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  1. GrimGent

    males playing females and the other way around, opinions?

    That would at least explain why it's never been a problem for me... Face to face, I run games in Finnish, a language which doesn't have gender-specific pronouns. Online, I might not even conclusively know whether the players on the other side of the Internet are male or female.
  2. GrimGent

    males playing females and the other way around, opinions?

    You know, I've never really understood the complaints about this problem, since the characters don't necessarily resemble their players in any other respect, either, sometimes to the point that they aren't even remotely human. Not remembering enough about the PCs to keep in mind that the short...
  3. GrimGent

    males playing females and the other way around, opinions?

    I'm sure that you can randomly roll up a character like that in at least one Japanese tabletop RPG: Maid, in which all the PCs are female by default.
  4. GrimGent

    In-Game or Out-of-Game Setting Material

    The bulk of the 3e gazetteers for Ravenloft consists of an in-character travelogue by a wandering scholar hired to prepare a comprehensive survey of the domains, with practically all the crunch stashed in the appendices. The books themselves actually exist in the setting, as a potential...
  5. GrimGent

    Irrevocable death? Or do you allow resurrection?

    Well, even in some sword-and-sorcery hack-and-slash campaign, death is far from the only meaningful negative consequence for failure; but several comedy games such as Toon and Teenagers From Outer Space go further than that and specifically leave it out altogether as something that simply...
  6. GrimGent

    Irrevocable death? Or do you allow resurrection?

    As others have said before, it depends entirely on the game. In the last three I've run... Changeling: The Lost generally doesn't allow for resurrection, except through very special circumstances such as performing a quest for a dream-god known as the Pale Brother, which the PCs in this case...
  7. GrimGent

    Minimizing Prep Time - Forked from "DMing: from fun to work "

    Out of the three playstyles suggested in the book, the first and most elementary one consists of just winging it all in a flurry of anime tropes "when you unexpectedly have some free time", perhaps for no longer than a few minutes, perhaps for an hour. (The second mode tends to follow a prepared...
  8. GrimGent

    Any use of dreams in your campaigns?

    Dreamscapes are one of the "otherworldlier" aspects of the setting in Changeling: The Lost, the one nWoD line that I'm interested in. All changelings are natural oneiromancers who can either visit the dreams of others directly when invited in or take the scenic route through what they call the...
  9. GrimGent

    Minimizing Prep Time - Forked from "DMing: from fun to work "

    Well, there are RPGs which are specifically meant for quick pick-up games, ranging from no-prep to low-prep. Consider, for example, Maid in which not only the PCs but also the basic setting, along with the genre and the mood, can be generated randomly from a series of charts and tables. ("Okay...
  10. GrimGent

    Tell what you want/like in a Diceless game.

    The same accusation is sometimes levelled at games based on resource management, that they are too fiddly or require too much book-keeping. Personally, with Nobilis I use glass beads for the miracle point pools: red for Aspect, blue for Domain, green for Realm, and colourless for Spirit...
  11. GrimGent

    Tell what you want/like in a Diceless game.

    Well, it could be argued that by calling attention to the mechanics, dice may detract from the sense of immersion. Then again, my usual stance is that diceless games aren't fundamentally unlike their diced counterparts in any way, apart from (naturally enough) doing away with random chance. This...
  12. GrimGent

    Tell what you want/like in a Diceless game.

    That's not so very different from how the same action could be described and would be resolved in a diced system, is it? Or, for that matter, how physical and mental feats function in Nobilis as miracles of Aspect. In those cases, resource management has been substituted for the conventional...
  13. GrimGent

    Tell what you want/like in a Diceless game.

    Moving beyond the games mentioned in the OP, I happen to be familiar with two Finnish RPGs which aren't based on randomizers of any kind: Stalker and Hiljaisuuden Vangit ("Prisoners of Silence"). In the challenge system used by Stalker, the GM rates both the concept of the attempted action and...
  14. GrimGent

    Tell what you want/like in a Diceless game.

    Nobilis essentially runs on a roll-over system that just replaces the random chance of dice with resource management, according to the idea that as demigods the PCs operate on absolute terms and never have doubts about what they by all rights should be capable of. However, Nobles may still...
  15. GrimGent

    3 Criteria some? RPG's fall into. :)

    Well, how about Amber Diceless, particularly in the Throne War mode? Even the attributes only describe how the PCs relate to each other in various areas of expertise, not what they can accomplish in the setting at large: Strength might indicate that your character is weaker than his sister and...
  16. GrimGent

    Storytelling Games

    That's obviously not the case, though. Probably the quintessential example of a storytelling game that no one would call an RPG is Once Upon a Time, which does feature a specific victory condition: clear out all the cards in your hand by bringing into play the elements printed on them (such as...
  17. GrimGent

    Storytelling vs Roleplaying

    Well... There's Puppetland by John Tynes, in which staying in character for the one hour that a single session of the game always lasts is mandatory according to the rules. Furthermore, the players are only allowed to talk in character during that time, and if they wish to make OOC comments they...
  18. GrimGent

    new preview DMG2

    I remember: the original Mage: The Ascension was my first brush with WW RPGs (and edition wars still rage over that game with clockwork regularity). The use of dream sequences, flashbacks, foreshadowing... All that was already featured in the GM advice even back then in the mid-Nineties, so it's...
  19. GrimGent

    new preview DMG2

    In other words, calling The World of Darkness by White Wolf anything other than a traditional RPG simply because the game runs on what's known as "The Storytelling System" would be patently absurd.
  20. GrimGent

    Game Systems to Try

    Here you go. And while you're over at that 1KM1KT site, why not take a look at Sufficiently Advanced, a Culture-style science fiction game released under Creative Commons?
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