Recent content by Thomas Shey

I've argued any number of times that a large part of rules lawyering is spawned by players who have a different sense of appropriate power level than the GM (and possibly rules system does). When you've got that kind of dissonance, you're always going to get people pushing against the edges.

One of the most critical skills to develop in life is to learn to do things bit at a time. I've found it even more critical once I realized I have some degree of ADHD. You can get some pretty good work out as long as you just keep chipping.

Its not just that its the wrong term; its the wrong concept. Most of game rules are, effectively, engineering principals. Engineering principals propagate. They've done so since the beginning of human culture. Even in the modern period and the existance of patents, all that typically happens...

I'll use them offensively, but I always figure mooks brittleness is part of the gig, so don't tend to use them defensively much.

Sometimes you want the enemy Wild Cards to stay up a bit, but that shouldn't be a major problem unless you're getting a lot of dice explosions. I have to admit I'd find it odd to spend Bennies on mooks.

I think all I did was the Jokers and that did seem to exactly flood the board.

You shouldn't need to, unless that is too high too. After all, an opponent with a D8 attack die has a parry of 6. That should hardly be unhittable for a typical PC combatant, and vice versa. After all, most PCs should have at least a D8, too, and they're all Wild Cards which gives them a leg...

I think when you go into a discussion of people adapting game mechanics to other uses and start using "plagiarism" you've made a categorical error right out the gate, and it'll lead to nothing but more of the same.

To some extent, that's true; its an open-ended die roll system, and almost all of these are buffered by their extent metacurrency. That said, the "flow bennies like water" tends to be overrated. I never did that when I was running the system and it didn't break anything. You just have to make...

Yeah, there are tactics I'd use with a Wild Card but never with an Extra because it would leave them so vulnerable; rather than feeling authentic it just makes them come across as having no survival instinct at all. Even Extras should be characters, not ammunition.

I should have gotten the digitized first few years when I could have myself, and now have some regrets of my own.

The monster is pretty much the iconic example of "Hurt people hurt people."

Yeah, that's probably the best way to go.

It very much depends where you are. There's been a counter-weight against that because finding parking in L.A. is so obnoxiously hard to find--even many businesses don't have it easily acessible, and when they do its centralized and you still need to walk from there.

Not required to, of course. But its not an incomprehensible position. I mean, half of compaints in the RPG sphere can be summarized as some version of "I wish a game existed with [particular set of traits] and was well known and popular enough I could get a game of it going or join one."...