Diary of a Failed Game Designer

Two years ago, almost to the month I wrote my deep dive on Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition Players Option Skills and powers. (TSR 2154.) An article I was pretty proud of at the time, even if only Russian web bots ever read it. Then the world fell apart. A pandemic made camp here in New York, hasn't left yet. For about a year my job went from how I make a living to how I lived. Furthermore, I have by any real measure stopped gaming. I even took this Blogg completely down for nearly 2 years. It's been a strange, sad, busy time. I kept occasionally thinking about The Players options books. How they seem to have been forgotten. Or if not forgotten dismissed. In reality I would love to ask the author how the Players Options books came about. I would like to know what their internal dialogs and the internal discussions at TSR were while the books were in production. With that in mind, I'm going to embark on part 2 of the AD&D 2ed Player's Option deep dive. Featu...

I think I am obligated to say: I'm not affiliated with Paizo in any way. No"review" materials were provided by Paizo prior to this writing.  Here is ae link to the  official Paizo  information about the Starfinder game. I bought the book from Amazon . I get nothing from your clicking on the links contained in this blog. I am quite obviously not a professional reviewer, all opinions in this piece are just that..My personal opinions. I think that covers my rear-end sufficiently. OK. I have to be a straight shooter here. There is no way to do a "Quick Look"  at a 521 page book. My apologies. So here is the TLDR version: Very good production values. Surprising value for price. A system the group I game with will relate to. A Pazio game I can get in on the ground floor of. Good value for the money. Does Sci-fantasy "shoot-shoot" as well as Pathfinder does Fantasy "stab stab".. . I took the time to hack together that preamble because I know Starfin...