Recent content by Joerg Baumgartner

As a simulationist, one might blame the randomness on ecological or market fluctuations beyond the control of the character/organisation. Sometimes the nth drink is the one too many, even if usually not. Sometimes your rare item comes to the market as the third of its kind. Sometimes some...

Resource management can be abstracted as resistance rolls, with the starting difficulty depending on successes during preparation, and increasing difficulty with each resource roll failure not balanced by some act of foraging, trading or similar.

I guess I would go for a BRP variant for some grit, possibly inheriting from the Moorcock adaptations whose heroes/antiheroes tend to have similarly troubled backgrounds. Fate might be an alternative, using the troubled background as a narrative resource to shape the scene.

Unless a fantasy setting is written for D20 (levels, Vancian magic) or magic is a rare thing mainly cast by NPCs (e.g. Lankhmar), D20 is a bad fit for most fantasy. Adjusting the impact of magic to a different setting is hard for most fantasy rpgs, and evaluating the longer term cost of casting...

Other than in D&D-inspired derivates, I haven't seen "class", "level" or XPs in any of the fantasy that I like to consume. BECMI Basic and Expert were among my first purchases, but never played as the alternatives I had beat it. I did play a little AD&D 1st and 2nd because friends played it, but...

Call of Cthulhu Great Old Ones are Kaiju that will drive you mad, but being (almost) helpless in the face of huge monsters is one persistent theme in the game. There are rules for various forms of exposure (radiation, poison, magic) to threaten to break the characters. Your typical Call of...

I expect from the publishers: 1) to ensure playability of a game system by clearing up unintended ambiguities and addressing/resolving contradictions 2) to provide world-building or to provide tools and niches for customer world-building (ideally providing a community content platform for the...

Piloting may be little more than inputting the target location into the navigation system. Maintenance of the ship systems might be a far less glorious but harder task. When it comes to space combat, you need to decide on space combat lethality. Fasa's ancient Inteceptor/Leviathan/Prefect...

My first non-solo tabletop rpg game I ever played (actually GMed for two other newbies) used the Fighting Fantasy 2D6 system plus the player magic from one of the subsequent books. The first game explored a dungeon that I improvised (featuring among others a major kitchen feeding the denizens of...

This thread sent me into a rabbit hole of SF sources I more or less remember having read, read the rules, seen on screen or played that I used AI assistance to create a taxonomy of FTL travel modes. Anybody interested in the intermediary seed prompt?

If you intend to play a sociopath, why not do it the Ferengi way with a huge network of cousins to exploit and run under the bus? Just don't pretend to be either Lawful or Good, and be ready to be backstabbed by your party whenever convenient, "in self defence". "Yeah, I know my parents. I sold...

As with wet navies, the means of travel decide how space navies work. Hardly any SF setting acknowledges the vast emptiness of space. Most asteroid fields look like a fresh accretion disk. Travel times are reduced to intercontinental flight times, or at worst to the travel times of Diesel- or...

Outside of rpg context, a simulation is a test engine for determining outcomes for certain sets of parameters based on observed relations. In the rpg context, simulation drives certain game mechanics, depending on the game system you are using. Simulation (to a certain extent) provides the...

Setting lore matters in numerous ways. Sometimes the "opponent" of or challenge to the players is the nature of the setting. Starting with environmental challenges like seeing in the dark, stepping lightly across snow, breathing underwater, or species-specific allergies/poisons like cold iron...

There are players who can immerse in their Theatre of the Mind space. I guess that this is a "session zero" or party contract topic whenever you start a new game with a new cast of players.