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My last time DMing I adopted a system that went like this: 1) HP are simply your ability and will to keep fighting. While you are at 0 HP, you cannot make Attack Actions, cast spells that require saves or attack rolls, or perform Reactions that make an attack. If you are conscious, you will...

The D&D IGOUGO combat system creates many such oddities. While I still play D&D, this is one of the things I really like about systems like the Apocalypse Engine and Forged in the Dark, and even Two Hour Wargames. The chunkiness of D&D-style initiative bugs me increasingly over time.

It can depend a lot of the system I'm running, honestly. Looking up rules Tremendously system-dependent. For D&D and related, its a constant bother. (Our group switches system a lot and minor changes in things like healing, damage, etc. are constant bugaboos.) However, when running Fate or a...

I was getting kinda tired of making up whole new worlds. So my last campaign was set on an alternate history/reality Earth. I remembered the story of the Buddha, and how he was prophesied to be either a great conqueror or a great teacher. I thought, "What if it went the other way?" ...which...

Capes is near-miraculous, IMO. Totally changed my perspective on what story/role-playing games could be: clearly-structured Conflict Resolution, insanely fast character creation including drives, as well as the power and speed of completely abandoning Simulationism. I've often wished for a...

..there are games that claim to rpgs and have no GM. Capes, in particular, is one that I think is imminently suitable to this discussion. Capes is super-simple in play, although hard to describe.

I'll set aside for the moment the idea that playing/using the rest of the 3e rules is "simple". I'm not sure I buy your line of thinking here. 1) If no one ever casts Fireball is the game simpler than if we do? I'm not sure that it is. I don't think American Football is more or less simple...

Depends on who you ask (see long discussion in Wikipedia article on emergent phenomenon). I tend to fall into the camp of thinking along the lines of "a thousand things doing something is inherently more complex than one of them doing something." Although, thinking about it too much rapidly...

Seems contradictory to me...I mean "emergence" is usually defined as something like "complex behavior exhibiting from multiple actors following simple rules". Going the other direction doesn't make much sense to me.

I haven't had declarations phases in quite some time. I ran a session of a game called Old School Hack that uses them to determine initiative order....and I think that is something I might try to work out for 5e. Just eliminate the initiative roll entirely. Start of each round, folks declare...

Not having seen the rules....the description doesn't make it sound like much of an rpg. However, it does sound like a good time, at least amongst a suitably nerdy group. I am definitely intrigued. Do I want a Labyrinth rpg? Not particularly. I find that Fate actually answers most of my rpg...

I'd agree with both Blue and Flexor the Mighty!. I mean, when I was young, I got into game complexity a lot. But I think it was barking up the wrong tree from the goals of play for which I come to an rpg. I'm perfectly happy to play a complicated war or battle game like SFB, even. I think...

Facetiously: I would guess two factors: a) new jerk GMs are constantly being created b) old jerk GMs never quit Not so facetiously, a GM being a jerk is something that tends to stick with people. We just don't like letting it go. So, even if a new GM is only a jerk through inexperience, we...

I gotta figure if you don't go IGOUGO, then you've got to work out some sort of WEGO system where everyone declares their intentions for the round (perhaps a recording nightmare) and then everything gets resolved at once....now that's completely doable, but it clashes pretty hard with the...

erm...have you heard of the United States? We have companies here that you can literally prove caused cancer and deaths in little children to save a few bucks, but because it couldn't be proved which children got cancer from the company's actions and which ones would have gotten cancer anyway...

For me, most of my answers would really depend on genre. For example, if I were getting into a supers game, I would want to know what era and what the "comics code" for the game would be. Fantasy and Sci-Fi could go in any direction, but I would expect horror or military genres to have a good...

I'm not. If you follow the chain back, you'll note that the comment that got me into this discussion was a general comment about responses to abuse allegations, not this one in particular. I don't have any statistics at hand, but my work puts me in contact with many corporations and gov't...

Well, it wouldn't for a variety reasons. Two of which that spring immediately to mind are contractual agreements with the Screen Actors' Guild, and the (perhaps odd) ways that intellectual property can be owned by your employer. I know many people who can't even work on a potentially profitable...

Even weirder is how much they vary from state to state. However, since at least the 80's, Americans have increasingly become enamored of the idea that our poor beleaguered corporations can't really do anything wrong and after all won't the market sort it out in the end. However, I was...

I follow the Fate groups pretty regularly and I can't say that I've seen very many people talking about published Strands implementations. I've seen a few people talking about their homebrew stuff, but I can't say that I know of any available online.