in an SFRPG.

Is there a reason you don't want to do supers?

Regarding cliches, is there a reason you haven't just asked the players what they want?
In my current campaign (long-time player, first time DM) I wanted the simplicity of the races everyone knew but wanted to give the players the chance to shape their own campaign a bit. So, after a late night discussion with the key players, we decided that dwarves were scottish (kilts, accents, strong clans, etc), halflings were like 60's hippies (everybody's ok, let's just go smoke some weed), and gnomes had a culture and niche based on medieval Judaism (they're the only monotheists in the campaign and reject the common pantheon, they have lost their homeland, many are in positions of wealth but are not trusted by the populace). I also decided to put enough lizardmen in the local swamp to allow them as a character class to spice things up.
This mix is working well so far; the players felt like they had familiar choices but each had some new life breathed into it by the discussion we'd had. One of them did choose to be a lizardman, and that's working out fine. I guess to me it all comes down to what the players want. Do they want all new races they've never heard of, or do they want standard races? Among the balanced systems, which system of magic do they like best? If there are certain levels where the game is most fun for your players, why not slow advancement a bit to make those levels last?

Rick: Many of my players have said straight out that they don't want to do supers.

David: I will, of course, be discussing things with my players, but one of the reasons I GM is that I think about these sorts of things to excess.

Very busy today, no time to write endlessly as my id is instructing me to do. Brief comments:

1) I'm loving the term 'snurbling', which will now enter my standard vocabulary.

2) I don't have a big problem with snurbling qua snurbling. I'm happy to sit back for reasonable periods of time and let other people snurble while I doodle. I do have a problem with snurbling the way it is used in our usual gang's games. Being generally intelligent monkeys, we have realized that most game systems favor the building of specialists who are INCREDIBLE at one sort of snurbling and terrible at everything else (except firing a gun). When you are a 10th Level Master Snurbler with Gauntlets of Snurbling, a datalink to a Snurb-chip and the Snurble of Death feat, it's kind of all about the snurbling for you, isn't it? That's when we get into these snurble-fests that are snoozers for everybody else.

So, I'd be in favor of a system that doesn't weigh so heavily towards specialization. Jason's log-based system might help there.

The Spycraft rules for chases are supposedly the finest choice for doing d20 vehicle combat, and they should actually work well for space battles. (Though again, that's a snurble problem unless everyone has their own turret to fire or whatnot.)

While I know that Trinity went over like a lead balloon when I ran it, you might want to flip through the rules and cannibalize the crunchy stuff (they used the open source Spycraft chase rules for their space combat system).

Giving each player a Kewl Power (either psionics, cyborg impants, Jedi powers or maybe letting them play 4 Slugs in a Tank) might help overcome the snurbling problem.

I think the key with a sci-fi game is to narrow the focus rather widen it out. Firefly works as a show because the actors don't mind if Wash doesn't get to do cool spaceship maneuvers this week, but players want to be a part of the action every week.

A space-marine game (perhaps stealing from the Stargate SG-1 game, which was also built on the Spycraft engine), where everyone is expected to be able to shoot stuff, but also have their own special area to snurble in might help overcome niche protection issues.

BTW, I read somewhere that AEG is about to come out with Spycraft 2.0 so I'd hold off on just getting Spycraft.

There is a great deal of appeal in being able to play a race and/or class that you as a player created. However, I find that campaigns where the world is internally consistent are much more immersive and vibrant. That means that the onus falls on the GM to create a framework and a flavor to a campaign. But if you convey those ideas effectively, then you can still give the players freedom to craft races and classes, for example, that fit your concept of the world. So I don't see it as one or the other necessarily.

I also favor being new and inventive, but sometimes using the old standards can provide players with something that they recognize and understand and can instantly identify with. This can be extremely helpful when you are throwing a lot of new material at them.

I personally find most games depend alot on the GM's excitement level. So that is something to think about. I'm not saying anything you didn't already know, though.

A question/comment on what races appeal to you and the group?

