Recent content by Thomas Shey

I'll probably have had about 60 sessions total in my 13th Age game by the time I'm done (42 arcs, but not all of those got done in one session, and it took more time as we got up to the upper levels).

Yeah, that's about right. If you read enough of the setting, far as I can tell the Fae proper are, well, out of play at the current time (as in they're apparently hibernating or something).

Most of the people doing that would likely never hear the term "venator"; if I recall correctly its primarily used among the Curseborne groups.

I think "desire" is doing some heavy lifting there. Let me explain. As I've commented before, I played in purely decision-making MUSH based games back in the day for a fair while, playing, in fact in what's been called Deep IC/Immersive in some circles over time. And there were absolutely...

The only cases where its not the best solution, I usually don't see it as the best for, well, anything (which to be clear, is most of the time). There's very little that a D20 does that some other die combination doesn't do as well or better. But at least in a resolution mechanic (as compared...

I don't really think so. Though he needed to unpack it more, the same general situation could come up in almost any trad game, and there are plenty of those that aren't D&D. I'm just saying I don't think his lack of limiting it to the D&D foras was a particularly meaningful mistake, which...

Thats' interesting, since I kind of got the feeling of the five traditional oWOD groups, though Outcasts were obviously the fill-in for Changelings, they least resembled them (since at least in-setting fey appear to be--something else--which is MIA at the moment (I wouldn't be surprised if they...

I just consider non-unified systems to be a problem unto themselves, and am unconvinced they every actually serve a desirable result that a subset of a unified system can't. Sometimes they're harmless or operate in such different an unrelated areas that its not clear it would be beneficial to...

The only thing I question here (because I believe I understand what he's getting at) is that I have a suspicion that the whole business is based on their being a zone where players and the GM would not chose the decisional outcome if allowed to do so freely, but would find it interesting if the...

This operates on the idea that even within one game system there's agreement what consitutes railroading. Not only this, but many past threads shows that's far, far from true.

I'm kind of in the middle on this one. I don't think homebrewing is intrinsically a mistake, but I do think casually adding on new subsystems without looking at how they integrate with the current ones can have unexpected, and malign effects. You need to really look at how they're going to...

Really. I'm aware I'm not typical here. It probably doesn't hurt that I tend to want games with a lot of mechanical engagement, so most games that would make for a decent three hour play time would just not interest me at all. We've been doing nothing but VTT play for six years now. Only...

There's been some suggestions the Young Avengers they actually care about (probably retiltled The Champions) will show up Secret Wars rather than Doomsday.

Yeah, that'd just be too short a time frame for me. I don't think I've played in games that didn't run at least six hours as a default, well, ever.

I've had players who would absolutely eat a failure if it was needed for them to get advancement. They wouldn't necessarily like it, but it wouldn't even be a question.