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It is both too much and too little. In the race descriptions there are a precious few sentences that tell me how to play given race. One race is arrogant, another always keeps its words. And that's all, in the long text with multiple paragraphs about each race. I get heights, histories...

There is no reason a setting can't. There is a reason why it, IMO, should not. And the reason is threefold: 1. It confuses the correspondence between the system and the game world. When you have "classes" that, in the setting, mean drastically different things, the "class" loses meaning. In...

I homebrew and improvise a lot. For this reason, most detailed setting information is worse than useless for me - not only I won't use it, I will also contradict it quite often and confuse players who read the setting book. I don't need more than one, general map. I don't need demographics. I...

There are many approaches that don't introduce dump stats and handle social interactions well. There are tens, if not hundreds, RPG systems with no such issues. Problems with charisma are endemic to D&D, from 3e up. Thus, any sensible solutions require getting away from the faulty framework of...

I definitely don't like games where someone has a clear story in mind. If there is a pre-prepared story, why am I playing, really? My choices either won't really matter or will crash the game - anyway, it won't be fun. I also don't like "sandboxes". If it's just a setting, it does not create a...

In my opinion, the most important question to be answered is: what does a class mean to you? It may sound strange or trivial, but I think it's not. I encountered several different interpretations - and disagreements about them started quite a lot of flames. So, what is a class? An archetype...

I don't like "weak deaths". I also strongly dislike any kind of fudging and I want the risk to be present. I've found a few ways of satisfying all these criteria - I generally play games that fall into one of the following types: 1. Games where combat is rare and when it happens it's really...

I could well play - or run a game - in a way described in this thread, but only if the system used was simple enough. By "simple" I mean "with few interacting parts", not "with few numbers on the character sheet". Unknown Armies or Call of Cthulhu are simple. They also fit this style of play...

The official core rules for Eclipse Phase are licensed on Creative Commons. You need to pay to download it from their site, but it's fully legal to copy and distribute it. In other words, download it from anywhere you can find it, play and if you like it, then pay to the authors.

I definitely like trying new games. I also like modifying them. And by "modifying" I mean doing much more than a single page of houserules. I feel a need for a system to fit the genre and mood of play. It just does not feel right if game mechanics encourage me to do things that don't have...

I played quite a lot completely freeform games. Such games are, in general, either very good or very bad. There are quite simple criteria that need to be satisfied to make a game session good (and it crashes violently when they are not): 1. All players, including the GM, trust eachother. 2. All...

I'd surely take teleportation over flight. Flight can be fun, but teleportation is just too useful. Flying to work in rain or cold weather would be extremely uncomfortable and would attract a lot of unnecessary attention; teleporting, on the other hand, would just save me about two hours a day...

You can't have a cookie and eat it too. Either dumping charisma is not a problem or charisma is useful and having it low hurts. If something is not a dump stat, dumping it is bad for you - "penalized" if you want to call it this way. There is no other way. The only question is what kind of...

My tastes have changed considerably since I started gaming 15 years ago. At the beginning I played many games, some of them homebrewed, but mostly focused on fighting. I liked complicated systems, houseruled a lot when I ran games and generally tried to have a rule for everything. Later my...

For me, it depends strongly on the kind of game being played. In general, adventure games have more uses for player narration than investigative or horror games, non-immersive more than immersive ones, ones with light and abstract rules more than ones with crunchy and detailed rules. There are...

I'm looking at the requirements you listed and it seems strange to me. How would you want to play the game? If it contains necessary, lethal combat against more powerful opponents, what would prevent PCs from getting slaughtered every other session or even more often? Do you want a system...

For me, it strongly depends on the rest of the game. If a game uses hit locations and wound levels, tracking separate pieces of armor is much better. I'll put more armor on head and torso than on left hand, for example - protect the parts where a hit is more dangerous. If a game uses abstract HP...

"You must spread some XP around before giving it to Celebrim again." And I would so like to give some. More than one, if possible. Celebrim's last post is really great, one of best posts I ever read on this boards. Reasonable tone in quite a heated discussion and a lot of very wise points. I...

IMO the "charisma as a dump stat" is an endemic D&D issue. Most games I played had no such problem or had much less of it. It was, generally, achieved in one of several ways, sometimes combined. 1. Social interactions as important or more important than combat. This also requires the social...

I definitely don't force things that make people I play with uncomfortable. But, on the other hand, I don't want to have the options that make the game fun for me limited - and I have found that most of good roleplaying scenes come from situations that some people may not like (romance...