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I just feel that the loop of "take job - complete job - take next job" is not very sandboxy and rather passive. That's waiting for adventures to come to the players instead of exercising proactive agency and establishing goals. I see it as an emergency tool to bridge moments when the players...

Since the original release of Star Wars, Space Scoundrels has basically become a subgenre of Space Opera in itself. And it's apparently quite popular in space adventure RPGs as well. Traveller, Stars Without Number, Coriolis, and Scum and Villainy all have it as one of their main play modes, and...

One poison mechanic that I came up with but never used yet is to have attacks that do poison do additional damage every round until you make a saving throw against poison. For simplicity, the poison damage roll is the same as the normal attack damage. "1d6 + poison" means you take 1d6 normal...

The GM's mistake was to ask for a saving throw before every player had declared to eat a fruit or not. If it's a tasteless poison, it's going to take a minute or two to kick in. (Probably even much longer than that.)

I think "fun" is the wrong thing to ask for. Keeping count of your stocks and subtracting what is being consumed is probably never going to be a exciting or entertaining. But I think what resource management can do is to make other parts of the game a lot more exciting and interesting. The fact...

Sounds like a Dungeons & Dragons problem, and a couple of other games. But there are plenty of games that have character creation that goes much faster with only a few choices to be made.

I don't buy things at random. I only buy games if I think they might work better for a type of campaign that I want to run than the options I already have. In some rare cases the premise of a game alone makes me curious about a type of campaign I had not considered before, like Apocalypse World...

I think with DM's Guild, this is kind of encouraged, though.

That's why there is both ® and ™. Something that's always been surprising me is that "trade dress" also falls under Trademark protection, and the majority of unofficial AD&D adventures that people release go to great length to make the covers look like TSR products, but somehow they've always...

- Fast character creation (under 15 minutes). This is kind of needed to realistically have an actual threat that characters can die if they pick the wrong fights and fight poorly. - Fast combat. Combat should answer who lives or dies (or gets badly injured) so we can go to the next scene. It...

I think that's actually the most realistic thing in all of the Star Wars worldbuilding. I think all the basics have already been covered: Planet destroying super weapons. Reviving dead villains. The first character of a species defines the whole species' culture. One time mentions of...

With these options, clearly Game. A well designed systems has structures and procedures by which simply following the gameplay loop organically creates story. Character is something that forms along the way as the players develop patterns in how they react to things encountered in the gameplay...

Barbarians of Lemuria and Apocalypse World are pretty great names. Short enough to be snappy, but they also communicate the whole mission statement of the game.

That was 40 years ago. Resource management was abandoned in the mid-80s in favor of scripted set-piece scenes that form a coherent pre-written story. The situation that players throw out all their best abilities at the start of a fight and then go through less and less powerful and interesting...

Crap, now I wonder if there's a band or a game named Grimfrost yet. :D

The climate in England is just not sufficiently Frostbitten to be truly Blasphemous

I'm not sure if there was a distinctively British style to TSR UK products, or if it was just personal preference of their editor. (How big could that team have actually been?) I also only now connected the dots that Games Workshop is British and that Games Workshop makes Warhammer 40k, and...

I assume this is going to be just a new edition for whatever RPG they've been producing for the last forty years.

Yes, a Dark Sun sandbox campaign is funny. I also think that of all the D&D settings, Athas is particularly well set up for survival sandbox games. I've recently been getting back into playing a lot of Kenshi, a post-post-apocalyptic Sword Punk sandbox survival base building RPG videogame. You...

I think the original release format of one primary source with general setting information and additional regional books that go into detail about the locations in different areas was a pretty good one. You can get the main campaign set and the sourcebook for whatever region you want to play in...