Recent content by pemerton

I enjoy a reasonable variety of procedures of play. But there is one that I tend to be hesitant about, and a related one that I actually dislike. I tend to be hesitant about a procedure of play that permits the GM to draw upon secret aspects of the fiction to declare that a player's declared...

I think this is an important question about a core mechanic: what does the outcome of the mechanic tell us about the fiction? @Staffan's post assumes that the result, in the fiction, of the player failing their roll is that their PC fails to perform the task that they attempted. But that's not...

There's a lot of variety in RPGs. But most of them have two distinguishing features: * There is a fiction that the participants imagine together, that matters in game play, in the sense that the shared fiction constrains what moves the participants are able to make, and what follows from those...

To me, that doesn't sound like a particularly compelling dungeon.

Not in my case. When I use dice in a RPG it's not because I think the fiction is uncertain. It's because I want the fiction to be uncertain.

From the point of view of the structure of a player's engagement with the game, there is no difference between the following two states of affairs: *Your character is unconscious, so you can't declare actions for them until they recover. *Your character is petrified with fear, so you can't...

In my experience, the play of Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic involves a lot of plot points being spent and earned; many more than a handful of times over the course of a session.

Most of the methods I have in mind are about sharpening the situation, by having the players - whether via PC build, or some aspect of play (eg Apocalypse World first session) - contribute core concerns for the starting situation. But for a D&D-ish sandbox, there is the method that Mythic...

What do you do when someone cheats at cards? When people break the rules of the game, it's time to step outside of the game and fix things up. I think the idea that seems to come up in relation to RPGs, that the GM can fix rules breaking by making moves within the game is a pernicious one.

I'm not a very big fan of this. It's like the GM playing the game with themself.

To me that sounds like a bad game. Instead of the GM railroading, why not have a better way of getting the game off the ground? It's not like there's a shortage of methods in the contemporary RPG world.

I think by using really open setting as the contrast with railroad, you are building in an assumption that at least some RPGers - eg me - don't share. When I play, and in most of the games that I GM, setting is not all that important. It is a backdrop, and a way of coordinating various events...

I don't really see how it becomes the GM's prerogative to tell a player how to play their PC. If (say) a low INT is an aspect of the character, then why can't the player play that? When we play Classic Traveller, we expect the players to play their PCs' INT and EDU. That's just part of what it...

Great minds, and all that . . . It seems that in some cases - even many cases - the GM's reason is to preserve a pre-authored conception of setting and events within the setting. This can be a way of disclaiming decision-making. But if that stuff is mostly opaque to the players - so that they...

I still have to read the write-up - but as a BWHQ fan, I could not let this go past without comment. (Admittedly I've not played Mouse Guard. But I've played plenty of Burning Wheel, and plenty of Torchbearer - two of my favourite FRPGs.)