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To be fair, you do have far less ability to bring in new, cool mechanics or weird monsters -- it is definitely a more focused campaign. So you do need players and a GM who are happy with a game where the types of encounter are fairly limited, and the fun is in how your knight feels and changes...

I should have been more precise. In Pendragon it's technically called 'amor' and is a bit different from our modern take. In game terms, you get a passion of Amor (Gwen) and it has a level, much like Hywel's Cruel Trait can influence how you behave. You can easily be a little bit in love with...

Well, like everything it depends on the game you are running. I have been running THE GREAT PENDRAGOIN CAMPAIGN for 2+ years now, and this kind of thing is a major part of the game and has solid backing both mechanically and in the fictional setting. As an example, when you first see Guinevere...

Yes, very much so. Role players are varied and fun creatures — sometimes I like to optimize a killer D&D4E bard/rogue/assassin Drow who creates shadows, teleports in and murders enemies with a carefully chosen set of feats and powers, and sometimes I like to play a kid on a bike who has a crush...

I studied pure math for 4 years and went on to get a doctorate in applied math. At a Gen Con long ago and in a city far to the north I was playing in Cthulhu Masters and in the first round I was assigned a character who very rapidly went mad due to having his brain super-augmented to do extreme...

Some recent threads I have been in have discussed player-GM interaction and the degree to which GMs need to handle player knowledge and the degree to which players and GMs like to challenge each other. This is not a poll to discover who is playing "the right way", but more to establish a...

Two answers to this. The first is simple — I trust my players and they don’t abuse it. I wouldn’t play with people who do. I mean, we’re playing a game of let’s pretend where people are continually trying to behave in a way that is not their (player) nature, and if a player cannot handle this...

Sorry, I’m not really clear on what you are getting at here. Is it that you think that the act of using actions to accomplish a task, by itself, makes the actions themselves less flavorful, or maybe using fewer mechanical options than if they were done outside such a framework? Perhaps an...

Well, there are plenty of other task-focused games, but I'd also suggest that even in action-resolution games, there are typically mechanisms for converting actions -> tasks. A good example is Skill Challenges. They form a mechanism for taking a desired task and allowing you to use actions to...

If you are giving two sentences of info to 4 players, it doesn't seem that is any less interesting, fun or informative than giving eight pieces of information to one group. This is the same as if you have four players searching a room -- you don't go into huge detail about everything each of...

If you are of the school that says one you have a written encounter, you cannot change it to react to the players' actions, yes, absolutely. For me, that is a failing of that style of play. To me, deciding on a suitable challenge the day before the game isn't any more of a privileged position...

So the issue is that when scenes are being run, you don't switch between them -- you complete a scene completely and then do the next one? And there is no interaction between scenes? Ok, I can see that that would be tedious, assuming scenes aren't more than a couple of minutes. I have done that...

I guess I’m a little surprised that handling a split group seems so unusual and hard to do for people. I thought we had moved a bit behind the traditional D&D don’t-split-the-party stage of game play. It’s probably more unusual for me to have a session where everyone is always together for every...

For modern, my favorite system for a heist adventure would likely be FATE. Their most likely actions would be to create an advantage, but there are also a fair number of leadership feats you can take which would be useful. FATE doesn’t really encourage a one-trick character like a Heavy, but...

It depends on the degree of feeling. If one player doesn’t like puzzles and the rest do, then it’s reasonable to have puzzles show up every now and then. But if one player has a severe reaction to, say, spiders, and the rest don’t, then you shouldn’t design a scenario with spiders. Both these...

Yes, that’s right. It’s the way I have played and run for 20 years or so now. I used to be more into the “you rolled a 1 so you die” style of play, but over time I found that it rarely made the game more fun. I also have a really great bunch of players, so I can trust them to make good...

It really does depend on your play style. In my style of play, no-one dies just because they get bad dice rolls, or just because they get in over their heads. That would be what I call arbitrary. In the style of game I run, it has to be a combination of things: Doing something you know is...

I want my players to feel comfortable, so I tell them. Sometimes it’s very explicit: “we’re playing The Great Pendragon Campaign” or “I’m adapting <TSR D&D module> to start our 13th age campaign”. Sometimes it’s more general “I’m using a mix of LFR high tier adventures as part of the campaign”...

I ran a lot of D&D4E LFR scenarios back in the day, and at mid-high levels I’d typically ask a group if they had RRoT feats, the magic dice, frost-based feats or radiance builds. If they did, I’d say something like this: “I can run this as a standard friendly GM, and with your optimized...

You usually get 3 actions a round, and at medium-high levels haste is common enough to give you four, so three actions is basically a one round action. Also PF2 strongly penalizes you for taking each action to attack, so a very common strategy is 2 swings and a move, so if you spread the...