Recent content by Thomas Shey

I've never been caught particularly hard by anime or manga. Past that, generically I tend to react badly to deconstructions, even when they're well done.

Well, that's probably present in 75% or more of games with mages in them, as the same people who will want complex and detailed magic systems will sometimes go for nearly schematic combat systems or systems for things like intrusion. Well, I'd expect in many of them they feel "ready to play"...

Though, honestly, the cases where that's true sometimes make the problem worse because people will sometimes want to, but never get used to them. I saw quite the difference between the versions of Fantasy Hero using hit locations or RuneQuest (where the hit locations are used by everyone, all...

Well, as I note above, the line between vampires and zombies as we now use the term is not historically that thick.

There's certainly a messy line between them, same as there is between what we tend to now think of as zombies and vampires.

Its basically the fantasy version of some of the medical services you see in Shadowrun and Cyberpunk.

Though that only works because the penalty applies to all actions. If you only penalize successive actions it creates an incentive to roll a lot of pointless (because they'll be progressively less likely to get anything done) rolls. This is why I finally concluded I didn't like Mutants and...

Its a bit a matter of perspective. I personally find PF2e much less heavy in the handling in many ways than D&D3 and its offshoots, so it kind of depends on what you find complex about PF2e. (Of course it may be a combination of slightly less special casing and the complex areas actually...

The solution a number of games have is to make the guard whatever they call "mooks", so they're easily taken out by one hit. This doesn't entirely deal with the "Took the surprise swing and missed" situation, but that's not the only case where that can come up, and there are mechanical...

Yeah, that's fair. I have some questions regarding my own; I have the sense I want things less complex than I did a decade or two ago, but I also know that my tolerance for what feels like overly stripped down approaches to important game elements or character creation isn't great either, so I...

I'd suspect you have the answer generally there; probably the material they've been trained on has enough decent samples of simple blades that it can spit out something decent, but it gets much more hit or miss with other weapons because the samples are less frequent and/or less good. That's...

Its really hard for me to assess that on a complexity scale, since I've known it so long that even though I don't use it any more, it feels significantly less complex than many games in the D20 sphere. I think some of that is its got less special casing and idiosyncratic bits, but if some of it...

At least of the ones I'm familiar with (M&M, Icon Assembled, Black Star, Cortex Plus, Savage Worlds and Outgunned) aren't really are in the same difficulty. Heck, I'm not sure Cortex Plus is always the same complexity as itself, and the Two Little Mice folks don't seem to think Outgunned...

As with many things, the word "extraneous" may be doing some heavy lifting here. But to me, most of the time having to mess too much with subsystems (as compared to applications of extent systems for certain purposes) are special casing.

Ah. Special casing and the like. I'm not a fan of that either (I've been on record more than once saying I think most incarnations of D&D are more complex than the Hero System because of all the special casing).