Is your beef with the standard array of races that they don't have any spark anymore, or that the new races (like in Arcana) have cool powers? Because, that's two different things.

To make a sweeping generalization, folks play nonhuman races for two reasons. The first is that they want the mechanical bennies of being a Snurfle. Snurfles have powers X, Y and Z that make it more efficiet to be Class B. The second is that they want to play something different, because it's a fun roleplaying experience. Jason plays 4 slugs in a tank because that's a fun idea. I played a lizard man because I had these goofy ideas about The Great Roaring River God. (And, of course, we also minimaxed the bennies out playing said races.)

I like characters that improve steadily, through the regular acquisition of new toys and/or new skills and abilities.

I like achievable short-term goals that contribute to a larger, over-arching plot.

I like the campaign world to be well-integrated, internally consistent, and relevant to the campaign. This is a problem I've had with Arcana Unearthed -- some good ideas, sure, but mainly different just to be different.

And incidentally, I vastly prefer the Expanded Psionics Handbook to its predecessor, even with the acknowledged blunder of eliminating 0-level powers.

David's remarks about the players having a chance to shape the campaign are well taken. What about spending a game session or two world-building and brainstorming, maybe a month or two in advance of the new campaign? You could then polish those ideas into a game world that everyone could feel more invested in.

Exploring another game system is worth considering. Deadlands might be more engaging than Cowboys and Dragons. And Shadowrun isn't nearly as broken as Jason thinks it is -- newer rules have eliminated a lot of the "snurbling" problems.

James Bond-ish Spycraft sounds intriguing; Tom Clancy-ish Spycraft does not. Supers could be fun, with the right approach and the right system. I'm less interested in SciFi, honestly, but willing to experiment a little.

I ramble. I'll stop.

I thought Greg's Arcana Unearthed campaign actually had a pretty good sense of a consistent world. The races probably were just different to be different - they weren't VERY different, after all, not like his weekend game where he made up the races - but I was really sick of elves/dwarves/etc so it was still nice. (says the guy who played the only human in the group - but at least I got to be prejudiced against mojh instead of being prejudiced against dwarves).

The main problem I encountered with Arcana Unearthed, as the magister, was that magisters were WAY overpowered. The spells are generally less powerful than standard D20, mostly, but they are so much more versatile that it far far overwhelms the power difference. If I remember, I was a 7ish level magister and could dish out something around 100d6 of fire damage (not all at once) if that was what I wanted to do today. And it was.

I bought the latest Shadowrun core rules when I was thinking of starting a Shadowrun game - but then you bastards didn't move to California with me, so now I have no players - and they look awfully similar to the 2nd ed rules to me. I haven't run them, though.

Again, based on what I've read, Spycraft falls somewhere between Bond and Clancy. The problem with spy games pulls back to the problem with SF games - the Snurble Effect. Also, you end up splitting the group a lot so that the Suave Dude is seducing Mister Big's girlfriend so she's not looking at the monitors when Sneaky Dude is infiltrating and Boom Stick Guy is blowing away the guards. And, based on my four year old memories (SOB, SNIFF) of playing with the group, the cool Mission Impossible Plans that are a staple of spy games are hard to implement and execute.

Why don't we have a gaming-related group blog?

First, in defense of The Usual Gaming Suspects: it's not that we're bad roleplayers. We are, when we roleplay, rather good roleplayers. The problem is that we tend to get focussed on the rules-related aspects of the game on a preferential basis, because when you role-play suboptimally you just don't have as much fun that evening, but when you rules-lawyer suboptimally you tend to get half the party killed.

....not that this, uh, has happened recently or anything. Ahem.

Anyway, I think TUGS are perfectly capable of playing in an atmosphere-heavy game. The trick to make it work is to get rid of the rules. We've never really done anything with diceless or narrative gameplay. Maybe it's time to try.

