Recent content by The Shadow

"Somebody ate Wheaties this morning!"

It seems they made the decision for the movie that only wizards and sorcerers actually cast spells. The druid never does, just wildshapes. Notice that Pine's character asks Simon to cast a healing spell! The problem is that robbed the bard of a big chunk of his shtick, leaving him as basically...

Indeed! I spent a stupefying amount of time on AmberMUSH.

I'll concede it's the best calculator made in Liechtenstein. :p I still have my dad's old slide rule around somewhere...

My 50g is still holding up fine. Though admittedly I more often use an emulator on my phone these days - faster and more convenient, plus I've ported all my programs over. I loved my 48SX dearly, but it did eventually give up the ghost. But it never had the sheer capabilities of the 50g. There...

Point of order! The 50g is the best calculator ever made! (I lust after the Prime's memory, speed, and color display - its graphing is amazing! - but the betrayal of RPN and RPL hurts grievously.) Is damage a dimension, though? It could plausibly be a logarithmic scale, like decibels. Though...

In practice, I don't find this to be a problem. The intensity boils down to coming up more often. If it were considered essential to model the distinction, though, it could certainly be done. Just say that hindrances, flaws, or whatever can grant a variable number of metacurrency points.

In all honesty, I don't think what you'd have left would be recognizable as GURPS. In effect you'd be creating a new game and slapping the name on it because marketing. Part of what GURPS is is the crunch level. I mean, if you don't believe me, look at GURPS Vehicles.

Demoralizing armies for fun, profit.

I played in a number of GURPS campaigns back in the day and had fun... but I wouldn't touch the actual rules with a ten foot pole any more. I've never seen a system more devoted to meaningless crunch - crunch that doesn't actually matter. That, and I've come to think it's a major design mistake...

I have felt an occasional twinge after giving my copy of The Primal Order away.

Oh my goodness, YES! I also would love to see Star Frontiers again in a modern system. (I don't even remember the rules, I just liked the setting.) Here's a hearty second vote to a streamlined 5e-ified version of True20! I've been tempted to do it myself. I would love to see Mutants &...

Oh, we also had a shorter campaign in which magic revolved around interacting with spirits. There were three kinds, based on which social skill you used to interact: Rapport casters made friends and bargains. They would have to pay through the nose for powerful effects, but so long as they kept...

All of those are older versions of Fate. Fate Core drastically streamlined the game and in my opinion vastly improved it. The more recent Fate Condensed is leaner, meaner, and (again IMO) fixed what few problems Core had.

I honestly think that having freely-usable spells that are just better than skills are usually bad design. There should be something (other than prepared casting, since this isn't D&D) that makes it not always the best choice. With that in mind, Fate fills the bill. There's two basic ways to...