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I have run a few games of DramaSystem, in which most of the fun lies in the interactions between players. It occurs to me that for anything procedural, I have always just said yes, exactly the way this thread suggests. As a GM, I set up scenes, and there are rule for how the players interact and...

Current AIs are not good enough to do this in general. They could do a lot of the flavor text part of GMing, but since they have no concept of facts or truthfulness, they do a poor job at running even somewhat complex rules. You would need to add a rules-engine agent to make it all reasonable...

In retrospect, I think I was also too generous with letting players know the difficulty of tests. I ran Dracula Dossier (Night's Black Agents) after TOC ETERNAL LIES and was much more careful, only letting players know the difficulty of challenges in vague terms. It was definitely more...

I played in a fantastic 2-year Supernatural campaign, and although we never had issues with the actual rules, the book was terribly organized and it was very hard to work things out. Overall, I think the game was great becasue of the GM and players. I'd say the rules were OK, but unless you...

I've played and run a lot of horror, and it's been hard to dislodge Call of Cthulhu from the top of the list. Here are some other systems I've run horror in: D&D / 13th Age / Pathfinder: You need to add your own mechanics -- and the nature of high fantasy can make it hard to feel that your...

I have a feeling that by "traditional RPGs" you are defining it in terms of combat-focused games -- basically D&D and direct descendants. Would you include older games like Pendragon, Toon, Call of Cthulhu, Traveler, Runequest and Top Secret as "traditional games", or are you really just...

Agree. The way I would do this is to make the rewards for the "selfless act" a meta-reward. So when playing in-character, the character is being selfless. But the player can be selfish, looking for the cool meta reward. So the "rod of seven parts" is a problem because it's an in-character...

yeah, some tables can play slow - but an hour per round is way slower than most. My experience is that an average combat took about an hour; faster at low levels, maybe up to 75 minutes at epic. I would say we both have anecdotal experience, but if you read the LFR adventures, they are pretty...

Yeah. I've done a lot of stage direction and it can be hard when your mind goes meta when watching a film or a play and starts thinking "that scene could have been cut and the time better spent on character development" or thinking about how the pacing could be improved or wondering why the...

On the other hand, if you over-write, it can lead to you making something that is meant to be general feel specific; or focusing readers on particular cases rather than the general rule. Plus it just makes things hard to remember. I’d suggest that if a rule actually needs a lot of explanation...

I'm going to qualify your statement a bit -- but then mostly agree with you! There are a number of decision points that a journey allows: Before taking the journey, they may decide to search out for rumors on the journey that will aid them (but will take from their very limited set of potential...

Each group needs to work out what style of game they are playing; specifically are they playing a game where rules are more important than simulation and narrative or not. When discussing on the internet it’s very hard to have consensus if your priorities are different AND you don’t acknowledge...

It's not good for crypto, definitely. That application requires that you cannot predict future occurrences from reviewing previous ones. My back-of-envelope calculations say that if you observe 3000 d20 rolls from these functions, you could start predicting the future -- not as a human observer...

If we are talking about introducing modern firearms into medieval warfare, then sure it would have a huge impact, but historically, the early ones had very little impact. It took centuries for them to become ascendant: These early guns (about 1380) were slow to reload, had limited range, and...

Bit of an aside this, but the current evidence is that when AIs learn from data generated by AIs, they do not get better -- in fact, they get worse. It's a major concern for the big AI companies -- as more AI content leaks into the world, it is becoming harder and harder to learn from new data...

This is an important point. A lot of the discussion in this thread is assuming that if things are equal (equal access, equal stats, etc.) then the system is fair. But fairness is not the same as equality: I've run and played a lot of Living campaigns, where you get a mix of people and parties...

Penguin publishing has a really nice article about why Terry's writing is so appealing. It absolutely is funny, but it's not just comedy. His setting is far more satirical than standard fantasy and, if you read the article, people see more depth in it than simple comedy would define. You could...

How about systems that just have each combatant make a single roll, and the better roll wins? That combines attack and defense rolls into a single roll, which arguably is more realistic and is much faster than D&D-style systems because -- for a one-on-one fight (a) you only need look up 2...

It has been a long time since we’ve had bad RNG code in standard computer libraries. Anything kept up to date (like, using libraries updated in the last decade) will be statistically more random than any random process you can come across in nature. It will be astoundingly more random than the...

You know, I'm not really sure. I think other factors make combat more fun than just this one, so it's hard to say which I prefer on average. I've never had issues with D&D's "independent" style of combat, but it is more fun to be able to do something about being attacked that isn't just "save up...