Recent content by The Firebird

For me, the allegations from last summer should be a career ender. Not long ago they may have been.

Yeah, I think it is a really important, and maybe unappreciated, dial. The DMG gestures at it with the 'gritty realism' variant which pops up in online discussions now and then but I don't know how widely it is used. I ran a campaign with some version of it and the players said they were more...

Very interesting work! I've said it before, but I think LLMs as players is a better test for their ability to execute tasks than AI GMs. The players need to set goals and plan for the long term, while GMs can be more reactive. I don't expect the AIs to do very well at anything requiring long...

I remember an argument out there that went something like: humans are very good at physical tasks because millions of years of evolution has optimized for running, climbing, jumping, that sort of thing. But intelligence and abstract thought is comparatively recent and much less optimized. This...

I suppose, it's complicated and it's complicated. People are going to judge for all sorts of reasons, some valid, some not. I know people judge me poorly for some of my opinions. At least online, they don't really know me, so that's ok with me. And likewise, I don't know them or what events in...

I like the vibes of the franchise, but I find the sexualization of the original off-putting. Obviously that carries through to today, in terms of how people expect the actress to look. (Not in this thread. But have seen much of that elsewhere). I played the 2013 game and watched the Vikander...

You seem to have made up your mind, so I'm not really interested in going down that road.

I was going to take a stab at it but the difference is less clear than it was in my head. I suppose there is a spectrum: "When you attack, roll 1d20 + X vs AC" is clearly a mechanic "The GM should only call for checks if there is a meaningful chance of failure" is also a mechanic, but bleeds...

Quite probably you are aware, but there was a conversion guide and discussion on the giantitp forums a while back. I've not run it but I remember seeing the thread and it might help you.

no one said you had to

What are the categories you're saying can't be distinguished between? As I read you, it sounds like you have one called "trad" and one called "narrative". The 'trad' label puts in my mind the six cultures of play idea; you also say it is "like early D&D", but narrative is not one of those (story...

I think there is a lack of specificity to the discussion that is making it hard to be precise. When I say 'unbridgeable', I mean there are certain mechanics (or perhaps, norms) of play that are incompatible. For example, "the GM specifies the structure of a location in advance" is incompatible...

I guess these are probing the same thing--if there is a game that is midway between two endmembers, then those endmembers are the same type of game. I don't think that holds. Colors are an easy example--you vary continuously but blue and red are different. With respect to games, perhaps frisbee...

I can't see the post you are responding to so apologies if I'm missing something. I've been increasingly feeling over the past year or so that narrative and trad games are entirely different games, though. That's subjective and qualitative and so could be argued about forever. So all I'll say...

I'm afraid to say, that was my response to Platoon. I'm sure very impactful at the time, but I just didn't connect to it. The NASA budget passed recently and was just about everything we asked for, short of Mars sample return (which was becoming massively over budget anyway).