Recent content by Gorgon Zee

Encourage your players (and you, for your NPCs) to think of the character as being played as a famous pulp character, or by a larger-than-life actor. Whenever you take an action, if you think to yourself, "how would Brian Blessed play this scene?" or "What would Indiana Jones do here" you will...

One suggestion is to emphasize at character creation that any attributes, descriptions, flaws or whatever are at pulp scale. Dale Arden doesn't just love Flash Gordon, she adores him so much that she will betray him to Ming and doom the Earth rather than let another girl kiss him. If your...

For a resource closer to the real-world, I quite like the old PIRATES campaign book for Rolemaster. Has quite a lot of useful info and timelines and it's less tied to RM mechanics than many of their supplements.

The reason I prep and strongly prefer games run by people who prep is that when you invent something at the table, you have very limited amount of time to come up with that invention, and so that invention is necessarily shallow. You simply don't have the time to come up with all the ideas...

Sorry, that wasn't intended. The contrast was meant between a rule that aims at simulation (which is fun) and a rule that is aimed purely as fun. As an example, I like hit locations and specific consequences for damaged body parts as rules -- the fun is found in the simulation. I also like...

Oh absolutely. I've played a lot of wargames, and from the perspective of a 70's player of games featuring combat, D&D is nothing like an accurate simulation; certainly it makes a ton of sense to state, to 1970's players, that the goal is not to be as detailed as a wargame. In the 1970's D&D was...

In an early post, I suggested that, for me, "modern mechanics" pretty much menat "mechanics not meant to simulate a reality". It is encouraging to see that this aligns well with the text you have highlighted! Some reasoning is for narrative, some for gameplay, some to help everyone participate...

Yeah, I've never liked that sort of solution -- especially when the GM has to make the decision as to which players' actions to negate. I prefer a solution that is a blanket effect as feeling a lot more fair feeling. Hence my thought that I'd probably house rule that certain BBEGs just reduce...

I started a long answer and then realized it boiled down to two words: "Not Simulationist". Older systems used mechanics as a way of trying to simulate a physical reality. Modern mechanics do not have that as their goal. They may want to generate a narrative, elide things they consider...

So, I think this might be a core reason Force Points are giving you issues -- and why others can run for years without seeing such issues. If the main reason your players play a TTRPG is to overcome challenges without drama, it's going to be really hard to use rules designed for drama. If they...

I really am unsure what you mean here. In a game that is a railroad, the tracks very much do go somewhere. If they only mostly go somewhere, that's exactly what every single game in the world does and so cannot be railroading unless everything does. I absolutely believe that people ere always...

But in real life, a hit doesn't require damage be done. In fencing and many martial arts, you just have to contact a person and it's a hit. In football people hit each other and they do not do damage. I'm fine with a hit doing no damage (like in fencing) or some stress or temp damage (as in...

Star Wars Saga: If it does hit point damage, it's energy and luck. If it does wounds, it;'s blood. D&D: It depends on the source of the damage. Alien RPG: When the Alien stabs you either it's tail, or a grenade goes off beside you it's only luck until you have to roll on the random death table...

No, but it typically has the potential to be. If I have a simple adventure that requires the players to choose to bargain with A, fight B and marry C, then that is a railroad as I am requiring the players to do certain things -- they have lost freedom to act and must follow my plot. If they do...

I think you'll find most people DON'T think of it as a quantitative term. It's intrinsic in the metaphor -- a railroad has a direction that you CANNOT avoid going. There is no qualitative aspect to a real-world railroad: Tracks do not "mostly" go in a direction or "suggest you head to New York"...