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The trouble with being an ordinary person in an extraordinary situation is that one has a disturbing tendency to die an extraordinary death...

I won't argue that playing D&D 1e and playing Fate feel very different! I was a little dubious of Fate myself before playing it. All I can say is, it WORKS! It works really, really well. It makes dramatic story beats just kind of happen, without major effort on anyone's part. (Though time...

Huh. Fate, which is my go-to example, doesn't exactly force things to go wrong for the characters. It's more that bad die-rolls are inevitable in the long run, in which case one must either "succeed at a cost" or else take one's lumps. Of course, Compels can bring about bad situations, but in...

All of those are important to me. My group loves worldbuilding! But we also love character development and dramatic plots. (My longest-running Fate character changed every one of his aspects except his high concept, some of them multiple times. My current one has already changed two.) A...

Perhaps we can boil our differences down to this: You want to emulate reality. I want to emulate stories. Does that sound about right? (Incidentally, I also grew up with 1e as my formative RPG experience, so that can't be the whole story.)

Speaking for myself, I find that knowing undramatic death isn't a possibility very freeing. I recall playing in a game years ago based on the Arabian Nights. We were playing True20 - which can be quite lethal - but the GM (@Quickleaf) assured us that, much like the source material, sudden...

There has got to be some disconnect here, because for the life of me I don't see how these sentences, and even clauses, lead to each other. How does "the PCs won't die" equate to "the players succeed"? Surely it's possible for the party to live, yet utterly fail in their objectives? How does...

"Their" consent? I assume you mean the player's consent. In Fate, one can definitely have long-lasting, detrimental effects happen to one's character - Severe Consequences take quite a while to get rid of, and there's an optional rule to have them permanently alter the character that suffers...

I've got life already; it's not what I'm looking for in a game. More generally, I'm a little curious why "no character death" is being conflated by some with "the characters always succeed". The two are not the same!

"Consolation prize: Found his ring?" This was a really short session, as the GM had to leave early. But Marco made a start on crafting a crystal to let Ludovico switch between his two forms of sorcery; and Ludovico made some progress on tracking down his erstwhile brother Asim. The trail...

Consolation prize: Found his ring?

I assume you're referring to 4e? My experience with it is nearly nil, so I'm not sure what you're referring to.

In Fate, it is virtually impossible for your character to die without your consent. That doesn't mean there's nothing at stake! Your goals can be foiled, you can be captured, you can receive wounds that last over many sessions, and so forth. Why does death have to be on the table to make a...

I think the increasing tendency to abstract away exact counts of supplies (which I thoroughly approve of) is part and parcel of the increasing tendency to separate character from player (which I mostly, but not entirely, approve of). In the old days, a puzzle was there for the players, not so...

Congrats on getting Kenneth Hite on board! "By your powers combined!"

Scum & Villainy suits the game to a T. Follow immediately intrigues me, even if I wouldn't buy one of Ben Robbins' games sight unseen. Honestly, Dungeons & Dragons isn't bad at all. Just what it says on the tin. As someone else said, the double 'L' in Traveller is weirdly evocative.

Okay! That's the end of the first arc. Is anyone interesting in seeing more? I still have a small backlog into the next one.

New Scene: Back in the Game! Interrupt! [Back to using Mythic. I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish inside the wards, but not of what precisely happens after.] Random Event: Divide/Death. [Well, that's certainly ominous.] Q(Unsure): Is a sudden suspicion of mine...

As an author friend of mine likes to say, a page of Star Maker is like a novel for anyone else. Stapledon's writing was not the greatest, but he's pretty much unparalleled for sheer inventiveness! EDIT: I will say that John C. Wright's Eschaton Sequence, though longer, is on a similarly...

By the way, when is the next backer survey coming out?