grandmotherfish

That's a big question, and I'll probably be able to answer several follow up questions on this topic.

I'm proud of 3E, and I'm glad that Paizo rescued it when Wizards ditched it. I like a lot of the improvements that 4E made, but I was not happy with the overall package. With 3E, we tried hard to make the game feel more like D&D than 2E did, but 4E made the game feel less like D&D, actually less than 2E. A problem with 3E was too many player options and not enough balance. A problem with 4E was too few player options and too much balance.

It's hard for me to play 3E these days because the balance issues are too clear to me. I'm not really interested in playing 4E, either, because it's too boardgamey. 5E has some surprisingly nice bits, but it doesn't seemed tuned for the serious play that my group engages in. That's why Rob Heinsoo and I wrote 13th Age. http://www.pelgranepress.com/?cat=248

Looking back on 3E, it seems really clunky and picky. We were trying to make the system more rational than what had come before, and we may have overshot it. 4E did a good job of bringing the game mechanics back to the service of game play. For example, a 4E monster starts with its level, which is a really useful approach. In 3E, you start with size and type, then Hit Dice and abilities, and then once you've figured out that monster stats you assign it a challenge rating. That's fine when it works, but it often doesn't, such as when a 1/2 CR orc dishes out big damage with a two-handed ax.

Yes, 4E kept you from making stupid decisions in character design because it kept you from making substantial decisions in character design.

We got a scathing "review" on the Answers in Genesis blog, and someone did a long You Tube hit piece. Occasionally creationists post mean things on Facebook threads. They really recoil at the idea of teaching evolution to preschoolers. I try to be civil to them. For me, if we didn't get this sort of pushback, I would think we weren't doing things right.

More seriously, we were in negotiations to have a publisher pick up the book, but they chose not to because a Montessori teacher told them that preschool is too young for kids to learn about evolution. Montessori schools teach evolution, but starting in grade school. For ages 6 and under, they focus on learning through the senses rather than through abstract concepts. To me, that sounds like old-fashioned psychology. Today we know that even pre-verbal kids have some sophisticated intuitions. It was disappointing to hear that even though Montessori schools teach evolution, this teacher said that they wouldn't take the book. As near as I can tell, preschool kids are getting the message from Grandmother Fish just fine.

There are occasionally some people who take a hard line against what they call "indoctrination," and they say that parents shouldn't teach their kids evolution until the kids are old enough to evaluate the evidence themselves. Grandmother Fish doesn't teach evolution by rote as if it's a tenet in a belief system. It shows children how they can see their connection to other animals in their own bodies and behavior.

There was also a biology professor who got the idea that I had a PC agenda because the book is about "Grandmother" Fish. He said it should be called "Ancestor Fish" or else it's not real science.

Great question. D&D 3E has the Open Gaming License, and 13th Age was written using that license. Plenty of people are writing 13th supplements, so that's close. But you're talking about being able to rework someone's for-sale adventure (RttToEE, for example) and reshare it?

If the right publisher had a plan for an open source game, I could see creating one, but it's not likely. Creating a new RPG is a massive investment of time and effort from a lot of people. It requires a huge amount of playtesting to get right, especially an RPG that will be general purpose enough to serve lots of needs. Sorry, but it seems like a long-shot.