A few words regarding race: I don't care. To me, 'race' as applied generically to gaming carries meaning that falls into two separate vats. There are the crunchy bits; what kind of cool stuff does your race enable you to do? and there are the roleplaying bits; how does your race help determine the kind of character you are playing? Really, crunchy bits are fairly extractable from the roleplaying bits. For example, you could play a game where dwarves have no special abilities or powers different from humans; the difference comes in their culture and their likes and dislikes and their physical appearance and other ephemerals. I guess I'm saying: I don't care what race I'm playing, or what special powers it has, unless said race has the ability to tell a new and interesting story. Whether said story was invented by me or my GM is immaterial.

Andy:

Why don't we have a gaming-related group blog?

We don't, because we don't sit around theorizing about the big picture of gaming; our gaming discussions are usually pretty narrowly focused on a problem at hand. But there are group gaming blogs out there, such as the one Ginger belongs to: 20 by 20 Room.

Permit me to shoot the diceless idea three times in the head, just to make sure it doesn't get up again. You can have my dice when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

That said, I agree with Andy -- the best way to add atmosphere is to subtract rules. The modified DUDE system of the pirate game is one successful example. How much atmosphere do we want?

Oh, I agree totally with HeeHoo's assessment of TUGS' role-playing abilities. I hope I didn't give the impression that we were a bunch of grognards who cared more about the +1 modifier for ThatThingWeTalkedAbout than ACTING (GENIUS! THANK YOU).

And I don't think getting rid of rules will make it easier to RP. For one thing, I think part of the fun of gaming is picking at the rules to see what works well.

On player-designed races and classes: I wouldn't allow it, but I usually don't deal with players who know the rules well enough to attempt it, either. I think if players want to have unique, customized traits, homemade prestige classes are the way to go--they lets the PC grow into being distinct and exotic, rather than forcing you to deal with one wildly divergent PC right from the start.

On economics and magic scarcity: Don't try to retrofit the standard D&D rules for this unless you want a large-scale Project. Either play it by ear with the knowledge that you'll have to rebalance some things on the fly, or turn to one of the existing scarce magic d20 / OGL games--Grim Tales and Conan are the two that first spring to mind.

On cliches: The more you try to write out the assumed tropes of D&D, the more you're going to run into rules that aren't compatible with what you're doing. You can still have a great setting with a lot of variant races, classes, etc., but it's a fair amount of work. For a mainly dungeon-crawling game that wants to add a little spice, I think something like Eberron is a better option. Don't get rid of the tropes--turn them up to 11. (Planescape also did this to a certain extent, with vastly different--but excellent--results.)

On slowing level advancement: So long as players feel like they're still learning and progressing, there's no harm in it.

Y'know, a gaming blog is a pretty good idea, really. Not a general-purpose blog like "20 by 20 Room," but a group one specifically for the Tuesday night game. It could be useful for dealing with background information, treasure distribution, all kinds of things. It would also provide a forum for the aforementioned rules crunching, so we could maybe move some of it away from the table.

BTW, I think Eberron would be a cool fit for TUGS. (I could even loan you my copy of the book if you want to peruse it.)

You might also like to take a look at Wushu (www.bayn.org), which is like DUDE, but moreso.

1: You all may really want a gaming wiki instead.
2: For rules-light, you all could look at Tri-Stat.
3: I would recommend Everway, but Mason's dice-fetish would get in the way.
4: Al-Qadim is my favorite D&D setting. A good campaign against the Yak-men would probably be bracing...

Andy:

I'd be in favor of a system that doesn't weigh so heavily towards specialization.

Mmph. As I noted above, one of my problems with the Cowboys & Dragons game was the relative lack of differentiation between the fighter-types. I think differentiation is almost paramount in RP systems, so some specialization is required. What the system designer need to do is avoid snurbling--specialization that is alternately dormant and dominating.

Adrian:

I find that campaigns where the world is internally consistent are much more immersive and vibrant.

I think a good GM makes the world seem immersive, vibrant, and internally consistent. For instance, the Savage Land game is a pretty terrible hodgepodge of stuff I just threw together, but I think I do an adequate job of presenting it with a kind of internal sense. (It helps that I've read a lot of ERB.)

