Recent content by Thomas Shey

Okay, that explains why I haven't seen it, since I rarely even get a core book in physical form any more (only when I'm certain I'll be running the game).

I'm guessing this must be about wanting certain physical books that are lumped together with other material at higher tiers? Because I can't say I ever ran into a problem backing at a tier that had, say, all the digital options. I realize I may not be typical in rarely getting a physical book...

I think, though, they still don't have the advantage of people coming to them with interest in the lore already implanted. (Oddly, D&D, at least some of the settings, may be a partial exception to that because people may have read the novels before they ever played the game. I suspect that...

"Groups" is doing some heavy lifting here, however. At least in some areas "groups" could include hundreds of people who's groups overlapped, and had influence on and from other groups they interacted with with some frequency. I could have pointed out a number of trends in a number of West...

Since I come by my opinion honestly, and with as much sampling as I think was possible at the time, I'd suggest your wants here are going to be unsatisfied at least regarding me.

While to some degree this is true, if you did things like play at game clubs, conventions and other widely spaced groups, and communicated with other widely spaced groups, you could get a pretty good sense of the temperature of such things, even if "proof" is essentially impossible. I did all...

I think you're confusing "inflicting random, arbitrary death to exert dominance" with "Were excessively hard and rigid in a way that could lead to pointless death because that's what they thought was the way they thought it should be." Some people might have used the latter to justify throwing...

A number of versions of it have some really hard breakpoints, though, and that can create problems of certain sorts.

While I dearly loved Carrie and Salem's Lot when I first read them, over time I became less and less enamored of his novels, though I still appreciated at least some of his short stories.

It looked vaguely interesting when they first came out with it, but I've always been less than thrilled about being dependent on remote management for my software (and yes, I wasn't thrilled when HLO became the core of their model; I don't use anything from them as a GM any more for that...

I've said before "Some people just want to know where their chalk marks are", and that can be a real problem if you want your players more self-motivated. But its a real thing.

Well, that runs into the wall you see all the time in investigative situations in any trad game where how obvious things seem to the GM and the players can be radically different. But the difference was that there was at least an intent to do something other than basic power-tripping.

One of the things that helped there is the scope of superheroes tends to have a broad impact on their setting and does so, well, very often. You don't see a lot of zero-to-hero stories in that genre, and when you do its usually in the young-supers subgenre. So basically both the system and...

I was more suggesting that some GMs thought they were or wanted to be playing "fair but hard" but were, well, pretty blind to when they weren't. This in contrast to the total power trip crowd.

I have to say I'm not sure at least back in the day there was a very bright line in some cases.