Recent content by Thomas Shey

Three is a good compromise over the raft of people medical texts and legal books get; you probably get to diminishing returns after that anyway (the only reason those type of works get more is the consequences of missing one can be drastic there). That said, if you get more than one full time...

The problem is that given the wide range of people who will run into problem with this, it uses an awfully expansive cateogry for "jerk".

As someone who used to do editing, including in the game industry its astonishing what will slip past you. I've had things I must have read a dozen times that I suddenly spotted when the actual book arrived. Some of it is that since the work is often a moving target, you come to expect the...

When you've got a language that probably started out as a pidgin, that sort of thing is going to happen.

That's an issue with most people not wanting to really engage with the consequences of failure, and is just as true whatever those consequences are. And honestly, RPGs are a leisure time activity; if people don't feel like dealing with heavy negative consequences in that that's their choice...

Point is, I think it requires a certain self-centered view of what you're playing for for character survival to be the main one. its not a problem in other people's games. Its a problem when they project it on their expectations in the hobby as a whole. I absolutely grasp people do feel...

Only because in most media they're not going to let a real failure happen. That doesn't have anything to do with what the actual stakes are.

Its only not exciting if you don't care about the other consequences of failure. You know, the place you're protecting getting destroyed, bad guys stealing technology they'll use to do harm, little things like that. It may not get your character killed, but them going down can lead to failure...

As I've noted before, this would define the vast majority of superhero campaigns as having no significant stakes. Yeah, no.

Both I and my wife love it, uneven as its sometimes been.

And even Hero had rules that applied to specific genres and not elsewhere. But it seems like that isn't enough.

Usually I'm more likely to port rules over conceptually than literally, because trying to do it literally is fraught unless two systems are very similar. As an example, I'd be more likely to port over the idea of "clocks" than any specific expression of them.

Sadly, past history has suggested we're actually perfectly capable of getting worse at it.

Yeah, I've seen more than one do the "power ring conjured gatling cannon" trick on occasion. I mean, in the end, its no more irrational than giant green hammers.

Its just that at that point its pretty much tautalogical; if you want everything exception based to the specific context, and aren't even willing to acknowledge tools to apply more flavor and color being enough, you've pretty much declared a generic system impossible definitionally. At that...