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I think there is a meaningful description between "story as a natural byproduct of things happening in a sequential order" and "story as an interesting narrative that can stand on its own merits, separate from the process of play". Because, well, not only game mechanics inherently tell stories...

I can! It is a bad game that is chock full of just completely baffling decisions. Playbooks are weird, bonds are an asinine mechanic that works infinitely worse than Hx, but the most obvious: why the hell there is randomized damage in a game that already has a mechanic for partial successes...

None of which even remotely resemble how they work or ever worked in D&D.

Even if you do use a VTT for a PbtA game, there's a decent chance you will end up in "general" or "other" or whatever statistic because the only thing you need is, well, a virtual table to drop pictures onto.

Hit points, sure. Wouldn't say it's entirely correct to attribute them to D&D, though. Classes are far from being ubiquitous in videogames, especially RPGs where a la carte menu of options is the norm. Even if a game even features a word "class", chances are, it means something entirely...

This is splitting hairs. If I was reading a novel or watching a film or listening to a radio play and there was a character who had a dramatic moment where they abandoned their faith and in the next scene they were throwing bolts of divine energy I'd be scratching my head and considering picking...

This is exactly what I consider an unwieldy workaround. I mean, "I rejected the power of the god because the gods are evil and uncaring for the struggles of mortals, but oh, I will continue using spells anyway" even sounds weird. "...but hey, I found a new god to pray to! Overnight!" isn't...

Even without going into the depths of "should we count not obstructing as support", the way 3e, 4e, 5e works does actively obstruct character-driven play. The most basic thing: There's a Cleric. Over the course of the campaign, she sees full coffers of church officials, she sees how her...

It's kind of hard to say. The way I envision it, the "meat" of the game, the thing the game is taken from the shelf for is combat and realistically, player goals are interchangeable. If the player wanted something else, say, become rich, the end result wouldn't be that much different, just...

Idk, in a reality I live in, roleplaying was separately invented at least once with ERP and other chat-based forms of roleplaying. ...and also Yoko Ono's Grapefruit predates dnd by a decade. Unless you are willing to argue that this is not a roleplaying game.

In my experience, using VTT for PbtA games is quite rare because, like, what would you need a VTT for? Any app that allows for a voicecall is more than enough.

As someone who plays plenty of videogames.... No? Even in the same fantasy genre, D&D-isms are very rare. What "ubiquitous sacred cows" are you thinking about?

Can someone explain to me, what is being discussed in the last dozen pages and how does it relate to neotrad design?

I don't want to derail this conversation, but: I'm lazily working on a game that from what I've gathered about what neo-trad is, more or less falls into what neo-trad describes. There are two distinct "modes", "phases", whatever, of play: there are scenes where PCs are chilling on their base...

Mages: the Ascension for all the innumerable issues Storyteller system has, but, most importantly, completely unplayable setting that has so much stuff going on that I have no goddamn clue how to make it work even after fifteen years of regularly trying.

I like challenging games and the bulk if not entirety of my TTRPG-related design work this year was dedicated to making games that involve a test of skill. Swashbuckling! revolves around testing players' and GM's ability to improvise witty insults on the spot, and in Inner Sanctum whoever is...

This was me when I ran PF1 as part of a challenge. I kept second-guessing myself: "is this rule actually from pathfinder, or 3E, or 3.5e or 5.e or was it a houserule?"

I apologize for not reading ten-odd pages of discussion, but anyway. re: Writer's room As much as I like writer's room, the main reason I love PbtA in general and Apocalypse World specifically as much as I do is because you don't need writer's room there. You can and should think like the...

I find the notion that the character doesn't know whether they are willing to follow up on their threat before said threat is made pretty silly.