Recent content by pemerton

To me, it seems that you're not fully responding to the bits that I've bolded: The worry about "do I want to find out if I can be as lucky as Joe?" seems appropriate to an early D&D luck-based dungeon. Lewis Pulsipher wrote about this in White Dwarf 45-odd years ago. But I don't really feel its...

This post is a re-post from another active thread. Given that it is all about TB2e actual play, I thought I'd repost it here. A post about Apocalypse World procedures made me think about an episode of Torchbearer 2e GMing this weekend, when the PCs went to the tavern in a village, and so I had...

I dunno about the players, but over the years I've found a variety of RPGs that don't have the lack of depth/stability that you describe: Rolemaster, 4e D&D, Marvel Heroic RP, Burning Wheel, Torchbearer 2e, and others.

I tend to think Be fans of the players' characters is fairly clear. That's not to say that it's especially, let alone narrowly, prescriptive. It leaves a lot of room for decision-making. (Which I think is deliberate.) But I think it's fairly clear what it does or doesn't permit. I think what it...

@thefutilist Your post just upthread, about AW procedures, made me think about an episode of Torchbearer 2e GMing this weekend, when the PCs went to the tavern in a village, and so I had to roll on the Tavern Rumours table. The results were: 7 Sudden appearance. Your friend, bedraggled and...

Here's another example from cards: One way to lose a hand of bridge or five hundred is to get unlucky in the deal. If I'm dealt four suits, with none greater than 3 or 4 length, and no card higher than a 10, I'm probably not going to win the hand. (And for the five hundred players out there...

We've had all sorts of town phases in my game. Some like what you describe, some more successful for the players (and PCs). Probably the thing the players feel the most is the constant pressure on their gear.

Here's a brief episode of RPG play: My PC arrived at the dungeon entrance, and went down the stairs. There were two Orc guards waiting at the bottom, and they attacked me! They drove me off, and I had to run back to the village to look for help. But all that happened was that the villagers...

It's certainly possible! The players in my game feel that it is absolutely brutal. Because of the way things have played out, they've had no loot for ages (a couple of 2D or so hauls in the past 6 or so sessions), so they're paying for everything on their raw Resources. The two Elves have no...

Shopping; healing; nandies; levitating; climbing.

We played a session of Torchbearer 2e yesterday afternoon. In attendance were 3 players, and so we had 3 PCs: Telemere the Elven Ranger, Fea-bella the Elven Dreamwalker, and Golin the Dwaren Outcast. Fea-bella's player gave us a prologue, and so Fea-bella recovered from Exhaustion. Golin's...

Gygax has an example of it in his DMG (in the discussion of PCs constructing strongholds). So I would say not all that radical.

"Mechanic" is cognate with "machine". Something being mechanical means it happens via a process that doesn't require discretion or intermediating decision-making. So when I think of a mechanic, in a RPG, I think of a process for making decisions in the game that is machine like, or is mediated...

This is the "vanilla narrativist" hypothesis. I am (or at least have been) an instance of the type, as I've often posted about including earlier this morning in another thread: Based on my own experience, and on the assumption that I'm probably not unique, I used to assume that there must be a...

No worries, and thanks! Well, what you described was more specific than "adding to the setting" - you said " the GM said: 'It is a two-day trip underground to the petrified forest. Describe to me what the journey is like and what you encounter.'" This is the players describing setting, and...