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Chalk me up with those nostalgic for Traveller. Although I think part of it was the release of the floppy black books. I would say about 15 or so years, at least.

If it's a core activity the PCs will be doing. Swords of the Serpentine has a neat mechanic where a character attempts to force action and the resisting target can give in or make a test against Composure (sort of a mental health track). It would work well for a "come out with your hands up"...

The rule of fun applies here; if everyone is enjoying themselves, you are playing right. But if lack of collaboration is harming your experience, you are part of the group and your expectations are worth as much as the next player: "One of the things I want you to do is play collaboratively...

Gumshoe allows for a lot of Bill and Ted style rolls to justify previous preparation. That's especially helpful for the hacker, and mimics heist fiction where a solution can seem made up on the fly. Incorporating the heavy is a little tougher. I don't thing I would run a scenario where someone...

The ransom model has creators set a price for releasing something with no strings attached, and if the public pays, it happens. There are obvious shortcomings. A creator might not be the best judge of the work's value, leading to no release or annoyance that they could have earned more. And...

Was this an IC fight or players arguing at the table fight? If the players are essentially at odds about what kind of game it's going to be, I think you have to step in and tell both sides to be patient and you will try your best to keep everyone entertained - with the implicit understanding...

As long as the differing factions' goals interact with the PCs' you are in business. An "evil" faction who wants the party's rival not to be king is just as interesting as a "good" faction who does. One other consideration is how easy it is for the PCs to discover a faction's goals - especially...

Good call. My first reading of the book involved saying "holy *&^%" over and over.

I agree that Night's Black Agents adventures do not fit the pattern that the rulebook tries to set up. But guaranteed success on a skill check - especially when combined with ability refreshes - is great for high action. I will say the Ringworld books Chaosium released BITD blew me away.

I suppose AI could run a prewritten module if it knew all of the PCs' capabilities. Can it improvise when a player tries something off the wall?

Spirit of the Century and Hollow Earth Expedition are more recent than those examples (GURPS Cliffhangers isn't). There was a Kickstarter for a new Solomon Kane game last year. I think it's been a while since we've had a Buck Rogers-type retro sci-fi game, too.

Keep on the Borderlands

Apologies for attacking the hypothetical, but from the way this unfolds, the DM has offered the players two mysteries to solve in that succinct setup. Mystery is a bad name, but certainly two possible objectives: find out about the artifact (a loaded word in D&D), and get it from the thief. And...

I would add a few bullets if the game is a multi-mystery campaign, but otherwise this is a great list. Incidentally, the first point is the design sensibility behind Gumshoe games.

This is one of those common instances where a sentence of out of character talk is worth an hour of play: "Given your character's expertise, they are satisfied that they have found what's relevant." "You quickly conclude that [the side information] is not relevant to the question at hand. It...

The trick is getting the brain to shut up. I usually envision what a NPC might say outside of play time.

As a D&D player in the first example, I'd be willing to entertain an explanation along the lines of "the intruder has a high intelligence, understood what the party was doing when they made camp, and knows the parameters of the spell." While it's still DM fiat, it sounds like there's enough...

We handwave it. When I was much younger, my group had just convinced my wife to start playing with us. One night we started a fight just as it was her turn to put the toddler to bed. Welp, the guy we thought we were fighting turned out to be a mind flayer, and let's just say my wife learned...

I'm afraid a postal service is one of those things, like vaccines and labor unions, that have worked for so long that people have forgotten how important they are.

A couple of points- Most contracts have happy endings. A lot of contractual language is an attempt to identify where things might go wrong because it has happened to one of the parties in the past. Word processing compounds this effect because it's easy to cut and paste. A lot of the flowery...