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Are the PCs already created? Do they have a reason to be strikebreakers?

Shadowrun 1st ed Turn to Goo

For the Dracula Dossier, the short story "The Power and the Passion" by Pat Cadigan. For 1968 Berlin, the movies Funeral in Berlin, The Quiller Memorandum, and A Dandy in Aspic, and the novel Declare.

In a perfect world I would use Loresheets, which provide character advancement at the same time as investment into chunks of the setting. Historical gaming can address this issue, depending on how much research the GM is willing to do. Even something like a movie night can provide the baseline...

Why is it important to the fiction? 9 times out of 10 the spellcaster's next questions become matters of mechanics: What things on the target's person did I burn up? When I froze the puddle the target was standing on, does he fall prone?

For better or worse, the history of business is driven by those members of a creative enterprise who did the marketization that their comrades couldn't care less about (see Gates, Bill).

Speaking in broad generalities, as a game starts differentiating gear and spells it gets crunchy. Consider a spy game in which my PC wants to do something at night. A light game will probably assume that he has the requisite equipment to be able to function when it's dark. The next step up might...

If RE Howard had written Conan with a band of regular companions, he would even have been included in your list ;) He is the Creedence Clearwater Revival* of rpg wellsprings. * the band with the most number of hits reaching number 2 without any number 1s.

I like this video because it stresses what is alike among GMs and players.

It's easy at a site with experienced roleplayers - and on a board which is explicitly set aside for non D&D games - to under appreciate the saturation of D&D in the industry. But the fact is that one could design completely within the 5E space very profitably without noticing other games.

I envision five categories of usefulness, although genre can easily get swamped. Mechanics: dice pool, percentile, roll over, roll under, maybe an exploding die game. Style of play: tactical, narrative, mystery/procedural, universal. Genre: fantasy, sci-fi, supers, horror. Character...

Probably because they had a session in which their PC performed poorly.

If one hallmark of a musical is that things can suddenly switch from a dramatic situation to a choreographed bit of singing and dancing, that's kind of what happens in a game that switches from role playing a scene to a tactical setpiece.

A mechanic where if a player sings in character they get a bonus? I will quibble that "musical" isn't a genre on par with the ones mentioned here, because you could always associate the theme of a given musical with another genre. Little Shop of Horrors is science fiction, for instance. The...

This is how it worked in White Wolf games, that for a time included Ars Magica, which Jonathan Tweet also helped design. The issue with THAC0 is that it makes little mechanical sense to use a number in the middle of a scale as the reference point. It made sense to current players, because...

I suppose an issue is that players might know the identity of the murderer from the outset? Yet this is essentially the same setup as a game set on the Titanic.

I kill the philosopher with my fireball.

What about games like Brindlewood Bay where the crime and evidence is generated during play?

If you can identify what a genre's core activities are, I'm pretty sure you could craft mechanics to support them. In terms of investigation, Robin Laws' Gumshoe system is even simpler than the coin flip example, and it works fine.

I would want to hear what Reynard says about his original intent. He assumes that you could "craft an appropriate ruleset," and believes that there are none.