Recent content by Fenris-77

Yup, I think the conversation about meta is far more useful to determine what games one would play in that it is as a definitional tool for RPGs generally. I think you can use the idea definitionally up to a point, but that's it.

I completely understand your point of view. However, we have entered very much into the realm of personal taste here. Different folks have very different tolerances for what we're calling meta. While I'd agree that increasing abstraction in specific ways affects what some people refer to as...

There's some good stuff going on here! The callout box is quite nice. I think your heading could be bigger, but I'm given to understand that that isn't the simplest thing to fix in Latex, IDK. I'd also probably increase the leading a bit unless you're concerned about physical page count. A...

It makes perfect sense, I'm just not saying what you think I am. Every single thing that happens in RPG play is abstracted, most of it quite abstracted. It needs to be so in order for the game to even function. When I say that makes none it meta I mean not necessarily, by dint of that...

Meta? Good lord. Some people will throw that word around at the drop of a hat. So, for context, everything in most RPGs is an abstraction to some extent. That makes none of it meta.

Yeah, IDK man, nothing I've described is anything like gambling and I think we're on the same page.

Not really. Let's say you have a background like 'squire in the Black Guard'. That suggests a whole bunch of possible skill type things, but in a system like Shadowdark that uses that sort of background you need to look at the background and figure out how it might provide you with the skills...

No one with the same background will ever have identical skills because the player is always interrogating the background based on specific situations and no two players will do that the same way. You'll get broad similarities (as one would expect) but the details will be very different from...

That said, a lot of people have never tried playing with, for example, a background instead of a skill list. They really do the same job, but the former means you have to interrogate your character regularly and decide things about their background. Personally, I think that's far more useful at...

Yeah, I wasn't telling you how to play. (y)

This is all true and I really like the passion in how you describe it. That said, you can get the exact same thing, more or less, without discrete skills. That's one part of what the thread is about.

Gahh. I hate knowledge checks. Not I guess in principle, but almost always in execution. I think my plan going forward is to grant knowledge without a roll to a PC with the right skills/background/class and maybe have them roll for extra info.

The best advice I've read for running horror is in Liminal Horror. It's a nice lean OSR-ish system that does a lot of things right.

I don't really like hours as an in-game measurement tool. Once you get to things that take that long you're abstracting an awful lot of little things (by necessity). I think it's also tough to say exactly how long those tasks will take. Let's say you need to find a snitch in the poor quarter...

So it's actually maybe closer to old dual class rules than the recent D&D multiclass where a MC character would usually be one level lower in each class than a single class character in the same party (so 9/9 to 10). Each basic class breaks down into two tiers for puposes opf this little...