Search results

I have to say, I'm not terribly interested in a low magic setting, but I really love this kind of resource discussion, and the general ethos behind all of it. This whole thread is so nostalgic for the 3e glory days, gathering a bunch of different mechanics from a variety of sources and piercing...

It's probably a bit too big in scope, but I'm planning to run this with a bunch of holiday themed characters in December: The North Pole Under Siege

Obviously I don't have enough context to really discuss this, but my intuition is that I would find the resource management puzzle I usually see described in Torchbearer more compelling outside of a TTRPG context, and frankly it's the sort of situation I'd rather not handle with dice-rolling; I...

No worries. I'm usually coming at these things from a board gaming perspective. I've said a few times that I think the important differentiator between a classic game and a TTRPG really comes down to victory conditions; my view is that role-playing is best deployed as a means to establish...

I don't think that's a generally accepted definition of a roguelike. In fact, roguelikes with that trait are likely to be called arcade-style or sometimes score chasers.

It's actually extremely D&D in the worst possible way: the paladin in that scene is a high level NPC, not a member of the party.

Always. My usual feeling is that everyone is perfectly happy to sacrifice the G on the altar of the TTRP, and rarely willing to acknowledge what that costs. I am not especially familiar with Torchbearer, outside of a few reports of play. I'd probably go with decaying board state, sure. I've...

I think it's a little more complicated, precisely because TTRPGs don't have pre-specified victory/loss conditions. A lot of what you're pointing out here are a combination of players internalizing a set of loss conditions that aren't necessarily discussed (intra-party conflict is a failure...

I think there's some connection to the immersion concept there still, in that both are about trying to avoid some kind of dissonance. Setting aside whatever immersion means, to both try to accomplish a goal using limited resources and to simultaneously have abilities that you use in service of a...

That last bit doesn't follow. That there exists a fixed board state at the beginning of a game, even a game with significantly less available actions than most TTRPGs and even a game with a fixed victory condition, does not require the intervening play be scripted. We tend to call games that...

It is literally a class feature henchman. Last update, 10 different kinds of companion to choose from.

There's a substitution that happens a lot here where the goal of play and the player's goal get conflated. The goal of play in a game of Netrunner is to navigate a series of difficult choices and evaluate the participant's grasp of risk assessment in novel board states. The player's goal is to...

I had the unique experience of reading the continuation fantasy series, Shadow Moon, Shadow Dawn and Shadow Star with no knowledge of the film. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found them very confusing, but I have vaguely fond memories, which is apparently not the norm. I don't think any further...

I've come to believe there's a hierarchy of how strong a negative reaction you're likely to get from a mechanic that isn't mapped that way from the set of people who care about it. In relative order of importance: Temporal mapping: if the action doesn't map forward in time to the character's...

Excellent! Perhaps if I throw a physical copy at my players, they'll consider multiclassing.

I think we talked about it elsewhere, but I feel like there's daylight between "change the rules to produce the desired fiction" and "create fiction/make decisions with intentional disregard of the rules." I'm distrustful of any system that punishes people for trying to understand or use it; if...

I think we can go a step further to an even more excluded middle: skill DCs tied to player facing abilities instead of external challenges. Once you can hit the "climb 1 handed at full speed" DC, that might influence the kinds of challenges that ought be framed for you, but it's not a property...

Imagine if DCs weren't something you, the GM, put down like locks/roadblocks and instead were the percentage chance of activation for specific player abilities. We generally don't consider parties without access to specific spells unable to engage.

@TwoSix explained it pretty well. It's a mistake to focus on a given die roll; I don't care if I succeed on a climb check, but if my character's goal is getting into that fortified zoo to rescue an awakened giraffe, what is the best set of actions I can declare to get that result? Ideally, the...

That puts me in kind of a different Alexandrian article. 3e's mistake was failure to extrapolate far enough above that well defined baseline, but the ultimate lesson seems to have been "wow we wasted a lot of time making that all make sense." I want more design cycles calibrating jump checks...