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Yeah, the way they cast the GM moves from softest-hardest and stick “ask questions” right there at the top is an excellent example of this. What you wrote here is exactly what the book wants you to do in play, and provides this range of “sometimes simple is fine, sometimes go complex with it...

Oh absolutely, the rules just remove some GM power over adjudication in terms of both FITD/PBTA. But it’s not like I’m not fundamentally shaping the play space in all the games I run, I’m just doing so with an eye towards what the players and their characters are focused on instead of...

I’ve now read through the PDF and honestly I’m a lot more impressed with what they’ve done here then I thought coming from the playtest: - the Agenda and Principles are PBTA/FITD fare, but customized well for the system and High Fantasy style of play. Honestly, this kinda does what DW2 wants to...

was Yeah, DC is a little improved on this but some of the FITD games have gone a lot further then Harper’s base conditions in how they handle natural beats in both the guidelines and fictional fallout. That’s absolutely the first half of the “give them opportunities” section - meant to help...

The core entanglements table kinda sucks. Most subsequent FITD games have a mix of interesting/good/bad, and ones that provide a bit more structure. More mixed stuff is better IMO! (I’d almost prefer heat and entanglements to give extra scaffolding to the GM off factions and such, but I digress)

Many games with explicit rules and procedures that either tell the GM when to trigger them, or have player-facing triggers that can be openly invoked also have relatively simple procedures for all actions. I dont think you'd call "make an ability check" complicated; it's not until you're...

I really appreciate that in a game like Stonetop (derived from Dungeon World), the entire useful core rules (the Basic Moves etc) fit on a single sheet; everything the players need to know about their character is on their sheet; and the adjudication is straightforward and clear. Same thing with...

Right, the core of most PBTA play is: something with forward momentum is going to happen. The GM establishes the situation, makes a Grabby (hopefully) move, and asks. If nobody reacts, you follow through and evolve the fiction and ask again. It’s a more circular conversation.

Something very funny: people talking about how they’ve played with the same group of players for decades and you should get to know people before playing with them to establish GM relationships and trust also constantly assuming players are somehow terrible and cannot be trusted.

You need to work with better players or make better rulings. The vast majority of mine over the years have been interested in “what makes for the most interesting outcome here.”

The only player I ever really had seriously argue about decisions and mechanics was the guy who knew the rules really well. Everybody else might’ve had a question and we walked through it together and got to a common ground, or the outcome simply didn’t match their expectation of plausibility...

Over in the Daggerheart thread there's some folks talking about how awesome the GM Guidance in there is about how to run the game from that perspective, tools and techniques for success, etc. At least one other poster went and looked at it and said "this is good stuff, but is basically just...

Oh I have no interest in the alt-universe stuff there (I forget which media he said he’d been watching that sparked that desire), but the DC mechanics fixes all the stuff of core FITD I didn’t care for and was already largely depreciating anyway. If nothing else, it’s a good example of “hey you...

So do most OSR games these days. Even D&D 2024 took a stab at it. To not have some degree of best practices, or dislike their presence, is conservative in the utmost.

I mean some of the problems I see reported are clearly trying to force the design into pretzels where it performs poorly! But I’m definitely one of the people who’s pretty “meh” on Blades in particular (neither the premise nor setting grab me at all), and didn’t like the design much until Deep...

His 2022 videos on the rhythm of play on the other hand are excellent!

I don’t think this is true, honestly. In the OSR space that’s full of games that use this tagline they’re intended to be part and parcel of the adjudication as a neutral ref, and recorded if they’re going to come up again. This is stressed in all the well regarded blogs, advice books, and rule...

I’ve literally never had that apart from playing 3.5e with friends as a teen. I think that’s the minority of play these days, and the absolutely massive international contingents of enthusiastic players suggests that’s just not a reasonable thing to eexpect at all. Hence the 2024 rules...

A couple system specific notes: - Blades is designed for retroactive planning as a system, hence stressing minimizing it here. The idea is you grab the first reasonable sounding Target and push for an engagement roll to bring the interlocking systems into play as obstacles come up. - Don’t...

Gotcha, I’m incapable of watching actual plays; I did a bit of his earlier one with Stras/Sean/Adam but it wasn’t very compelling. Thankfully I don’t have those issue in the games I run ;).