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Speaking as a martial artist with ki-adjacent magic powers, it's because it takes around 90% of character downtime to maintain the skills necessary to deliver ki in the ways D&D monks deliver it. If everyone could do it, everyone would do it. But most folks aren't into the hours of bodywork and...

It contains limits that the more Terrence McKenna, mushroom-wizard take on magic didn't. A Vancian magician casts its spells, its out of spells. It has spells that change reality, but only under certain conditions and in certain ways. Unlike a mushroom-wizard, who needs only their imagination...

Speaking as transference from 5e, the always-caster player has stuck with caster as his main class. He isn't hugely upset by the loss of raw power, which he has commented on, but has taken another class (Investigator) to make the character more useful in other arenas.

I...I...must see this film. Why have I never seen this film? Other than I played Cyberpunk 2020 before the internet happened and probably skimmed over this entry in any Appendix N the game had. Tomorrow, I find and watch this film. And yeah, absolutely with you on the second point. There must...

Well there was a lot of failure at the start of the campaign, while the players built their "core competencies" and we all learned the game mechanics. Nowadays they don't mind failing when it comes to learning new skills, because they can always fall back on their highly rated skills to expedite...

Some immediate thoughts on randomness from reading this thread and via my current Burning Wheel campaign: 1) The players rarely undertake any "big" actions unless/until they can build an overwhelming dice pool and spend enough metacurrency to back it up 2) The Die of Fate (on a 1, whatever...

Yeah a new version of Cyberpunk makes for pretty dispiriting gaming.

It's my personal view that Cyberpunk is now a retro-game. And that's cool, nothing wrong with a big dollop of retro-nostalgia gaming. Running around the Streets stickin it to the Man! But I think a new Cyberpunk, working off of today's social anxieties (and not those of the late 70s-late...

I think there's a value to this over and above trying to do a criticism. When folks (potential players) have asked me about other games, they often ask "Is it like D&D?" and the answer - if you want to softly softly catchy monkey - is always an enthusiastic "Yes!"

I wonder if the difficulty comes from a type of shyness. It's fine to talk about the rules/setting text, the "implications", as Dennis Reynolds might say. It's fine to pontificate about where a game comes in some ranking or typology system of the ttrpg. It's great to talk about abstract concepts...

No, but i am now!

I get this. It's one thing to describe how your group ended up deviating from the game's (any game's) procedures as play progressed, and what happened when you did, and quite another to deviate from the RAW and then try to rationalise that as a) a problem with the system, or b) the way it should...

Man, my copy is seriously falling apart. Someone else is going to have to pony up theirs, or we all split for a roll of gaffer tape.

If i had my druthers and decided to start a blog about Criticism & RPGs my first articles would be: 1) examining ttrpgs as a site where the interpassivity of capitalist realism is both reinforced and resisted, rpg gamer as consumer vs rpg gamer as producer 2) Enter the Murderhobo: the structure...

I don't think there's a model specifically for RPGs, but there could/should/would be a range of approaches. The lenses I like to look through might not be the ones you like to look through, but that doesn't mean our criticism cannot appeal to each other, and more importantly, it doesn't mean...

What's really interesting to me is that despite players not wanting to engage with what's generally accepted as one of the core parts of Blades (jumping into the score in media res and playing from there, flashing back if planning detail is needed to overcome an obstacle) the group still had an...

Personally I would love to read someone's cogent criticism of Blades In The Dark, discussing how they came to it and why it didn't work for them/why they didn't enjoy it. Reading an analysis of why it did not spark joy would be valuable to me as a BitD/FitD fan and general ruminator on the RPG...

Are you reading the new Runequest: Glorantha? That uses an older (2nd edition, iirc) version of the rules as its base and so it can seem a little clunky in places.

This is absolutely the case. The humanities (what's left of it) and particularly cultural studies (is that even still a thing?) collapses under the weight of its own self-importance if the theoretical terminology cannot be explained in plain english, and the analysis itself cannot be discussed...

Thanks, that site and the journal make for some interesting reading. A few thoughts in general and in specific: 1) The link didn't work until I removed the /thoughts part of the address, just in case anyone else is struggling with that! 2) The continuing legacy of the Forge are the games that...