Recent content by Thomas Shey

Though that only works because the penalty applies to all actions. If you only penalize successive actions it creates an incentive to roll a lot of pointless (because they'll be progressively less likely to get anything done) rolls. This is why I finally concluded I didn't like Mutants and...

Its a bit a matter of perspective. I personally find PF2e much less heavy in the handling in many ways than D&D3 and its offshoots, so it kind of depends on what you find complex about PF2e. (Of course it may be a combination of slightly less special casing and the complex areas actually...

The solution a number of games have is to make the guard whatever they call "mooks", so they're easily taken out by one hit. This doesn't entirely deal with the "Took the surprise swing and missed" situation, but that's not the only case where that can come up, and there are mechanical...

Yeah, that's fair. I have some questions regarding my own; I have the sense I want things less complex than I did a decade or two ago, but I also know that my tolerance for what feels like overly stripped down approaches to important game elements or character creation isn't great either, so I...

I'd suspect you have the answer generally there; probably the material they've been trained on has enough decent samples of simple blades that it can spit out something decent, but it gets much more hit or miss with other weapons because the samples are less frequent and/or less good. That's...

Its really hard for me to assess that on a complexity scale, since I've known it so long that even though I don't use it any more, it feels significantly less complex than many games in the D20 sphere. I think some of that is its got less special casing and idiosyncratic bits, but if some of it...

At least of the ones I'm familiar with (M&M, Icon Assembled, Black Star, Cortex Plus, Savage Worlds and Outgunned) aren't really are in the same difficulty. Heck, I'm not sure Cortex Plus is always the same complexity as itself, and the Two Little Mice folks don't seem to think Outgunned...

As with many things, the word "extraneous" may be doing some heavy lifting here. But to me, most of the time having to mess too much with subsystems (as compared to applications of extent systems for certain purposes) are special casing.

Ah. Special casing and the like. I'm not a fan of that either (I've been on record more than once saying I think most incarnations of D&D are more complex than the Hero System because of all the special casing).

See, I tend to not see complexity and excessive special-casing as the same thing, though I agree that the latter is much more of a problem than the former.

Funny, combat is one of the last places I want a lot of simplicity, as it either reduces meaningful decision-making, or throws it all into the GM's lap, neither of which seems a virtue.

Well, I'm old now so when I took a fall at Knotts Halloween Haunt a few years back, I braced myself by falling on first my left hand and then forearm. Took a couple weeks to figure it out, but I'd managed to do a hairline crack in the latter. Taught me my balance just isn't what it once was.

I bruised the living hell out of my left palm at one point a few years back (braking a fall (which only helped so much) and managing to have the hand land on the edge of a brick) and I learned it is shocking how much you lose when doing that. It'd probably almost be better to have it in a sling...

Define "dramatically". I personally thought replacing the attributes with just the modifiers saved a step in process since there was almost no purpose in the actual attributes. While I'm not sure the actual result worked, in principal replacing all the special-case attack powers with...

Doesn't exactly make a great impression even in those of us who aren't generally big fans of either.