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While I think there are many "paper cuts" that can make a bad GM or player, the overwhelming factor that overrides everything else is simple: inability to set expectations and stick to them. If I am invited to "uhmm a game I guess it will be cool!", nah, I'm not going. If I was invited to a...

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean by scale here. In many (if not most, honestly) games combat is basically a self-contained minigame that only vaguely conforms to the fiction. If anything, it's often the opposite, where fiction is heavily influenced by constraints of the combat...

Would you consider chess to be a tactical game? It does require a lot of thinking about positioning, so it counts at least in my book.

I would argue that having to make guesses, educated or not severely reduces the tacticality, but that's another tangent. What the enemies can do to prevent those options from being used? What can you do to prevent enemies from preventing you from taking those options?

I mean, paying a more-or-less unbroken attention to the game state while keeping in mind at least most of the rules for 3-4 hours is bound to be a taxing activity regardless of how you slice it, and if you don't do either, you just basically offload this tax to someone else, which is also, uhm...

While yes, I will broadly enjoy a bad game with good people, I find the idea of using an RPG as a hangout activity just utterly bizarre. Like, if I want to chill with friends, a mentally and emotionally taxing activity that event at the most minimum of minimums requires a non-trivial amount of...

The issue with "tactical" RPGs is that they are almost always reliant on player options. The end result is that there's no tactics, there's just a closed loop that works all the time. Most of the time the loop is short: "I HIT HIM WITH MY SWORD!", sometimes it requires a bit of set up: "I buff...

I'm not sure I understand. 25% chance of success is not "reliably succeed more often than not"??? Typical DCs table in 5E DMG states that DC 15 is a "moderate" difficulty, with DC 10 being easy, which means that a person with only 10 in a given stat has only a 25% chance at succeeding at a...

Overall, I think stats that describe what the character can bring themselves to do or stop themselves from doing are ultimately both more important and more immediately useful than stats describing their ability to persuade or solve riddles.

Or take average DC of 15 as a baseline. Yeah, an "average" person has only 25% chance of a successful negotiation! That said, this isn't an issue with stats themselves, that's an issue of the very specific way D&D stats work that is not universal to all games that have social and mental stats.

Aside from everything else, now I wanna run or play a game about the last mage in a dying world, that sounds like a blast ...at least as long as I'm not the one playing the last mage

I posted this in other threads more than once, but still: There's an obscure Russian RPG called УМЕР МУЖИК (MUJIK IS DEAD for you, westerners). It's free and short, go read it. Then, play it. In short, it's brilliant. In long, it's weird an innovative. From time to time I think "okay, I've...

Faction relationship rules are kind of that? Factions that have -3 with you will go out of their way to screw you, and showing up for your score is one of the most obvious way they can do that. The same goes for PC's personal enemies.

I'm not Manbearcat, but in games I've ran or played that were closely following the rules, they kinda were and weren't? Depending on the definition of a "dynamic situation". In the last Scum&Villainy (BitD in space, I guess???) game I participated in, there were plenty of situations where a...

It is a choice of how to run it. I run Blades that way too as a basically series of one-shots. I don't think it's the intended way for it to be run, though, given how a starting situation presented in the book is "Crows, the biggest gang in the area just had a very suspicious change of...

While I understand how it might be uncomfortable, neither AW nor MH really intend for players to ERP at the table, as both Vincent and Avery said that they normally just fade to black. Honestly, speaking as an ERP connoisseur, they are pretty clunky and aren't exactly suited for actual ERP.

There's an obscure Russian RPG called УМЕР МУЖИК (MUJIK IS DEAD for you, westerners). It's free and short, go read it. Then, play it. In short, it's brilliant. In long, it's weird an innovative. From time to time I think "okay, I've seen everything there is in TTRPGs", but every time something...

Well, I was invited to a game of mundane personal horror without katana trenchcoats, and it was a pregen anyway, so... Yeah, I'm pretty sure?

I only played Mausritter and enjoyed it a lot. I don't know if it's a common feature of the family or a thing unique to Mausritter, but I adored inventory/health management, I think it's very neat and creates this whole "inventory anxiety" that I ultimately want from an encumbrance mechanic