Recent content by Thomas Shey

With SF TV shows that would exclude a lot of excellent shows; I'd go as far as to say almost all of them take at least a few episodes to get their feet under them.

This is all legitimate, and I do have it on my wishlist at some point, but on mulitple levels its not a game I'd find it likely I'd ever run, so full price makes no sense. That said, I tend to find a game I can't get at least a fair idea of how its supposed to play from just the rules is...

That's an intrinsic risk with a show with any sort of decent episode count; some episodes are going to be duds, and if you hit those first your impression will be, at least, incomplete.

I'm going to moan about something that will not initially seem to relate to this, but very much does. I'm a big fan of 50's SF movies; I'm not quite obsessive about them, but pretty close. Now, a lot of 50's movie SF is junk. And a lot more carries the baggage that older films always do to a...

That's your choice, but I still stand by my opinion that the coherence and consistency of PF2e would be massively more preferable to me than PF1e or D&D3e if I was going to use something as exception based as most of the the D&D sphere. I don't consider tactical focus particularly a flaw, so...

I'm not sure that's so much narrative informing the rules as leaning somewhat into GM power model of how they do so. At least from the description. "Rulings not rules" is mostly associated with old-school style quasi-simulationist games by people, but that doesn't mean its exclusive to that...

Isn't that because most of the tactical elements are buried in character abilities rather than the weapons themselves? (I may be admixing my memory of Outgunned proper with OA here, though).

Ah. Unfortunately for your preference, like the Tolkeinesque elements you see all over fantasy, there's been too long and solid a shadow there to get entirely away from it.

Would you prefer "cosmic horror elements"? Sometimes they're used interchangeably.

And as I mentioned, the "single game" was simply an example. Movement management can be an element of a tactical combat system (and in fact, I prefer that it is) but my point was that you can have an intensely tactical game that cares little about movement, because all the tactical elements if...

Barring the one person I ignored literally the first week I was on here (it might have been the first day), I've usually found anyone I can't just roll my eyes and move on about will ignore me before too-too long.

Sure. I was just talking about the basic form of it here.

While I see your point regarding Stess and Hope (I'm getting ready to run Eclipse Phase which has a slightly different kind of Stress mechanic) I think at the very least Armor and HP are part of a superset of bookkeeping of which combat is an important element. I mean armor in systems where...

Besides the lack of a few things, I still think the loiter-time issues can come up too easily. While you have to pay some attention in most versions of SR to things like this, its not actually hard for someone using the SW magic system to burn through all their power points in 3-5 rounds, and...

I slept with a hanging bookshelf partly extruding over my bed from my early teens until I went off to college. Doesn't mean you're wrong, though; in the Whittier Earthquake the whole shebang partly disconnected and the books slid down the shelf onto my bed. It was just that I was up and off at...