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Dearth: 1: scarcity that makes dear specifically : FAMINE 2: an inadequate supply : LACK For clarity, did you mean to use "dearth" in the quoted sentences above? Did you rather intend to convey one of its opposites, e.g., "abundance," "variety," "smorgasbord," "assortment," "multiplicity,"...

There's an excellent Blades in the Dark hack called Court of Blades that I kickstarted back in 2021. Highly recommended. It takes the core Blades' "heist" sequences, but sets it up to be much more focused on courtly intrigue. Your "scores" are carried out at fancy ballroom galas, in the secret...

Unless it's on pizza . . . .

** Looks at Honor Among Thieves poster ** Hmm, yeah, you may be on to something there. 😉

Okay. Would you care to clarify the bolded phrases in such a way that they are more than trite, meaningless word salad? And what, exactly, in your opinion are PbtA / "Story Now" games trying to be? Please, enlighten us all, great guru.

Unpopular cell phone opinion: 95% of all Seinfeld episode premises become ridiculous and fall apart if you retcon that key scene participants had a cell phone in their pocket.

Absolutely agree about Ironsworn. Ironsworn has fantastic advice, visuals, and charts for considering how to run a game. I'd say probably 70% of that advice is portable across systems, and the "Oracles" in Ironsworn are AWESOME for generating ideas as a GM. And seriously, the original...

10 minutes of playing GURPS in a superhero setting would end the appeal instantly, trust me. Modeling super powers through a numeric input/output structure like the GURPS engine will give you the least superhero like gameplay possible. It will not resemble anything remotely like an actual...

If by "more people" you mean "literally no one," then I would agree with you. 😉

QFT. It wouldn't be such a problem if the rest of a player "action turn" could resolve faster such that 1-second rounds weren't so punitive for, you know, actually having fun. It's a design decision that has MASSIVE downstream effects on basically everything combat related (so, you know, like...

I could never quite figure out if it was the group / GMs who ran GURPS or the system itself, but my experience was identical. It's the only system where I broke my own rule of not looking on my phone / surfing the internet while playing, because the GMs could never figure out what the hell they...

So I'm one of the few in the "hate" category. GURPS to me is a weird amalgamation of 97 individual design choices that, when looked at discretely seem to make sense, and even appear to be superior to alternatives in the same RPG design space (trad / discrete action resolution / emphasis on...

It helped a great deal that I had been exposed to Dungeon World and especially Ironsworn before getting into it. I was much more easily able to come at the FFG narrative dice system from a more open minded place and accept it on its own merits. It was instantly apparent that FFG has a similar...

The greatest missed opportunity of eps. 7-9 was to not explore themes relating to the idea of, "Okay great, we've created the New Republic. Now how do we avoid becoming the thing we had to destroy to get here?"

Media-related unpopular opinion: Inception is without question the most overrated movie released since the turn of the millennium. The exceptional quality of the actors involved and the overall "coolness" of the general concept greatly cloud the fact that the last 40% of the film is basically...

Which does beg the question . . . . Which is the cooler time travel device + mentor? DeLorean + Christopher Lloyd / Doc Brown, or Phone Booth + George Carlin / Rufus?

Here's a classic "narrative" mechanic embedded right within a fairly solidly "trad" / discrete action resolution mechanical framework system. From Savage Worlds Adventurer Edition, page 52: Edge Name: Scavenger Requirements: Novice tier (can be taken at character creation), must also have...

That's a pretty good summary, actually.

@Bill Zebub , think of it this way --- "Story Now" means that the system supports ENUM mechanics in such a way as to allow players to focus and purposefully inject character-centric concerns into the flow of play, in some cases while specifically limiting GM veto to do so.

Roleplaying games whose main rules / mechanics typically involve a player proposing and then resolving a single, discrete character action and the immediate result of that action. "Discrete Action Resolution Mechanics", or DARM for short. As opposed to External Narrative Universe Mechanics, or...