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I mentioned MDA to sidestep questions of my own design experience, though I have worked as a BA and currently work as a software engineer. In a sense, aesthetics are your requirements and dynamics your acceptance criteria, so it seems analogous to practices I have used professionally for quite a...

I like linking this post by Jon Peterson because the article it discusses is actually about a group that did play the war-gaming way (with referee separate from the opposition). I actually tried something like it as a conceit in my homebrew system, but it confused my players. They thought they’d...

My assumption is a fairly traditional delegation of responsibilities (with GM being responsible for scenario, world, opposition, etc). As soon as one starts tinkering with those things, the assumption doesn’t really hold up very well, but that’s presumably the point. In an RPG context, I’m...

The muddling is because there’s an inherent conflict of interest between being both an adjudicator and a player (of the world, opposition, etc). There are traditional ways of addressing it, but I think there’s design space to explore different ones as well. It’s something I’ve touched on a few...

There seems to be multiple definitions of “neo-trad” being used in this thread. For supporting a certain style of play, I can see a list of common patterns or approaches being useful. However, I’m failing to see the purpose of a “manifesto” for a particular type of design. Why should a designer...

What I’ve seen over the last twenty years playing and running is that people don’t reliably maintain their carried weights. They may figure it out initially, but it’s usually a matter of time before it gets out of sync. Simplified systems like bulk or slots don’t help much because you still have...

I don’t find the examples in that post compelling. The proposed encumbrance system works because the tracking is automatic. It has nothing to do with framing the default as a bonus. If the players had to do accounting (or other tedious work) to track their status, it wouldn’t provide any more...

I think reviewing through a particular lens is okay. It helps an audience know if a work is something they’d like. However, see below. These issues both seem to have the same root: misuse of taxonomies in RPG discourse for edition warring and other BS. Not surprisingly, that also makes...

I think it’s more helpful to look at the cultures as describing different sets of preferences rather than as “camps”. This is touches on why I am critical of the taxonomical approach — the problem being that as soon as you deviate from or step outside of the taxonomy, it becomes a lot less (if...

I think the six cultures are most useful when viewed as different potential audiences for a game (e.g., as I discussed in post #299). Otherwise, using them to build out a taxonomy doesn’t seem especially helpful for actually designing games.

If Hasbro actually tried to pull the rug out from under the CC-BY SRD, there are enough people with an interest in the CC ecosystem that I don’t think anyone sued would be fighting their fight alone. It would be really bad for CC if the license could be revoked when it’s trying not to be revokable.

I’m trying to figure out the argument that it fundamentally can’t be. (I otherwise agree.) The “deauthorization” gambit assumes that it can manipulate section 9 by prescribing and proscribing certain versions of the OGL. The idea seems to be if you have a work under the 1.0a, and that license...

It depends on how the information is presented to the players. If the DM reminds them of a particular path without any other information, they might interpret it as a nudge towards an intended or preferred solution. If the DM also notes risks (particularly those would occur or be known to the...

I assume the argument is that any fix they could purportedly make could be undone in a future update? (i.e., if WotC could deauthorize the OGL 1.0a retroactively, then they could still do that and undo the mechanism that would be used to create an OGL 1.0.final that declared it couldn’t be.)...

This to me is the big problem the CC-BY SRD fails to address (even should older ones be released). For example, Old-School Essentials has dozens of products listed in its section 15 statement. If you want to incorporate it into your product or base a game off of it, there’s a cloud of...

Cult is one of the crew types. We picked assassins, but we ended up involved with She Who Slays in Darkness, and we all got into it. It was fun, but I’d like the next Blades game I play to develop differently. Since you’re not supposed to push the game in a specific direction, that presents...

Played in two and ran one this year: Blades in the Dark. We started in August 2022 and wrapped in 2023. About half of the ~30 sessions overall were in 2023. Blades was fun, and I wouldn’t mind giving it another try (as long as it doesn’t devolve into more cult play). Stonetop. We started up...

Just call it a self-portrait!

More so in the sense of whether the list is open or closed. If the players want to combine things unexpectedly or use materials not on the list, is resolving that situation still in scope for crafting, or would that handled a different way?

I don’t think that’s fiddly per se. It may look like it in comparison to other tabletop RPGs (particularly D&D-likes), but crafting often has very little gameplay associated with it in those games, so adding some may seem like an imposition (or be “fiddly”). However, if people don’t want to...