Recent content by Thomas Shey

Just a note that "light and nimble", while a virtue, is not always so much a virtue it trumps everything else. Its a common mistake of people fond of light systems to project their own priorities on others here.

And though obscure, "Black Blade" the song about Stormbringer co-written by Michael Moorcock.

Hero, just in its basic manuevers, has at least five come to mind (Haymakers, Move-Bys, Move Throughs, Block and Dodge). And I'm probably forgetting some latter-day ones.

I tend to consider both desireable if you're going to have a really full-featured system, honestly. My gold standard here was alwasy the Hero System combat manuevers; some anyone could use just by being able to operate in combat, some you had to access by acquiring aka learning the particular...

Its one of those things where what you value is going to reflect how you feel there. Personally, Backgrounds were one of the things I least appreciated about the system (in the end I never ended up finding the Icon dice particular natural or useful either, honestly).

Because the Background system is so detached from the rest of the system, it wouldn't be difficult to port over another D20 game's skill system if you wanted to. You just need to remember that the scale is slightly compressed because of the 1-10 level, and that occasionally skills are going to...

Tell me about it. The shapelessness of OD&D combat--and thus the non-GM-dependent elements that could make playing a fighter interesting--were one of the big things that drove me out of it. Yeah, the way advancement and capability was handled was radically different, and that's ignoring...

Probably not for a couple reasons. 1. 13th Age is very loosey-goosey in handling movement; D&D 4e was very much not, as controlling positioning and forcing your opponent into bad positions was a big part of the combat loop. 2. You'd probably see a lot more interactions with setting elements...

You've got some weird corner-cases too. I'm pretty comfortable calling the Polyhedral Knights (publishers of Wicked Pacts and others) and Dragonsbane Entertainment (publishers of the Sabre RPG games) indie. It gets a little weirder with Design Ministries, given the Fragged Empire and related...

Having been a friend of Steve Perrin, you can make an argument that its a D&D offshoot, but I think once you've done that the argument has essentially degenerated into claiming that about almost every trad game. There were too many elements of RQ that were really radical when viewed through a...

I suspect I don't really disagree with you here. I was mostly addressing some corner-cases.

The current approach seems to be for third parties to do things that evoke SR without actually being it. There were two of those that hit Kickstarter last year, but far as I know, they're still pretty obscure and I had distinctly mixed feelings about both.

Other than reversing the die roll, how is that any different than having a skill with specialty mechanics? (Especially since you need to do multiples to cover different Knowledges anyway).

That actually largely changed as of 5e (maybe 4e too) because it became usually impossible to do important hacking remotely, so the hacker has to do his thing while his allies are keeping the local security off his back.

A take-10 style mechanic can, indeed, handle much of this problem as long as two things are true: 1. People set difficulties with the actual thought of what an expert in the field will have as an expected bonus rather than getting carried away with said target number, and 2. can get away from...