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We are finally beginning to move into an era where I was aware of Dragon and had at least some issues available to me. I liked the coin article. While it's practical impact would seem minimal, it is the sort of thing that I think greatly helps a DM visualize what a pile of coins looks like and...

I loathe director stance GMing, but I think people tend to focus on the wrong aspect of what's wrong with it. What's really wrong isn't that you have a story in mind, but that you are trying to tell players how to play their characters - which is one of the core aspects of being a director...

I think Mongoose has done a fantastic job with the IP and really this great news. I had a cousin that played Traveller back in the 1970s but for some reason I skipped over it, probably because I have never really considered Sci Fi settings to be very gameable. But the fantastic quality of the...

Killed Pirate; Talked to Separatist

D&D Campaign JRR Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings HP Lovecraft Complete Works The Brother's Grimm - Grimm's Fairy Tales Tom De Haven - Walker of Worlds, The End of Everything Man, The Last Human Frances Hardinge - A Face Like Glass Tamora Peirce - Squire Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls, The...

One of the big problems that crunchy systems can run into is attempting to assert rules to govern interactions in the system where those interactions have a lot of edge cases that don't model the assumed reality very well. A good example is the conceptually sound system 3e has for modeling...

Oh, right, sorry. Spelling was always one of my nemeses.

Disabled and Boarded Pirate Spaceship

I mean I played consent based MUSHes back in the early 1990s. And I'd count them pretty much as dysfunctional. I mean, I had some fun on occasion, and maybe at some point it would be worth a long post on the MU* culture and the processes of play that developed within it; but, I do think the...

Rulings are rules. Failing to write down the rules doesn't make the process of play inherently simpler or easier. The process of smithing and applying rulings is part of the complexity of the system. The only thing that makes things lighter is forgoing certain aesthetics. For example, "Make...

Suppose we evolve Celebrim's world's simplest RPG system in which all propositions are resolved by coin flips into something resembling a rules light system. That system would have at its mechanical core something like: If the proposition is deemed by the GM impossible, it fails. If the...

A 'Light RPG' places most of the responsibility on the GM. The rules are generally little more than broad guidelines for pass fail mechanics. The game is almost entirely in the hands of the GM. Fortune mechanics tend to have little granularity. You tend to see a lot of rolls resolved by a...

Well, again, agreed but I was never trying to denigrate RPGs. I was just suggesting that as an interactive social experience they deliver particular themes and settings well and others not so well.

While I generally agree, that is my answer. There are not "genres" that RPGs can't handle but there are cross genre conventions that RPGs cannot handle in the general case of being a social game. Genres are so broad that I don't feel like they are a useful description of the limitations of an...

Those are literally 'cantrips'.

RPGs don't work for situations where the number of NPCs (with personalities and motivations, not just MOBS) on stage tends on average to be greater than the number of PCs. AKA, Monsters and other Childish Things and it's setting is probably unplayable as written. I note that the published...

Night of the reoccurring NPCs

That's a very narrow view of what "a god" means. Historically "god" was typically just applied to things that were higher than men, so for example the dryads and nereids were gods - just small ones. But even the big Olympian gods could be fought, especially if you were a hero with some gods...

Even if the gods are very hands on, they may be open to different interpretations of what they stand for or different cults around them worshiping them in different aspects. Or they may themselves have dual natures. For example, the sun goddess Showna in my game allows herself to be worshiped...

In my homebrew it's certainly possible to kill a god in that there are gods that are explicitly dead. Killing a god however would not be very easy and would probably be impossible for a mortal in the case of major deities like Lado, Arete, Showna, and Erravar. Trapping a major deity in a...