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While nominally universal, I think Fate applies here: despite being geared towards storytelling it makes a very competent tactical skirmish. With guidelines on creating stunts and creating enemies from Adversary Toolkit it's very easy to create tense encounters. And if you are willing to go...

Special armor itself is just a counter, it does nothing on its own. Abilities that let you use your special armor to resist allow you to, well, use your special armor instead of a resistance roll (and thus not get any stress). I'm reasonably sure you can use any uhh sources of resistance...

In my birthday game, I've had very exciting, fast-paced but first and foremost, tactical combat. The core is very simple: hex grid, your movement = your attack. With a spear, you attack in the same direction as you move, with a sword you attack cells that you are touching, with an axe you attack...

I haven't been around for a while, but I'm not surprised that "using specific words to describe specific things" is still a controversial subject. I think y'all should be grateful that TTRPG "jargon" didn't went the way of gamer slang and isn't abbreviated, littered with in-jokes or referring...

RE: PC death I find it more annoying than anything else, if we are being honest. Games that heavily rely on progression (and thus make losing a character actually meaningful) tend to break down if one of the PCs is noticeably weaker than the others, so replacement PCs must be created at an...

A game about players overcoming challenges demands that outcomes are only contingent on how well (or poorly) the actions taken are suited for the challenge at hand, so the players can express their skill. In a game about creating satisfying stories, on the other hand, the exact same action in...

More pressing question is why uninterested players keep being invited, I think.

You don't think there are mutually exclusive priorities? No, they don't? There's nothing about tacticality that fundamentally requires it being slow. It's a difficult problem in tabletop space (although, no, it's not particularly difficult either, it's just TTRPGs consistently find the slowest...

I mean, like, planning the "component" job of, say, a stealing a big enough transformer from Spirit Wardens through flashbacks.

I don't enjoy uhm short-term planning. Like, best case scenario is that we play the exact same damn thing twice. I do enjoy long-term planning, though, where you set out goals to be achieved in the future. How will we take down Lord Scurrlock? Ok, we will have to build a sparkcraft device to...

To be fair, "you are constantly pressured and always are just a step away from a disaster" is pretty broadly applicable.

This is what astounds me a lot with PbtA (and now FitD, I guess). "Ooh, Bakers made a game where you always have something someone else wants and want something someone else has! Let's reskin it into a cozy game about running a catboy cafe without changing much". And then everyone makes a...

I found the best approach for me is to compartmentalize G into its own thing so it can leave the whole RP business alone. Basically A) Make rules as abstract as possible, so they don't map 1-to-1 to the fictional situation B) Make resolution mechanic be an interesting game in of itself C) Use...

While I think there are many "paper cuts" that can make a bad GM or player, the overwhelming factor that overrides everything else is simple: inability to set expectations and stick to them. If I am invited to "uhmm a game I guess it will be cool!", nah, I'm not going. If I was invited to a...

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean by scale here. In many (if not most, honestly) games combat is basically a self-contained minigame that only vaguely conforms to the fiction. If anything, it's often the opposite, where fiction is heavily influenced by constraints of the combat...

Would you consider chess to be a tactical game? It does require a lot of thinking about positioning, so it counts at least in my book.

I would argue that having to make guesses, educated or not severely reduces the tacticality, but that's another tangent. What the enemies can do to prevent those options from being used? What can you do to prevent enemies from preventing you from taking those options?

I mean, paying a more-or-less unbroken attention to the game state while keeping in mind at least most of the rules for 3-4 hours is bound to be a taxing activity regardless of how you slice it, and if you don't do either, you just basically offload this tax to someone else, which is also, uhm...

While yes, I will broadly enjoy a bad game with good people, I find the idea of using an RPG as a hangout activity just utterly bizarre. Like, if I want to chill with friends, a mentally and emotionally taxing activity that event at the most minimum of minimums requires a non-trivial amount of...

The issue with "tactical" RPGs is that they are almost always reliant on player options. The end result is that there's no tactics, there's just a closed loop that works all the time. Most of the time the loop is short: "I HIT HIM WITH MY SWORD!", sometimes it requires a bit of set up: "I buff...