Recent content by dbm

Specifically, concessions are the player agreeing to their character being ‘taken out’ of a scene and in return they get some agency on what that means, plus a Fate point. So you need players who are willing to accept any outcome other then ‘victory’ over the opposition. My experience is that...

Draw Steel addresses the ‘what are HP’ question head-on by having Stamina as the thing which gets whittled away. It is explicitly described as your energy and ability to get out of the way of serious injury. So, while an attack may cause you to lose Stamina that is more a case of you becoming...

I like a well implemented meta currency system. They are all over the place these days so that’s fortunate for me, I guess. The implementation of Inspiration in 5e D&D was an example of a poorly implemented meta currency in my opinion, primarily because you had to choose to use it in advance...

Another vote for Savage Worlds as an option for urban fantasy but with some more crunchy combat. The latest version of the Horror Companion (for Savage Worlds Adventure Edition) has a chapter on playing ‘monstrous’ characters such as vampires, werewolves, angels, and more. There isn’t strong...

I seem to recall Hackmaster 5th Editon (no relation to D&D5e) uses this kind of action tracking. Might be worth checking out it you haven’t already?

Concessions in Fate model this, though the players really need to buy-in to the concept for them to work. There is too much ‘carrying my shield or on it’ mentality baked into many players in my experience.

I have thought about this a lot over the years. First, there is no one best answer in my opinion, and second multiple options can and probably should exist in the same game system. I have previously called these ‘gated abilities’ versus ‘skill penalty abilities’. Compare a system like GURPS...

Didn’t play SLA Industries myself but I do remember it from ‘back in the day’. As a Scottish publication maybe it had more market in the UK than other places? I remember a key setting conceit was that the adventures of the party are live-broadcast to an audience and you get rewarded based on...

GURPS does this with templates and lenses. Templates are recipes / pre-spent points to create a certain type of characters, while lenses are similar but smaller in scope (fewer points) and intended to be added to a template. So the mix of template and lens helps quickly create characters with a...

I didn’tread the Forge personally. The best explanation I have is that procedures and mechanics are both examples of rules but mechanics are the smaller more discrete things like skill rolls or attack rolls and procedures are the bigger things like how combat works (incorporating rules like...

One of the reasons Savage Worlds is my favourite RPG is that it has some great procedures which cover scenarios that come up often in gaming, beyond combat. I really like the Dramatic Task system, which is an evolution of various skill challenge systems that other systems also have. There are...

I would say that is a very common rule in general, now. Even GURPS says not to roll Driving skill for a trip to the shops, and with the now-common design concept of (generalising) “don’t roll a skill unless there is an interesting outcome for both results“ it seems to be becoming a default in GM...

I find the asymmetry of Daggerheart attack rolls quite interesting. Players use 2d12 (triangle distribution) while NPCs use d20 (linear distribution). The implication of this is that the output of players will be a bit more normalised while the output of monsters will be a bit more varied. I...

I can totally understand that. One of the tools in GURPS is a set of general difficulty modifiers, so you can just think about how tricky in a narrative or world-sim way you want something to be and apply that level of mod. The calibration should work out at the macro level as people are given...

First, let me put my cards on the table as a person who really like triangle and bell-curve distributions. In my opinion, it’s not about normalising people. It’s about having a more normalised set of outcomes. In a system like GURPS someone who is high skill can reliably perform at a given...