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What about an NPC - some kind of seer? (Not necessarily a humanoid - an intelligent entity bound to the location would work just as well.) Typically used to find new veins of silver, but perhaps its powers are greater. Perhaps it has knowledge about events that happen and may happen where the...

I might play both if 5E can hit the right notes. For me that's a solid game game, like B/X, with quick and easy resolution with lots of player choices the players have to balance. Otherwise I'll stick with my current games. I might want to translate one 3E game into 5E.

When you change your Belief in BW, you are most likely going to gain a Persona point. It's a big deal. (If it's not, you're not going to get that Persona point. It's called "Moldbreaker".) I don't know how GURPS works, but I'd be surprised if the replacement of a flaw with a new flaw...

Except that you have full agency; you don't have to follow your instincts. I had a PC in BW who had a pretty aggressive Instinct - something like "If I think someone is under the influence of an evil spirit, I will draw steel." In the game I ended up drawing steel on the daughter of a powerful...

Good article, KM. Since you asked: I use a system where players set their own goals based on the DM-provided setting. Accomplishing those goals grants XP. I feel like this provides two "reward cycles": players are rewarded when they explore and engage with the setting (getting more powerful -...

Thanks for the replies. I only vaguely remember skill points; we never used them in our games. In my favourite SW campaign I changed the Dark Side Point mechanic: you'd only fall if you hit 6 DSPs, and you didn't have to roll each time you got one. I think that gave the players more space to...

What are your feelings on Force Points/Dark Side Points and using/getting Character Points? I'm not sure I like the tension between advancing your stats or improving a specific roll using CPs.

Sounds interesting!

Check out this map of Seattle: http://blog.microdungeons.com/2012/09/the-year-of-apocalypse.html

Assume two opponents of equal skill. Team A wins the coin toss, takes the ball. Team B's closest player wins initiative 50% of the time. He readies an action to run onto the ball as soon as it crosses the centre line. (Then, since there's no facing, he kicks it back to his own squad.)

I like to imagine soccer being played under turn-based initiative. It wouldn't even survive past the first touch!

I think that's getting into "there's no roll needed" territory; you're just practising, so you'll get a +1 to your check after (whatever amount of time is necessary based on your skill).

Yeah. I always had trouble trying to figure out what a good failure was on a failed knowledge-type test. I could have gone "metagame" heavy - where the connection between the skill task and the failure isn't great so instead you play up failure of intent, eg. you're trying to escape some...

The sub-systems I've designed are not very interesting in themselves; they tend to be "Spend x GP and y days and get z". I don't know how well they'd work for scene-framed play.

Burning Wheel: You advance by tests, some of which you are pretty much guaranteed to fail. After a certain point you can only mark those "guaranteed to fail" tests towards advancement. In Burning Wheel you don't test unless there's some penalty for failure. So there ya go.

I think that you should just cut through the prologue and skip to either here or here depending on how big of a deal you want to make the cargo shipment. Tell the players that you're going to jump into the middle of the action, like a good Star Wars story would, but that will require some...

Kind of; the idea isn't to challenge the PCs during downtime, but to flesh out time as a resource. If their only option was to rest, then that's what they'd do, and they wouldn't have any other way to spend that downtime. How you spend your downtime is part of how you want to deal with future...

Not too much to say; I set the recovery of HS to 1 per day, provided that you take no other actions. Which is kind of lame on its own. I "added" a whole other set of actions that PCs can take - from gaining GP, XP, building structures, raising their reputation in town (thus lowering the...

Odd, that. Healing surges do exactly that, considering how you can spend them in an encounter. It's the ease of having an Extended Rest (where you get them all back) that takes those choices away. And you can get there (edit: to full HP healing after each fight) any number of ways; healing...

re: Dust of Disappearance: If I were DM, I'd read A creature or object touched by it becomes invisible (as greater invisibility). and cast that as a Reflex save or a touch attack (ranged or melee, depending on the action of the character). If the basilisk even cares to dodge it; it might not...