Recent content by dbm

Probably the longest running campaign I ever played in used RM2 with all the companions. We played once or twice a week for several years in a continuing campaign, though there was some character loss along the way. We played all the way up to about 60th level IIRC so a lot of the crazy top-end...

I prep outlines and then (like 90%+ of GMs) adapt to the players at the table. I probably prep-to-play a ratio between 50% and 100%, so between 30 mins and an hour for each hour of gaming. Most of that is reading any adventure I am using, tailoring encounters to the group, writing down headline...

The conversion seems to be being done by Mike Underwood, who was part of the Daggerheart development team.

Not an RPG but definitely RPG-adjacent, the Lone Wolf: Vengeance of the Kai board game is in its last three days currently. It’s 230% funded and chasing down the last couple of stretch goals. The game has taken inspiration from some modern classic board games, including Star Wars Rebellion...

For me this would say GURPS, full on rather than ‘just’ Dungeon Fantasy but pulling heavily from those assets for inspiration on the character side and for monster stats. GURPS allows for small amounts of progress to be awarded each session without ending up at Demi-god status when the GM...

How many midichlorians to the force point? :P

More data points definitely needed to fully understand YZE 🙂

I think this is really hard to nail down, however on reflection I think modern games are more intentional in design and leverage better understanding about how game mechanics promote certain aspects of play. Things like the rules for torches in Shadow Dark strike me as a clever mechanic to push...

It sounds to me that you players have a fundamental disconnect with the type of game you are trying to run. I can understand your group’s desire to ‘win every encounter’ however that can result in a really unsatisfying experience for some kinds of games. In my personal experience, systems like...

I would describe YZE as a ‘house system’ model where a system is modified for different applications while retaining some shared qualities. I’ve read one (Forbidden Lands) and played another (Alien) and they were very different. More different than similar in my opinion.

Like several posters already, I follow an iterative process - do enough top level prep to provide a ‘helicopter view’ of the campaign as a whole which could mean geography or themes or more likely some of both. Then drop into more immediately useful detail that will ground character creation and...

That’s probably fair. Meta currencies, things like the Doom pool from Cortex and so on, the escalation dice from 13th Age, are all familiar to me so they didn’t jump out. But I’ve never played a PbtA system so that stood out for me personally.

I’m not the person you are asking, but I do have Draw Steel. The only particularly ‘modern’ element in my opinion is the use of an evolution of the PbtA tiered success mechanism. For example, in combat you will always do some / average / more damage. There is no ‘miss’ result. Skills are...

For sure, it’s a more realistic game in many ways - charging that machine gun nest is truly heroic! Though when highly skilled characters are up against more mundane opposition heroics can be back on the table. I think a good route to enjoyable outcomes in GURPS is to play with a smaller group...

I don’t think that @Reynard was commenting on games being played, I think it was more about new games being made. There are definitely an order of magnitude more light games released each year, for all the good reasons given. I think the original question was more a case of - with big numbers...