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Hmmm. I think you might need to explain this a little more. D&D 4E is an obvious high-tactical game, and yet often has "lots of hit points". I think you might mean to exclude games where you have lots of hit points, but few ways to change how you protect or destroy them. Again, true if they are...

D&D 4E is the clear first choice here. Having played a lot of other systems, nothing comes close for tactical choices, for strategies involving multiple characters, and for terrain affecting combat. But it’s complex for players (relatively easier for GMs) so you may find it too much. It’s also...

Hey all -- quick note to say thanks for a lot of excellent comments and reflections on the system. It's been super-helpful to hear everyone's point of view and the consistent tone of being helpful and supportive has been ... well ... helpful and supportive! I've been in a few PbtA discussion...

And I guess this is why it doesn't work for me. It says that the focus is "see what your characters do" but in practice, because much of the time any action results in success with a complication, it seems more like the focus is "see what the world does to your character". When I play Fate, if I...

I have found them a bit frustrating. The emphasis on not needing prep, and on making sure that something happens every roll, led to an experience where nothing can ever be simple; everything leads to more scenes and improv activities. My preference is for systems like FATE where you CAN do that...

I've never really felt that advocating only for your character is ever going to work out well except when you have a very homogenous group -- one for which advocating for your character will always also further the story and fit within the genre and themes established (and yes, I'm deliberately...

@hawkeyefan Great to read this -- it brought up many fond memories of my first session. I journaled this using footnote-style references to give the prompt numbers, and simply added headers when the date changed significantly. I kept a running. electronic tag of my assets, skills and memories...

And here is the difficulty -- measures of "value" are highly subjective. What is the value of happiness? How do you compare energy cost to happiness generated? You might discount the joy of owning something unique, but I just paid a non-trivial amount of money for map of Ireland made in 1743...

NFTs are as pure form of speculation as you can see; the value of them is tied only very lightly to any real-world effects; as far as I can see the only thing that might affect their value is the perception of the popularity of their creator. When you are buying one you are risking money in the...

That was my first experience of D&D, and actually it was one of the games with the MORE pressure to be competent. It had a very high death rate, and if you rolled up a bad character you were sort of expected to let them die and be replaced. I later found out that most groups would look at a...

Definitely. Above all, be excellent to one another.

If the campaign is about effective combat characters defeating dangerous foes, then building a combat-weak character is actively undermining the campaign ethos, and so is "the wrong way to have fun", because it hurts other people's fun. And, TBH, most traditional D&D style games are about...

Having written a technical book myself, I now have a deeper appreciation of how easy it is, when reading your own work, to miss seeing things that are unclear. It is really, really valuable to have a serious editor and/or copy-editor to evaluate your work and spot all those issues. One of the...

Differentiating yourself from other systems on the market. This requires a solid vision of how your game differs; it requires marketing to let people understand how it is different, and it requires game design skills to make sure it really is different. Your game must compete against the...

Hotels have always been an issue, but the crowding is definitely new. I also have been going since Milwaukee days and the last five years or so have seen substantial changes that have led to me being less interested in Gen Con nowadays. Specifically: Fewer Exciting Cool New Things Obviously not...

It's possibly because I like to have a pre-defined plot that I have thought through for investigative games -- my goal for that sort of game is for the players to have fun by solving the mystery. I know that another form of investigative game is more reactive, with the fun being the players...

There's a difference between open source for a new RPG, which is what the OP is asking about, and taking a dominating market position and open sourcing a relatively small part of your IP

Here is a set of games I would run with zero prep: Everyway DramaSystem / Hillfok My Life with Father Dogs in the Vineyard Some Fate genres Fiasco Numenéra And here are ones I would not: Any form of D&D, including AD&D, 13A, PF Any investigative game, including CoC and GUMSHOE Any superhero...

It's worse than that even. Whenever you say average, you are assuming something to average over. For roleplaying campaigns, you might assume that the average is over the campaigns (that would be the typical usage), but another reasonable option would be to average by time spent. The average...

I ran NBA for a long, very successful campaign. It was pretty rare for heat to reduce in that game (not sure if I ever did, actually), mostly because in NBA, players become more powerful over time, so that if they do nothing, they can easily overcome the heat they generated previously...