Recent content by Neonchameleon

Player expectations and play style. My players know I do a lot in the moment - the world is collaboratively built and they have been known when I asked about religion in their home region because the PCs were visiting there to drop an actually present God on me and have me roll with it. This...

No. It is a film. It fails utterly to be an RPG because you are passive observers and the game element is entirely absent. To me the railroad can bite in the first story/module if it is heavy handed, but it normally bites in the second story/module. To use a Star Wars as RPG example assuming...

The thing is that you're moving the goalposts from "stolen from the PCs, especially in an invasive way with no respect for precautions taken or expected to be taken by the PCs" to the more general case of "find and retrieve quests". Find and retrieve quests are still around. But the specific...

To me there's complexity of inputs and complexity of outputs. D&D 3.X maximises the complexity of inputs. You've 32 skills plus four skill categories (craft, profession, knowledge, perform), lots of individual modifiers including stat modifiers, skill ranks, and so many difficulty modifiers...

I couldn't disagree more here. Due to the lack of unified systems and mechanics mechanics even B/X is two 3s in a trenchcoat before spells and spell-less AD&D at least three before we root through the DMG. (And 40% of every pre-4e PHB was spells). And Fate? It depends which Fate. 2000s Fate was...

And in my experience it is one that has been mostly deservedly left in the dustbin of history or at least for the greenest of groups or for things that aren't actually possessions of the PCs (like people or public objects). Because the oldest learned behaviours of players start with things like...

I don't think it's remotely inexplicable. If you kill a PC the player soon gets another. If you beat them up they need a long rest. But taking their stuff and that's potentially permanent. And this brings me to the subject of this thread. I don't think that "railroading" is the problem; I think...

Again RAW first game - or at least a credible effort at such (I can't claim 100% rules accuracy on a first game). This is generally much easier in games published post-2010

In response to me having come with receipts? Your "refresh of my memory" is countered by you claiming that that was a writing prompt. If that's your definition I can accept that- and use Grey Ranks. As this was not an apology for your responses to my entirely correct statements then I see no...

I think that this was one of the improvements Essentials tried to make. Reducing the amount of multi-attack in the game because they really were above the curve. But Essentials flopped to the point that if we consider it a different edition there is only one book post the base ones that was more...

I don't recall claiming they did. They can however contain narrative arcs and other story elements. That said certain rulesets such as Montsegur 1244 and Grey Ranks which blur the line between rules and scenario do contain stories. The story of the Warsaw Uprising is a story, as is the story of...

A narrative arc isn't a story either. Instead it's an element of story structure. A writing prompt isn't a story but a narrative arc can be a writing prompt.

Honestly the problem with the vampire is that it's a striker with basically no double-tap abilities, reactions, or bonus action attacks. And unlike the thief or slayer it's very hard to smuggle them in. So at low optimisation or in a pure Essentials game it's fine and genuinely fun but when the...

Some ways have been discussed but the other part of this is how to become a decent or good DM; the rules and DM procedures model what a good DM actually does rather than some abstracts like Chapter 2: Building a Multiverse. A decent ten year D&D DM is likely to e.g. keep only one eye on the...

Vampire and Call of Cthulhu are textbook trad games (and with 8 stats and 50ish skills CoC isn't even in the neighbourhood of rules light although it certainly isn't heavy - and Vampire not delivering what was wanted was a major driver of The Forge), and OUaT is a one shot storytelling game that...