Rick:

Is your beef with the standard array of races that they don't have any spark anymore, or that the new races (like in Arcana) have cool powers? Because, that's two different things.

More the former. I am an old curmudgeon, and I am sick and bored of D&D elves and halflings and what-not and all the rules- and campaign-cruft they've accreted to themselves in thirty years of gaming. Dark Sun erred nowhere more than in grafting elves, dwarves, and halflings onto Barsoom, when it should have focused on the muls, half-giants, and thri-kreen. Standard D&D races have become an impediment to campaign design rather than a tool, because of expectation and assumed knowledge.

I (with some invaluable help from Jason) made up something like twenty new races for the Savage Land, all of which excited me more in their potential effect on the campaign than any elf ever could.

Mason:

This is a problem I've had with Arcana Unearthed -- some good ideas, sure, but mainly different just to be different.

I'm not going to disagree; as I mentioned, I think Arcana Evolved seems to be going in a direction that doesn't particularly appeal to my style of gaming. I think the spell rules are darned spiffy (though, emphatically, as Jason points out, their flexibility presents a huge new balancing issue), but the races are pretty trite. The classes are a different issue. Straight D&D has a couple of simple classes that fulfill simple, focused roles, particularly the fighter and rogue. AU takes those simple roles and baroques them up, possibly needlessly.

Various:

I don't think I'd be very good at running a spy game. And some aspects of it (particularly seduction) squick some of my players.

Alex:

On player-designed races and classes: I wouldn't allow it, but I usually don't deal with players who know the rules well enough to attempt it, either.

I'm a rules wonk, so I implicitly assume that I'm going to take whatever the players give me and make sure it's conformant. This often leads to discussion, such as Jason stopping playing a romyar (an ape-ooze dimorph) in the Savage Land game after a process of rebalancing it left it insufficiently munchkiny in his assessment.

I'm much more interested in hearing divergent ideas from the players that I can wrap rules around. I know that my thinking tends down predictable paths, so it's very useful to have someone (again, like Jason) whose thoughts take very different paths, as the result provides a much better mix of campaign options to the players.

Question about the C&D gunslinger problem: Were the players frustrated by the lack of differences between the spellcasters and non-spellcasters, or was it a GMing problem?

I think one solution might be to have a generic gunslinger class, and give it different paths, like Rangers can go the two-weapon or archer paths. You also might want to tone down the lethality of guns, so that someone might play a knife-fighter or "Native Archer" that isn't hampered by the fact that guns are much more lethal. That way you can pull back towards the D&D standard of the "fighter who cuts things up with his sword" being as useful as the "fighter who stays back and plinks arrows at things."

My memory of C&D was that it was very hard to differentiate the non-spellcasters, and even the spellcasters (other than the cleric) were really a lot like non-spellcasters because they used spells to enhance their gun combat. We all sorta just fought. The lethality of guns was way below real-world levels; the gun rules only killed stuff very rarely, almost always what killed stuff was hp damage, and guns weren't particularly better than swords there. Nontheless, I think we didn't have much hand-to-hand combat going on, we all had guns. Sadly, I now can't even remember what I played in that campaign... it wasn't one of the interesting characters, evidently.

I'll address the C&D question.

I, personally, felt no particular frustration that all characters could be reasonably competent in combat. I quite enjoyed playing a Englishman-equivalent mage who shot a dainty little pistol but, with the appropriate spellcasting, could nail anything at 200 yards.

Still, if one is interested in compartmentalizing western archetypes into races in a fantasy world, here is a first cut:

POSIT, as did C&D, that the game world is a frontier place inhabited by non-humans of varying levels of savagery, and human colonists are relatively recent (and successful) arrivals.

Then the PC races might be:

HUMANS: the only ones with significant metalworking technology, and hence the ones who can play gunslinging races. Humans have no magic. Can play fighters, rogues. Automatically have the Firearm Proficiency feat.

EZINNI: anthropomorphic zebras, plains indian analog. Fierce and warlike, can play barbarians and rangers. Also have shamans who are druids.

