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Also the phrase "step on up" is super corny

I don't think I quite understand the distinction here. Isn't greed something that can motivate a character? Why is greed a dramatic need in BitD but not in classic Dnd? Another motivation in classic dnd is exploration, very much in a colonial sense (charting an unknown territory, etc). These...

Are you familiar with Trophy Gold? It's a kind of dungeon-crawler story game. In the game you are meant to be a) acquiring gold and b) doing a particular thing to move to the next scene. That is, the drives of the PCs are given by the game. Would this be a game about dramatic need or about...

How would you define "dramatic need" ?

This is why I love whitehack. It leaves a lot of room for the characters to define themselves within the specific world in which they are playing, rather than as generic classes that are supposed to fit in any world

One line from the above article that I thought you might appreciate The suggestion is that the best 'system' for even a narrative heavy game like critical role is not a game with a lot of story-oriented mechanics but an FKR style game with basically this one rule (try to roll high) and lots of...

So much this. I want a podcast app to be able to just skip the first 2-3 minutes of any podcast

I think what this speaks to is the common root of both 5e and OSE in the TSR-era editions--tieflings from planescape, psionics from dark sun (in one iteration). Mechanically, I'd say there are various efforts to take the core of 5e and simplify it into an osr-ish style game. But outside of...

examples? These claims strike me as very strange indeed

I'm aware, but there is a third option: a distinction that has no prescribed mechanical teeth. For example, a system in which a fighter saves the halfling villages, and thus the dm decides that they get a +2 to halfling reaction rolls. There would be no good way for a system to predict the...

I'm not trying to make a hard distinction; certainly plenty of ttrpg products of any kind have a heartbreaker quality, considering wotc's dominance in the hobby. But I was thinking of things like Amanda Lee Franck's You've Got a Job on a Garbage Barge. Weird, self-illustrated in a distinctive...

The OSR has been very thoughtful about mechanics and gameplay and drilling down to a particular style of play (even if that style is more specific than the diversity of approaches taken in the early days of the hobby). Aesthetically, OSR products typically do not present themselves in the form...

What's appealing about OSR is that it is often a rules lite framework to which you can add things as you need them. For example you can take any OSR game and then add procedures from Errant for specific purposes, changing them to suit your needs. You can tap the OSR blogsphere for subsystem...

Here is the Questing Beast review of OSE back when it was still called B/X Essentials. One can get a sense of what people found/find appealing about it. It's from four years ago. The Advanced Tomes kickstarter was in 2020, during the pandemic. So I'd say it took off in 2019-2020, aided by...

Exactly...I see people talk a lot about the lack of character "customization" in OSR games. My feeling is that a character can be as customized as you like, but its defined by what you bring to the table and what you do in the game, not a menu of pre-written options. "Every fighter is the...

I guess Sean McCoy of Mothership fame tried to run a mediation but that failed. It's hard to not see this as them being a victim of their own success. :(

It's a really sad situation. It seems that, as they began working together just as friends, they never really formalized ownership over the IP. As they became successful, co-ownership came to be in dispute. Mun Kao, the artist who has official ownership, is just shutting the whole thing down...

I like games where “the solution is not on your character sheet.” It makes for more creative and spontaneous play. My two favorite OSR games are Mausritter and Whitehack

Whiskey really brings out the murderhobo in me

To me, what makes dungeon crawlers tick is a constant risk/reward structure. Everytime you inch forward or interact with anything you might find great reward but also risk several types of peril-traps, curses, monsters, etc. But I think everyone should be on board with that, and the DM should...