Recent content by TheAlkaizer

There's multiple ways we could explore that question. But I did a market research last year. One of the data source I used was the number of products on DriveThru. I had a few surprises. If I limited it to English products, Science-fiction wasn't that far off from Fantasy products if we checked...

You're in luck. To my understanding, the books currently being Kickstarted don't include the rules. The rules are found in Cypher 2E. A strange decision to me, but also a bold one.

The plot thickens.

Mad Men is my favorite show of all time. And for years, knowing that Matthew Weiner had worked on it, The Sopranos have been on my list. So I started watching it casually during the holidays. About two-thirds of the way through. I like it, it's a good show. But, to my standards, it's nowhere...

I really don't think it is. I've played Traveller and had my issues with it. But one thing is clear, it's a system with a very wide scope and it's quite modular. The core rules are incredibly system. I would say not that much more crunchy or complicated that most OSR products. It does have a...

It really depends on the type of office. I work in video games, so it's mostly programmers programming, artists drawing, designers talking, scribbling notes and playtesting. But whenever I visit a more traditional office, I'm always wondering what all these people do. There's a huge amount of...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1192053011/dragonbane-trudvang-the-legend-returns/description I... was not expecting the Kickstarter to explode like this. I'm definitely interested. Gonna keep an eye on it.

There's some elements of OSR that I really like. There's others that I don't care about. I really like the tendency to have lighter rulesets that allow more freedom to adjudicate during play. I also really like that it's a more consequential type of play (which is a more apt description than...

But video games are a different beast. I think you're absolutely right in your assessment that with video games, randomized elements would be a fat fit for survival horrors in the way that they're articulated. But you obviously can't reproduce this the exact same way with TTRPG, you have to...

The other games that I know that use a wound system with your encumbrance all don't allow to increase your carrying capacity. It's often modeled after your STR or something similar. Accumulating wounds often force you to either get rid of some items, or make them "unusable" depending on the...

Happened once. I've backed about two dozen Kickstarters. And a few weeks ago was my first time where once I got the email that the campaign had fulfilled I regretted it. The product will be great, no question about it. But I realized that I had backed it up for the wrong reasons. Maybe it was...

I'd also add that the friction that a set of rules create is different from the complexity. They can be confused. A high friction can make internalizing and understanding rules much more difficult, which might make it seem like they are complicated. A simple example would be making a random...

I don't think complexity belongs anywhere. Complexity is undesirable. But it's often unavoidable to introduce complexity as you add rules, or try to add depth to your designs. So it's a necessary evil that you try to curb. The golden goose is always to have simple rules have offer great depth...

I have my issues with Spire, but it is still an incredibly evocative game and will never leave my shelves.

For me it's very simple. In some cases, having a game designed from the ground up just leads to a product more coherent with the source material. There's plenty of adaptations that I find pretty underwhelming, but there's some absolute fantastic ones. My most recent example is The One Ring 2E. I...