AMGAMANS: short, squat mountain valley herders with beaver tails. Bronze age-ish culture, sort of Hopi-equivalent, agricultural, largely peaceful. Worship the Angry Mountain, who actually listens to them and gives them clerical powers. Can also play paladins and rangers.

BIIRITATI: lemur-like lake-fishers, kind of Iroquois Nation, with low technology but high social organization. Not big on combat, but have sorcerous powers. Also communicate via a class of Brin-Postman-like messengers and tale-tellers, essentially bards.

GVAGHORA: the heavies (or not?), just as humans are colonizing from the east, the Gvags are coming in fron the west, and eventually they'll collide. Gvags are black and spiny and unpleasant, consider fighting with weapons to be cowardly (they're monks), and are ruled by an elite class that has unlocked the secrets of black magic (wizards).

GRUTH: The first series of human colonists brought semi-intelligent giantish slaves over; some escaped and formed their own clans. Big and strong and hit you lots. Barbarian.

Specialty classes could be created for each race. One could also expand on the races to use Monte's concept of racial levels, with concommitant crunchy bits.

One idea I've seen that I thought was intriguing comes from Andy Collins' website, where he describes a new gritty, low magic campaign. To balance out the dearth of magic, magic items, and even gold, he plans on giving PCs a feat every level. I like feats- it may be my favorite part of the d20 mechanics.

I also like games flavored with particular real world cultures and mythologies, though not necessarily conforming perfectly to the mythology as written, e.g., I always wanted to play an Oriental Adventures game. I even had a 1st edition kensai ready to go, with honor points and everything...but it never happened.

I've also always wanted to play in a campaign centered around an event or a series of events, such as a war, an extraplanar invasion, or some advancing supernatural weather phenomenon (think of the cartoon The Pirates of Dark Water). I went so far as to try to play in a PBP game where I was part of an advance force of githyanki, preparing to invade the Material Plane. It didn't get very far, unfortunately.

Andy - I think there should be more than one "European" race, since you've got umpty-zillion beaver people for different native types.

I can't get that Andy Collins link to work, but the Midnight setting supposedly does something similar for characters since not-Sauron's forces have taken all the cool stuff for themselves. A feat/cool magic power a level makes up for the lack of Stuff. That requires playtesting and rebalancing, which I never cared for in-media-game.

How do you think the group would go for something like Urban Arcana (I know, d20 Modern, but still.)?

Rick:

Were the players frustrated by the lack of differences between the spellcasters and non-spellcasters, or was it a GMing problem?

I think the players enjoyed the game and enjoyed their characters and did not seem overly disturbed by the fact that we had something like three rangers. It bothered me, though.

I also bobbled things in moving the adventures around too much to let continuing campaign elements accrete properly, which would have helped. (OTOH, there was a RESOUNDING thud when I introduced the "Bleeding Kansas" campaign element, which I thought was fascinating, and I backed off of that quickly due to the profound negative interest.)

Oddly, Mason's character, an orc barbarian, discovered what Grendel discovered in your Shadowrun game: That a sufficiently big and strong guy with a melee weapon is at least as munchkiny as a guy with a gun. That differentiation was the only thing that saved us from having four too-similar gunslingers instead of just three.

(Mason's character, OTOH, also had a dire rifle--Burt Gummer's gun in Tremors 2--and used it to one-shot not one, but two different dragons.)

Jason:

Sadly, I now can't even remember what I played in that campaign... it wasn't one of the interesting characters, evidently.

I thought it was one of the better ones--dynamite-obsessed, map-collecting dwarven miner/rogue. In a fight, other than throwing dynamite, you were relatively generic, though.

Andy:

POSIT, as did C&D, that the game world is a frontier place inhabited by non-humans of varying levels of savagery, and human colonists are relatively recent (and successful) arrivals.

You can see the campaign background and original rules here. I made a few different choices than Andy. His suggestions are interesting, though.

