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As a player I'm often quite happy to have my attempts at slang or patois be somewhat impenetrable to the other players. As an more general writing goal for a game I find it tiresome.

The faction sheet looks like a goat-ton of work until you realize that you only have to track the factions that the crew actually interacts with, which is much smaller list.

That last point is undeniably true. That said, if we set aside GM distaste, I think the project isn't all that controversial or difficult.

Yup. I think the idea could be widely adapted to other systems without an undue amount of heartache.

Interestingly, I've worked rather hard in the recent past to add a decent soupcon of setting rootedness to OSR play, as I have increasingly found the rootless wanderer trope to unfulfilling. Even if the PCs are new to the local (often the case) I tend to design settings that will as a matter of...

Luka is killing me. I just remembered to finally pick up Longwinter and now there's more on my list. I should just arrange to sign him over every third paycheck or something.

One of the issues with discussing RPG design is an almost complete lack of stable definitions (not that those are necessarily always a good thing). One person's immersion is another person I'm outta here, so any discussion needs to take that into account. I spend rather a lot of time pushing...

There's a bit in Burning Wheel that does something like this and I've always thought it was pretty genius.

You are making what I think is a category mistake here. If you've played those games enough that you know they aren't for you, then you probably aren't who I'm talking about. You specifically are a game player and designer of almost unparalled scope compared to most forum posters and I have...

The opposite mostly. Usually that negotiation is pretty quick and it's building on my declared action. I can see how it might not be some peoples cup of tea though.

Just to tack some basic notions onto the P&E thing, because I like it so much, there are two aspects that I really like. One, part of the mechanic is player facing, so a PC can decide to take worse position (a harder roll) to get greater effect, or the opposite. The second part folds into that...

You're correct about the P&E thing. It is, IMO, one of the best framing mechanics I've ever used in an RPG. Not least because it allows FitD games to gracefully fold all actions into the same mechanical framework very successfully (i.e. combat isn't seperate). Other games do that too of course...

Sort of, but also not. The main ingredient is an exhaustion mechanic - six levels and you die. If you don't sleep, or eat, you gain levels, and they aren't trivial to remove. That gives a solid mechanical backbone to hang a lot of playloops off of. I have a camp and journey mechanic in the works...

So I love Blades, and a lot of other FitD games but I'll do full disclosure here - I bounced so hard off of position and effect on first reading it, and though my first couple of sessions it was comical. How great that mechanic is at the table really isn't apparent on just a reading. It's also...

This is an interesting topic. Rather a lot of the writing and design I've done recently on the fantasy side has been in service of hacking OSR play (Black Hack 2E specifically) to expand and round out the wilderness exploration side of things. I used a bunch of ideas from Into the Wyrd and Wild...

I suppose there should also be an obligatory mention of the Street Fighter RPG, which is way better than one might think given the title.

Related to this, because there's some shared DNA, I'll recommend both Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold. Rules light and slick as goose poop.

To continue rather than edit my post above, I might suggest that for some people that change in agency can be hard to grapple with on both sides of the screen. It can be hard for GMs to give up their ultimate cosmic power, and it can also be hard for players to have to sit up and be more active...

No no, not you at all. My commentary there is based on rather a lot of forum posts from smart canny folks who have just read a PbtA games but not played them, or perhaps played briefly (and possibly in a 'bad' game).. I find their lack of grasp pretty predictable. That goes somewhat more for...

So not to step on anyone else's toes, but this really brings us back to a regular issue which is that people without at least somewhat broad experience playing PbtA games don't have a great handle on how those games actually function at the table. That's not by way of critique, but just to index...