Recent content by CF07

It was but a lot more slow moving than many people would think, and induced by multiple events, including the Antonine Plague, the Crisis of the Third Century's civil wars. Later on there were issues such as the Justinian Plagues, the Gothic Wars that devastated Italy, the destruction of the...

As bad as they are in the moment, apocalypses often have benefits. For example, if you check into historians such as Walter Scheidel or Peter Turchin, an apocalypse of some sort can be followed by an age of prosperity due to the destruction of established oligarchies.

Many fantasy games and genres have an apocalypse as part of their backplot. Lord of the Rings is set in a time of longterm decline with the final apocalypse being barely averted. The plethora of ruins and magic items floating around in your average D&D campaign are often justified by an...

100% agree. Yes this is my favorite type, though things often do start to lose steam and keeping the campaign alive can become too much work.

One way to make things be at least somewhat self-consistent might be to choose to emulate a particular era of naval combat. David Weber's Honor Harrington-verse started with a very Napoleonic vibe and moved up to World War II and beyond. Different classes of ships emerged, clearly modeled on...

VERY good points. The James Bond novels are a great example, as opposed to the movies, which reboot pretty regularly without continuity. Over the course of the novels Bond ages. But he also really gets nutty. In the later ones by Fleming, Bond goes through a fugue state and is pretty clearly...

I ran Greyhawk myself for a while in the early '90s, but loved playing in a Greyhawk campaign from the late '90s to the late oughts. Super fun setting. We got to explore the world but our PCs were based in the City of Greyhawk. The campaign was one where there were a small number of players with...

Absolutely. They didn't have the math worked out properly so things were highly problematic with regards to insurance until the 17th Century, but it was around. Agreed. Indeed one thing that the King of England did to make the office popular was provide the King's Justice. During the travels of...

In one of my campaigns, trade features highly because one player really enjoys it and the others are OK with it. A few examples: The main area of magic item mining is the site of the long ago and legendary Battle of Pesh (between the forces of Law and Chaos, where Miska the Wolf-spider...

For me I like both kinds of games, but have really enjoyed playing in narrative games, assuming they align with the genre. We already discussed Star Trek Adventures, which really runs based on the narrative tools in the game (Threat, Momentum, etc.). They read weirdly but play really well and...

Absolutely. Indeed I think this was one of the really big tensions in game design for a long time. Many modern games are designed to try to emulate something more like a book, movie, or TV show. Older game rules rooted in wargames are frequently too random or restrictive to give that kind of...

I see what you're saying. I guess for me Lara Croftian plot armor is part of a genre like pulp, but I agree that generally speaking it's not part of the "physics of the world". There are counterexamples, such as the Trinity Continuum, where flux induced by the Hammersmith Experiment "explains"...

Yeah that might be a better characterization of the kind of character I tend to like than hero per se, although my current PC is more of a precocious youth.

Well Croft (and other pulp heroes) are very much in genre, though you're right that the general pulp genre (which is very broad; I'd include James Bond in it, for example), involves incredibly lucky heroes who take a licking and keep on ticking. But I think once you start poking at Trek, it's...

Totally. The idea of a secondary reality (as opposed to concepts like suspension of disbelief) is very liberating in my view. A game (or piece of fiction) doesn't need to be realistic, it needs to be reasonably self-consistent. In Star Trek, there are genre tropes that make total sense even...