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I think it's easy to compare this to earlier editions and see how much more useful the earlier editions were from a story telling purpose. You could take any science fiction setting and get a pretty good feel for which TL that setting was at using the older tables. Something like Outlander was...

The trains that existed in 1890 were more advanced than the ones in 1850, but they were still trains. They were more numerous, more powerful, and more economical and more accessible, but that just meant the technology had matured. The way of technology is that for any given invention it...

@Bill Zebub I think there is a general agreement that "magic" is by being rare a specific exception to the general rule that a player always has agency over their character's decisions. I also think that there is widespread agreement that even though mind control magic exists, you don't use it...

More to the point, when I bought the rules and played we were according to the rules TL7 and TL8 was "the future", and the future could be recognized by things being "different". There was going to be "game changing" technology in TL8. And the thing is, everything now just feels like slightly...

sigh This old argument again. Egypt had three dark ages before the rest of the world even learned to write. They are not particularly unusual in history. However, it would be a mistake to make one of the two common misconceptions about the European dark ages. First, that the whole world...

I think you are correct to import fixes to problems you have in 3.0e rather than importing 3.5e as a whole. The more I learn about what is actually different in 3.5e, the more I consider the whole thing a bad move. I feel no desire to give up horses occupying a 5x10 area. Yes, formalizing...

You don't understand what I'm saying. Yes, the player has agency. But because he has agency, and because he for example lacks the mental or social or moral skills of the character he's trying to emulate, he will fail at being a believable version of that character. He won't have the...

As a professional software developer, I am certain of few things more than I am certain of the fact that people are terrible at estimating how hard things are. We have no intuitive sense of what is hard or easy. We measure that based on how rare some skill is, or whether something is hard or...

You hit on two things there but mostly just illustrated how counter intuitive probabilities are and why linear math is so much better at the table. First, it's not diminishing returns - it's actually huge returns. To understand why, let's look at some simple linear math from 1e AD&D. Let's...

Well, basically everything. Probably the single biggest problem is that GURPS is an almost pure skill based system with the worst skill system ever designed in the history of gaming. That's the core problem. The fact that it violates every aspect of good skill system design but in particular...

I tried to run a GURPS campaign once. It dampened all the excitement I had about the system, and taught me a lot about how to tell the difference between a well written system and one that plays well. I learn a ton from studying GURPS, but it produced very little gameplay. And that's my...

I'm not at all convinced by this timeline. I feel we are not quite in TL8 yet, which in the version of GURPS I had was supposed to start around 2000, but where we are maybe having a hint we might reach if we don't slide into another Dark Age.

One of the things that greatly annoyed me about every edition after 3e is that the monsters had removed from their stat blocks all the minor powers and skills that had to do with establishing how they could interact with other NPCs and were slimmed down to just entities that existed in combat...

I let players make rolls to see if their characters can see through deception, but I don't force players to play their characters as deceived if they themselves aren't, simply because I enforce no rules on metagaming. I allow players to play their characters while under a compulsion for...

Oh that. Yeah, I'm just getting warmed up. I haven't even had the need for an essay that can't fit in a single post yet. As I understand the term, railroading is set of techniques and yes in and of itself it is neither bad nor good. Some of those techniques are more artless than others, but...

It's not. GM's should be conscious of all the different ways they could be potentially metagaming and conscious of why they are doing it. Railroading is unavoidable. You won't be able to prep for everything. You won't be able to preset the difficulty for every possible challenge. You...

Thirty years of arguing RPG theory I've learned that some of the biggest misunderstandings come from the fact that someone heard some term of art somewhere and knew only from some context and whatever loan words were involved what the word meant and so evolved their own private definition. It's...

Fully agreed, so why start the sentence with "But"?

I have seen plenty of people argue that what he said was literally true. The GM is continually engaged in this process. Agreed, but it's that "open to their efforts" that I'm talking about. The GM is also rooting for the players. It's not really all that fun if the players can't resolve...

I get what the poster is saying. But some people act as if what the poster said was literally true, and I think it's an important point that it isn't. And my point is that this is harder than it might first seem, and really almost impossible. What's important isn't that you never force what...