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While some people do play long, most games of this ilk are meant for 10-25 session play, tied to "arc" style outcomes. They are explicitly not intended for endless forever play, and tell you that directly in the guidelines. If you want to draw your BITD game out, you focus on the Crew as the...

You actually do grab another domain card per level. There's some interesting Deck Building stuff going on around Recall Costs, how you swap around at Rests, and what cards do (eg: the Arcana Domain Rune Ward ability is disabled if it absorbs 8 damage on a single roll, you can swap it out for...

I mean, PF2 is "I want even more tactical fighting and tighter math to my D&D" right? I can see DH being an interesting middle ground between PF2 and a PBTA as well; but I'm not sure how many people are heading in that direction (and tbh - somebody who's open to PF2 is probably already breaking...

Mainly that, calling out with hope/fear, lots of abilities that are X number of Y resource so you need to check and see if you have those left. I'm not saying it's a lot, just a little more.

5e has: HP / HD / Limited Use Class & Heritage abilities / Spell slots / Inspiration? DH has: HP / Stress / Armor / Hope / Limited Use Domain abilities? I think DH has a little more fiddly calculations of stuff.

While I'm not the biggest fan of full OP style play, I'm not sure that's the thing to highlight here. Ridge/Under/Sea/Order/Wanderborne aren't particularly "special in every respect." Nor is Wild, really. I think they just chose to spotlight less-common background ideas to create a more diverse...

I don't think anybody in this thread has stood up and said "I consider myself to be a storyteller as GM," with the exception of "I have run AP style railroads in the past/present aware of what that style of play requires or expects." I pretty much figured this entire thread for ~500 pages or...

Something that just occurred to me this morning as I was looking through the character background stuff again, there's no Community that's just "some guy/gal from a farm/town." You've got: Highborne (wealth/status) Loreborne (academic/politics) Orderborne (discipline/faith) Ridgeborne...

Ah, now we get to be recursive on how “everything in a sandbox is GM created” again :P

I was honestly afraid/convinced it was going to be a messy kitchen sink from the early Playtest materials, but the refinement they've done has made it something a bit more interesting. Is it the sweet spot bridge for people who want some crunchy combat modifiers with flowing narrative...

Sure, I guess my question would be how much does the latter bit rely on established elements or like "content." My personal exposure to Sandboxes tends to be from the OSR / Hexcrawl side, so stuff that's very dependent on rumor tables -> adventure/dungeon hooks etc and heavy GM prep of an entire...

Oh, I agree with @JConstantine that there's a lot of GM driving play in all games that apportion a role to a "GM." The question is largely "what's your primary heuristic for making the decisions" and "are there explicit restrictions on how you do so" and we've mostly beaten that to absolute...

Not in the ones I've seen? Maybe I wasn't quite clear with what I meant: - In most FITD games, you have a strong core premise of the game itself, what the macro "playing to find out" is (we're here to explore the success or failure of new criminal gangs in a victorian city filled with ghosts /...

IIRC 5.14 has it in the DMG as an optional rule as well, the 5e math just doesn’t support it the way say PF2 or DH do.

Yet culturally we have, and thus there’s an expectation that you do get More or Things Go Extra Bad as you note in the OP.

DH clearly intends this to be the case, with the 2-1-1 but not how you wanted answers from a potential list provided in the Environments section. Very much “use the seek answers roll to propel play” that I love so much from PBTAs. No roll leaves things static - you get actionable info, and or...

What are you defining as Narrativist here? As a dynamic of play, BITD fully supports it. It also supports much stronger up-front GM framing and designer vision, while still inviting open collaboration in all aspects of play. Eg: the first GM action is “Ask Questions,” and you can run just about...

I think part of it might be cultural, and part is a desire to highlight unique patterns that the human brain fixes on and gets a dopamine hit from. Roll a Crit at that important moment? The table goes crazy, you did that your brain says! “Heck yeah!” All the players go; and sometimes that...

Not necessarily, there’s an expectation your Experiences and Backgrounds have a say here. Somebody with an experience of “canyon climber” (or something similar) is suggested to not make a roll to scale a wall normally, and maybe spend a stress if it’s raining or whatever; but if they’re under...

It also does the “don’t hide obvious stuff” and includes examples of specific deeper questions for certain Environments that are basically bespoke Gather Info / Discern Realities type stuff (with a “ask 2 on a full success, one on a Success with Fear, 1 on a Fail with Hope but you may not like...