Recent content by Oligopsony

Yeah, for mass combat I’d go with Dragon Rampant or By This Poleaxe or maybe just some random tables rather than an expansion of existing rules. (It’s weird that people say “D&D started out as a wargame” as an explanation for why it has such bloated combat rules when most wargames, including...

I much prefer “nonlinear dungeon” and “looping” a dungeon, simply because going with another non-transparent phrase isn’t going to help with anything. “Gygaxian” means a lot of different things, obviously; “Gygaxian prose” and “Gygaxian naturalism” are separate concepts.

Yeah, I don’t see anything wrong (as a fiction element) with an unjust universe; as an atheist myself, my default is that the world wasn’t designed with any good purpose (so an unjust universe is a default, albeit one we can mitigate.) And even really morally awful people don’t deserve to suffer...

IMO the difference between “gameable setting material” and “sandbox adventure” is thin to nonexistent, and it’s where my own tastes lie. I’m gearing up to run Curse of Strahd and though I’m changing plenty, this is the sweet spot it’s in (mostly) and I love it for it.

I feel like you’re eliding between simulationism and granularity here. In the latter example, torches aren’t modeled in detail, but the principle is that using torches dwindles your supply, and the answer to why you ran out of torches is that you used one too many. By contrast consider a system...

I think you’re thinking small here, where bespoke art is largely something that appears in published products. One-shot prompting isn’t quite there yet, but I’m looking forward to when Discord bots can just provide a running series of illustrations to anyone’s game, likely informed by fine-tuned...

Same as if they want to play a dragon: ask them questions to clarify their intent, put the mechanical work on them, and give it a shot.

This suggests a challenge/contest: if the viable market rate is £9 for 28 pp., say that you’ve got 6 pages to work with (is this A4? A5?) for £2 or $2.50, and that you’ve got to write at an eighth grade reading level (with allowances for a few particularly evocative words to send kids to the...

The format is a bad fit, but opening up the IP on DMGuild means that one product doesn’t need to carry the IP. Curious what old hands will put out unshackled from too much editorial oversight ala Greenwood or Baker.

$0 to turn your houserules into a Google doc, twice that to teach yourself Scribus and Stable Diffusion to make it look professional. Not including time costs, which is the relevant part of course, but that’s hobby/recreation time in most cases, art pour l’art. Economically viable I might be...

OSR is proof of concept that you can have arbitrarily many close-enough systems that people mix and match from with impunity. 5e is crunchier, though, the culture is less DIY, and small balance differences are seen as more important, so in practice I would expect more consolidation. The example...

If their actions take precious time or expose them to danger, that’s the cost. If there’s no time pressure and their actions are safe, then just let them succeed and get as quickly as you can to the next meaningful decision.

Relevant blog post: https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2015/05/what-is-tested.html?m=1 There’s a lot of different player cognitive skills your game sessions might reward: system mastery, knowledge of world lore, lateral thinking, number crunching, remembering that you have a game scheduled, and...

For pitched battles I’d use something like Dragon Rampant, rather than working with the modern D&D chassis which wants way too much detailed resolution per unit. The logistical/diplomatic questions of “getting a large group of forces from one place to another without starvation, plague, or...

You had another thread on jargon, and this is an essay where I think that an embrace of jargon could be useful, because it’s often unclear where you’re referring to the general English meaning of a term and where you’re referring to the particular meanings these have taken on in TTRPG discourse...