Recent content by Michele

It's a lot of time since I GMed a truly fantasy setting, but I never had problems with differentiated species. We regularly had the so-called (by the humans) high elves, forest elves, and dark elves. The dwarves had several kingdoms; IIRC there never was a dwarf PC, so I just dealt with those by...

I don't know if "needs" is the right word. You might use them - say, templates - if you feel the players will feel more comfortable to start with. Or you could do as I did, make the first adventure or two really easy and simple, so that the players get the hang of rolls, combat, character...

I played some D&D and found the character creation system and character advancement a straitjacket. That's why I initially switched to GURPS. I kept playing GURPS because that's more versatile and detailed. Then they published my first RPG article in English, and I became just too fond of GURPS...

This is interesting, but these are descriptors, which is particularly useful if you want to compare multiple systems with a view to selecting one for what you want to do. But they don't measure quality, so I wouldn't call them metrics. The closest they get is the recommendation, but a...

GURPS Mass Combat http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/masscombat/ is abstract. You do know a lot about your units, your commanders, and the commanders' strategic and tactical choices, but you don't know, or care, where they are exactly on the battlefield. It works.

Yes, of course. Why not? The point would be whether the thing would be appreciated by others. But assuming he has a gaming group willing to playtest, he could come up with his own system and setting, and verify, at least with a small group of probably like-minded players, whether it works.

There is nothing wrong in providing fictional bad examples of bad things. Well, no. I disagree. It is entirely possible to say "bad = enemy", and as I mentioned above, staying with the basics, an enemy may well be another human, if he threatens your survival, the survival of your offspring, or...

We have no problems with violence in RPGs for the same reason why we have no problems with violence in fiction. In other games. And especially in sports. Mind you, either it's not real violence (in fiction and games), or it's a strictly codified, limited form of violence (in boxing or football)...

OK, thank you for the explanations.

So maybe evil-worshippers can't be PCs - but they definitely might be enemy NPCs. Because if evil is real, is present, and is powerful, somebody will worship it. Similarly, the game might be not about evil organizations - but evil organizations are likely to exist, if nothing else as enemies. I...

I don't know what geimdark is, but one would have to wonder what are the supernatural evil's powers, then. If evil can't seduce the faithful, corrupt them, tempt them etc., then what is evil? A pack of dire wolves who just happen to come from another dimension or to have things like a breath of...

It very easily is. One of supernatural evil's mainstays is possession. As late as 2018 that I know of, there were cases of exorcisms in which the supposed victims of possession by the devil ended up badly hurt at the hands of the exorcists. I'm sure the exorcists thought that beating up the...

I think I'd like to see various ways of fighting evil, not just one. As to the notion that you might find evil and evil persons in the church itself, I don't think this actually defies the equation of faithful = good, unfaithful = evil, because if a high priest is actually evil, then he was...

Balance. In everything. It's very easy to be a GM focusing on lovingly detailing your gameworld - and forget about the playing characters. It's also very easy to be a GM who will bend over backwards for the PCs and ignore everything else including key underpinnings of the background. It's very...

If the point of social ostracism is that it's good because it's old, then verifying whether this claim is true by comparing it to other old stuff is nothing shocking. You'd need to make a better point for ostracism to be good, other than it being old. Several problems here. The first is, as...