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After deciding on a general style and feel for a setting, deciding on the creatures that populate it is always my first step. They are the main building blocks from which nearly everything else that makes up a setting is derived. All the way back since I played Morrowind, I've been a huge fan...

As do the others.

I believe referee is merely a holdover from a time when people did not yet have a proper name for gamemasters and helped themselves with the next best thing that was somewhat familiar. RPGs grew out of mini-games within wargames. And in wargames, you often do have an actual referee. Two...

Very much true. But that's exactly why the concept of play cultures was proposed in the first place. And why it was put as play cultures instead of game types. That's Classic and Oldschool. Neo-trad is specifically about people who don't want that.

I feel like rather than making the GM more like a player, isn't this really about giving more GM functions to the players instead?

I completely forgot about the Darkness Points. In a strictly classic game, those would be seen as a problem for being a highly dissociate mechanic. There is no direct causal relation between the cause and the effect. Other than vague allusions to some kind of karmic balance being restored. I...

So, this is a player asking something about the world and the GM returning "I don't know. You tell us!"?

Ultimately, everything really comes down to what you want to accomplish with a game. Once you have determined that, you can start thinking about the best way to get there through game mechanics. Applying game mechanics or more abstract rules because they are good practice won't really get you...

Story in an RPG should be the outcomes of the PCs' actions and decisions. I feel everything else is missing the entire point of RPGs.

"Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked."

Though I think it's fairly unambiguous that this is highly controversial within the Classic play style. It's a position that you have to defend against strong opposition, which I would regard as strong evidence of it not being part of the culture itself.

NPCs' great personal story: Trad. PCs' great personal story: Neo-Trad.

With The One Ring I absolutely see the neo-trad elements. But Coriolis and Alien seem just straight up trad games where the GM tells a story and the players make skill rolls to see if an action succeeds or fails.

Reading the rules with a Classic/Oldschool perspective, I would most likely have been blind to many of the neo-trad elements in the text, but when I read Mutant, Coriolis, and Alien, I saw a game system that appeals very much to what I think I need from a rules system, and it's one I really want...

I say breaking even. Making and distributing an RPG does not have to be a full time job. It can be done as a hobby. If you're not paying more of your own money to get the game to people than you get back, that seems pretty successful to me. Though then, almost all hobbies cost money, so...

To me it really never mattered how any publishers positioned themselves in the discourse about the RPG industry and their reception by the outspoken segment of customers. Unless the publisher seems like really horrible people, all that I care about is whether the game looks like something I want...

"The Golden Age of anything is sixteen."

I think E6 is a really cool idea that could make for really great campaigns I enjoy much. But there's still a lot of classic D&D material in level 7 to 12 that is also a lot of fun to have in a campaign. But personally, I feel that level 13 an onward just don't introduce any new things to the...

One thing I feel that rarely gets sufficiently considered is that in both 3rd and 5th edition, the roster of monsters very much narrows down past 12th level or so. After that it's really mostly just dragons and the uppermost ranks of fiends. Bigger spells is really the only more grand content...

Easy start today. Set up a site where I will be putting up all of my entries, starting with a simple farm animal.