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It's not about having everything decided by the players or the dice, it's the principle that the GM doesn't know what will happen the same as the players because the GM is a player too. Once the GM has decided that an event will happen regardless of how the game plays out, player agency or the...

And just like in engineering, most of that planning is for the case of failure. And therefore isn't actually something people see. For an RPG, that's silly. I'm not going to plan for every contingency in a game the way I would a SQL Server high availability/disaster recovery architecture. But...

The idea is to not decide that beforehand at all.Play to find out what happens. Don't plan events or have a plot. Let the players generate story through their actions.

I've basically ignored them for most of their existence, but I agree it's not well-grounded in the reality of the RPG industry even back then. I suspect that awareness of Microsoft's tactics, who did pull this sort of crap, colored people's views of what was occurring with WotC acquisitions.

I don't hope I'm right. I can't spit without hitting somebody confusing D&D for all RPGs and thinking that they all are played the same way.

It's the same approach it's had for the last 40 years. It's not going to stop being mainstream when it's been growing revenue in the double digits year over year for the past couple years. D&D is for all intents and purposes its own hobby. That's not going to change.

@timbannock summed it up nicely, but my take is that prime traits should apply 99.99% of the time to all rolls. If that isn't happening, there's something not tuned correctly with the traits, themes, or situations of the game. If you have relationships as a prime trait and some non-zero portion...

I wouldn't call it impartiality. I call it having no expectations. You play to find out what happens, and respect the results of the dice when they are brought out. It's when you decide that she should get away, or she should get captured, and start bending things to go that direction that...

One thing to note...distinctions are a prime trait set and are assumed (and highly recommended) for all Cortex games. A distinction will be included in every roll. If for some reason a distinction doesn't quite fit the fiction, hinder one of them instead. If it often occurs that no distinction...

For some reason I thought SotC was a bit later than that, but yeah it was 2006. SotC had conflicts for combat and contests for when characters weren't trying to hurt one another just like Fate Core does. So the terminology is the same between Fate and Cortex in some respects, but the...

Fate Core was published in 2014. Contests in Cortex were introduced in Smallville in 2010. Stress was introduced in Marvel Heroic in 2012. Not that any of that matters, Cam Banks is old friends with Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue. Rob worked on the Leverage RPG (which is Cortex, and had flashback...

Cortex Prime, the latest version. Sure there are mods for stress, trauma, and recovery, but it's a toolkit. Without using the stress mod, you are using complications and by default complications automatically recover at the end of the scene. "Taken out" also != death. There is no prescribed...

Cortex Prime contests. Once a contest is initiated, each side rolls to beat the difficulty set by the other side, until one side loses or gives in. If one side gives in, they narrate how they did so but don't take any mechanical consequences. Generally speaking, this means they give up whatever...

Toolkits sometimes have oddball tools for specific purposes. The mechanic came from earlier Cortex games and, along with a couple other mods like Life Points, was included for completeness. There are also third party games. There's Reality: Redacted and a superhero game called Lifted funded in...

Enjoy! https://docs.google.com/document/d/18GgPA6ppSr9UzbwRbPKYnMqtzX83q9Gswi-EbfKh_b8/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rtUw2cUNvNirq0uQL9558-q0bl6FT1mvS7ZuQxGuXeA/edit?usp=sharing

The preferred method is to take two eligible dice and add them, and if required choose a third for the effect die, yes. But all of it is "optional". That's the point.

The fun thing here is that there isn't only one basic mechanic. There's also the add all the dice mod, where you total all of the dice. But I can totally have multiple different "power systems" in Cortex that work and feel different at a fundamental "Stupid Dice Tricks" level. Tales of Xadia...

With Cortex it's not just narrative (although I don't agree with "narrative conceits", especially in a fiction first game - narrative is powerful and does most of the heavy lifting). I'll illustrate by listing a number of ways you can do magic in Cortex, none of which will likely make sense if...

The license is not the same for Cortex Prime. Here is the current non-commercial (community) license: If you want to sell a Cortex game, you need to acquire a commercial license. To do that, you'd need to contact Direwolf Digital, but for the moment I think the licensing is paused as they get...

I really like cards. I have Short Order Heroes cards to help with GMC traits, as well as a Decuma deck that I like to sometimes draw from and answer the prompts. But my favorite GM aid is the players. I'll usually just ask them for the answer.