Adrian:

I've also always wanted to play in a campaign centered around an event or a series of events, such as a war, an extraplanar invasion, or some advancing supernatural weather phenomenon.

Have you seen Malhavoc Press's "event books"? They are campaign sourcebooks specifically about what you suspect--war, the death of a god, the impact of a meteorite, one or two others. They're excellent to mine for crunchy bits, and I daresay could be used as the basis for good campaigns.

Maybe then, the thing to do is to encourage different types in the character generation phase, and let the plot congeal around a town. That way you don't have 3 Rangers.

There is no "but still" if it's D20 Modern.

My favorite of Andy's capitalized race names is the Posit. Here's how I'd write them, supplanting the gvaghora:

POSIT: Settlers from the Old World who landed on the opposite coast, and are colonizing at the same time as the humans. The humans and posit already feel that there's going to be an eventual showdown - the lesser races are bound to be wiped out sooner or later by the superior gumption and general fittitude of the Euroraces. The posit are a rigidly controlled monarchy (with extensive hangers-on) with serfs, and with firearms forbidden (in the Old World) for their destabilizing effects. The posit necessarily then have worse guncraft than the humans, but compensate (in the usual manner) with widespread practice of black magic among the numerous royalty.

The are the drow to the humans' elves. So I guess they have dark skin and white hair? Or they can have two subspecies which can no longer interbreed, the orc-like Posit Serfs and the drow-like Posit Nobles.

And... people with beaver tails? Ugh. Replace with unusually civilized ettercaps!

In C&D, even after rebalancing the dire rifle and the massive firearm damage rule, guns are good--far better than any other ranged weapon, and better than most melee weapons even at melee range. It's necessary to the genre for guns to be that good.

So any race or culture that doesn't adopt the gun as fast as possible is obsolescent, so there's not a lot of use writing up races and cultures that can't or won't adopt the gun. (This was an error I made with the garrugalach: I should have munchkined up their ability with bows to compensate for their not using guns.)

The only real possibility is to set up magic as a contrasting element--a race or culture has magic if it doesn't have guns--but that also breeds a couple of problems of its own: Why can't the magic race also have guns and beat everyone? And, it's basically guaranteed that you'll have a party with a magic-race character and a gun-race character, and now you've got to justify how that party gets and stays together.

That's a generalizable rule: Anything you make available or tempting to play will get played, so you had better make anything you allow to be played relatively compatible with anything else. I.e., you can't set up humans and posits as opposites and enemies because somebody's going to want to play a posit.

If you set up magic and guns as mutually exclusive, you can justify it like this:

The gun race doesn't use magic because the magic doesn't work for them. They haven't made the necessary bargains with the Forces of Evil, and probably aren't willing to. Or, they just don't have the magic gene.

The magic race doesn't use guns because the small fraction of them that actually can use magic, the nobles, are trying to oppress (with magic) the vast majority of mundanes. They can't afford to teach their goons how to use guns, due to the risks of rebellion. While the nobles might be able to gain some benefit by personally using guns, it's a lot easier to enforce "no guns period" than "no guns except for this one group of people who CAN have guns".

Well, there are some ways to address this issue:

1) When a player says "I want to play a Posit who knows how to use guns!", you say "No."

2) You could present guns as another form of magic. Instead of gunpowder, you have Delphaeum, a sort of crystallized elemental force. Back in the Old Country, the Ballistomancers With and Smesson have perfected the art of not only creating Delphaeum, but triggering its conversion to elemental force via arcane activation. In this game, guns have barrels and sights but no triggers: shooting a firearm is essentially a spellcasting action. Travelling ballistomancers, also known as gunslingers, can become quite proficient at the use of Delphaeum, eventually learning to trigger it more rapidly, more effectively, or even to produce effects other than propelling a bullet. Alas, the secrets of ballistomancy are not known to other cultures, or perhaps some racial characteristic makes only pureblooded humans capable of working this art.

I've read Piper's "Lord Kalvan" stories, though, which deal extensively with a culture that tries to keep control of firearms via an elite. (It doesn't work.)

