Recent content by hawkeyefan

Nice! How did that go?

Games I played in: Scum & Villainy Daggerheart Call of Cthulhu Delta Green Dungeon World Games I ran: Stonetop Band of Blades Mothership False Kingdom Blades in the Dark DIE Overall, a good year of gaming across three groups. We literally just began DIE with session zero, and the first full...

Agreed about the Storm-Marked Heavy. That was a playbook/background combo that was in the game I played in, and then also in the game I GMed when we made a second group of PCs. The character in both cases was devastating in combat. The Heavy and the Judge in the game I played in was a...

Yeah, the 4e influences are obvious in the lore of the setting. That doesn't mean the game plays like 4e in any way. I like the playbooks. They are a bit more "class-like" than other PbtA takes... but they themes of most seem far more specific than we typically think of when we think of classes.

So, a lot of them are game dependent. Stonetop, for instance, has a series of questions that are asked about the town and the people in it. The group answers these together and comes up with NPCs to fill the major roles in the town (blacksmith, publican, midwife, etc.). Then each playbook has...

Yeah, I got the impression that more time is meant to pass between major excursions and the like… but that seems to assume that threats either really bide their time, or that they’re generally resolved quickly. Many of the threats that came to face the town in our game were persistent and tended...

Yeah, the game I GMed went for probably about that number of sessions. It was every other week for just over two years. We wound up adding a second group of PCs when the first group spent a good deal of time away from town. We had two PC deaths… one that took the Thrall playbook and another...

This issue you have is based on what? Some games, as has already been pointed out, don’t have “holes in the lineup” because they don’t require role specialization. They talk it out like friends. Or at the very least, like adults. What if someone shows up at your game and doesn’t want to...

I’d say play resources. Like reference sheets and the like that can be used at the table. Some games do this and it’s very helpful. Other than that… I just want to keep seeing new games.

Most of the games I’ve played over the last few years have some element of collaborative PC creation. It works so well that I don’t really expect I’ll ever run a game in the future where we don’t do that. Some games have very formalized rules or procedures for it, others are pretty loose. My...

Steal. Need a frontier town filled with NPCs? Take Deadwood and plop it into your campaign. Make Sheriff Bullock a grim dwarf and Al Swearingen a foul-mouthed orc. Reskin everything just a bit, and you can have a vibrant location filled with NPCs that you already understand. Seriously, just...

I don’t know which Mothership modules you may have played or are familiar with… but the couple that I know (the aforementioned A Pound of Flesh and Gradient Descent) aren’t really less complex. One’s a dynamic setting and the other is a mega-dungeon. Both can provide dozens of hour of play...

One man’s trash is another’s treasure. It’s all a matter of preference, really. But for me… I grew up running modules. I did plenty of homebrew stuff, but we played every module we could find. The further back you go, the smaller they were (generally speaking). They were also less complex...

As someone who has run a ton of published adventures over the years, I would certainly say that as time has passed, the idea that they’re meant to be read more than played seems more and more legit. I generally don't run published material anymore, but there are a few things I’d like to...

Absolutely. But even in a classic dungeon delve type adventure, you don’t need to go to the lengths of prep that a module does. You can just use bullet points for room descriptions… you don’t need full descriptions and separate boxed text and all that.