Recent content by zakael19

Interesting! Every game I’ve ever played has pointed in the rules to the GM to facilitate the table and manage play. I’ve had players DM me to bring problems and concerns up that they wanted addressed, because they didn’t want to “derail” or have a fight over chat about stuff. I think DH’s...

Yup, same. I think that prioritizing dramatic and cinematic emphasis will be the criteria for t-ing up a GM action and pivoting, but I refuse to let a game with this much promise to lag outside of clear periods of downtime / chill-ness where you frame stuff with the players and they take it for...

I just don't see how you can see the "Sharing the Spotlight" section and "Engage Quiet Players" and think it doesn't apply to all scenes across all aspects of play.

A) Daggerheart fundamentally disagrees with your point. It expects the GM to actively pull the players, all of them, into the game. This shows up under pretty much all of the Best Practices in various ways, see especially the amplification under Gain your Player's Trust, Cut to the Action, and...

THERE'S NO INITIATIVE. All play is play. Spotlighting an adversary happens in Combat, or in Social scenes, or in Exploration, etc. The GM Best Practices apply to all play at all times, as do GM Actions.

This thread has hundreds of posts of people implying that if you arent doing some sort of pure sim / traditional D&D / something else style of play, it just "won't have verisimilitude." I definitely accept that like for @Micah Sweet he wouldn't find Blades in the dark or whatever to feel "real"...

The Trade Baronies expansion adds in what are functionally tweaked Blades in the Dark style playbooks to facilitate narrative play with more meat on the bones. ICON takes this a lot further up front, in that there's an entire FITD narrative play side that you could run on its own; and the...

Huh? You can also Spotlight an Adversary or Reveal an Unexpected Danger or Capture Someone to make a move against a player who's hiding out, and make it clear that the lack of action is why, by acting fiction first: "Charis, as you're dithering around the edges of the melee, you feel the kiss...

This is one of the things I really like about the narrativist games that DH has taken a lot of cues from, especially in its Agenda and Best Practices. I play exclusively online without ever looking at my player's faces; and I have multiple AuHD players as well. Relying on things like "creating a...

I do find what Lancer with its narrative expansion & ICON are doing fascinating attempts at having your cake and eating it too here. "Oh, here's your mega tactical grid-based combat, but also your free flowing fiction-first storytelling mode." Ugh, I really want to get DH to the table though -...

Oh, I think that MBC's and y'all's Stonetop etc play is absolutely not reflective of the way many of us play those games, lol. Like, Stonetop clearly intends for there to be periods of "Let it Breathe" on the Homefront where there may be stakes, but they're intimate or about personal lives and...

Daggerheart doesn't agree, although again it's designed to collapse gracefully to more "conventional" TTRPG play. This is a game that intends you as GM to directly spotlight certain players and prompt cinematic action: Lets not relitigate "agency" the way that 10k+ thread over there has, but...

Sure, there's an ebb and flow to gameplay. Nobody can keep the tension ratcheted for 3 hours straight without getting exhausted IMO! In fact after a couple of sessions of nearly nothing but high stakes gameplay and revelations the players in my Tuesday game were saying they were ready for a...

Sure ok, we're back to teh same silly argument about why you'd want to curtail GM power but somehow Uno reversed. "Well the players can just get up and walk away from bad GMing" and "the GM can just flip the table and leave if it's boring" are both facile arguments, and you're completely...

I think it was about 500ish pages ago I noted that as of 5.2024 the DMG once again has advice about skipping to interesting stuff / doing scene framing like movies / letting time pass in montages / etc.