This superficially reinforces your point that it's easier to enforce "no guns" than "elites have guns", but only superficially: the Lord Kalvan stories have no external gun-wielding culture, unlike we're positing with the Posits. That renders the situation unstable.

Now, it's not at all a bad idea--in some ways it might be a very good idea--to start a campaign in a manifestly unstable social environment. (The history of the last two centuries is basically a constantly unstable social environment.) Then the campaign can be about that instability breaking free and the characters being instrumental in how things change, but you start running into campaign script problems there, plus the instability itself has to be basically interesting to the players.

I'd say the Posit situation is stable enough: maybe it's not stable on a scale of hundreds of years, but it's certainly ok for a campaign. One way to enhance that is say that even in the Old World the posits have only limited contact with the other europeans and that's limited to the nobles. This was how it was in pre-communist Russia: serfs stayed at home, period. They weren't legally allowed to move around; also, they had a great disdain for all things foreign and felt no need to move around. They hated the government but loved the Tsar. I think foreigners weren't even allowed into the villages.

It might help to have a civil servant subspecies among the posits that can interbreed with the nobles and the serfs, and which is (for example) -4 Charisma; they are genetically wimps who don't make trouble. Or: make them mules - nobles can interbreed with serfs, and the children are sterile civil servants.

Posit Noble: -2 Str, +2 Int, +4 Cha, LE
Posit Civil Servant: -4 Cha, LN
Posit Serf: +4 Str, +2 Con, -4 Int, -4 Cha, N

A return to C&D becomes much more appealing if I'm allowed to resume playing Gus Dragonslayer. :-)

I find small-scale changes to traditional fantasy role-playing more interesting than sweeping ones: familiar fantasy races in new contexts (e.g. C&D, Shadowrun), or new/different races in more familiar fantasy-type environments (e.g. Arcana Unearthed).

In other words, I'd prefer "Injuns are Elves" over "Injuns are spiny blue Xphrsztlym."

If you're looking to map cultures onto different races, Dave Duncan's A Man of his Word series would be a good place to start.

Yes, it's in genre for guns to be the great equalizer - but you've already got magic which is another great equalizer.

Random strangs of spagetti thrown against the wall...

The Gun was a gift from Wesson, the human god of Smiths, to help them in their war against the [dragons/giants/squamous things]. To use a gun without being a follower of Wesson is bad mojo and you'll end up blowing your hand off.

Elves (using the Elf = Indian from C&D v1) don't have elf-chainmail, they have Ghost Dance shirts, which make them bulletproof.

Okay, my brain just exploded. New concept:

Maybe we're limiting ourselves too much with the transpose-onto-Western thing. Maybe we want to broaden our scope a bit.

So: what about transposing D&D onto Space: 1889?

You can generate a D&D equivalent world akin to late-19th century Terra. Maybe the elves are the noble New World savages. Maybe the Dwarves are the Russian Czarists. Maybe the orcs are the sultanates, and the gnomes are the Swiss, and the halflings are the Jews. I dunno.

So they've got magic and technology (or technomagic) in some kind of weird mix, and they do what anybody would do in their situation: they go to Mars.

Bam! you got your creepy aliens!

Bam! you can tell stories in a John Carter vein, not in a Western vein, which has already been heavily mined!

Bam! you can continue to use the familiar D&D system (with tweaks), yet have a world completely different from what we've seen before!

Bam! I just like saying Bam! BAM!

Dwarf tossing is just a lot better at 0.43 G

You know, I don't have much to contribute but I really did love reading all this.

I will suggest that you take a look at Mutants and Masterminds, if you haven't already: you could do a pretty good magic system with their mechanics.

I should hasten to point out that I don't mean 'play supers' with it at all: there's no reason the M&M system can't do fantasy, and do it well. Especially with Power Level being pretty equivalent to D&D levels, and with point costs for everything from BAB to defense bonuses, you could easily use the system to create anything from Newhonian Sword and Sorcery stuff to more magic-intensive flashy Moorcockian stories, or REH, or even Burroughs, C.L. Moore... I've considered it on a few occassions.

Is Mutants and Masterminds a d20 system? I've heard people rave about the system on a few d20 boards, but I don't know anything about it.

M&M is an OGL (not d20) system, which means that it contains rules for the Big Two forbidden things(generating your ability scores and how to advance in level) in d20 games.

It has a lot of nifty features that would make it fun for a generic system, though it's obviously aimed at supers.

Green Ronin is also coming out with another OGL game, "Blue Rose" that takes some of the M&M simplifications and applies them to the fantasy genre.

Knowing what I know about Greg, I think he'd be happier frotzing with the D&D rules to make what he wants than adapting M&M to fantasy.

My votes for the next campaign in order:

1) D20 Cthulu, but only if it is set in the 1920s. I can't imagine anything less scary than "Oooh, the Devil sent you an email!" Plus, with only two charater options, it is much more for the player to differentiate his character than using an archetype.

2) Hackmaster. With a group of people serious about rational applications of the rules, I think it would be awesome to play a game that went exactly the opposite direction from D20, i.e. rather than making obvious simplifications (AC is the number you have to roll over) it took 2E rules and added exceptions (such as a skill system designed to ensure that no one really understands it).

3) An old west game, but with lots 'o reality, e.g. after you get shot you bleed to death in d10 rounds but you can still act. A game with HIGH lethality would be fun. (New character every 3 weeks!!) The D20 rules, IMHO, do not allow for something like the OK Corral by there very nature.

Just some thoughts in no particular order.

I have always thought that it would be fun to play a western-themed games on a mix of personal and institutional levels. Here is what I'm talking about:

You have a generic frontier town. Player A gets to play The Bar H Ranch. This means that he gets to play:

One 'heroic' gunslinger
One iron-fist-within-velvet-glove matriarch
20 ranch hands

At various times Player A gets to play adventuring-type games (using the gunslinger), social politics games (using the matriarch) or even group-action 'The Injuns are Comin'!' type melees. And as these activities don't usually overlap, they can probably be comfortably accommodated in a single game.

Meanwhile, Player B gets to play the Silverwater Mining Company, Player C gets The Norwegian Homesteaders, Player D gets Sheriff Bill and His Posse, and Player E gets The Thunder Creek County Temperance League (featuring Miz Myrtle and her Formidable Handbag of Whacking). Shoot, Player F could get the Lutheran Church, but the little Chinese man who sweeps up used to be an assassin in the imperial Court....

Andy:

Ugh, you probably liked the community rules in d20 Gamama World, didn't you?

8)

As it happens, I did think the community rules in Gamma World were pretty neat. I thought they were one of the most inventive things about the system, in fact. The problem for me was that, while said rules would make for a perfectly enjoyable game, they aren't Gamma World. Gamma World has never been about community building; it was about shooting 6-story tall hyperintelligent slugs with the last shot on your plasma cannon, then preparing to finish it off with several stout whacks from a stop sign.

If the Gamma World game were ported out of D20 Modern and into D&D, and then were renamed something like Hiero's World: The Roleplaying Game, then I would have basically no problems with it at all.

The community rules were quite ignorable. They admittedly covered a lot of real estate in the rulebook, but they had minimal impact on the actual RPG if you played it as a RPG.

I thought the community generation part of the rules was sort of reminiscent of the random town rules in the 1st ed DMG, does anybody remember those, or am I hallucinating that there was such a thing?

The GW rules would generate really lame, random communities. Why would anybody do that? Can't the GM just make up a community? I mean, in a typical RPG you don't burn through communities that fast... the two-night game I ran only had one community in it, Chloride, and that was there partly because I had been intending to try to work in the community rules when I started putting "The Flying Tchaikovsky" together, and then when I abandoned that idea I kept the town.

I would like to ask if any one could please send a list of 20 questions (or longer) on charecter devlopment. I am stuck on fleshing out some of my charecters and would like to get in depth with the details. Please could anyone here help?
thanks