Search results

Team Fortress 2 has a very evocative "spy-tech" setting, where retrofuturistic doomsday doodads are hidden in rustic rural environments. Importantly, it also comes pre-packaged with distinct character archetypes -- suave jamesbondian Spy; relatable down-to-earth dumbass Scout, mad scientsit...

Foolishness deserves punishment. By magicianing some get out of jail free card out of a backside hat, one allows their own foolishness to fester.

I recently caught myself that I have a favorite description technique, especially in an opening scene or a new location: describe in excruciating details all the small irrelevant things, and then just casually drop a bombshell with the most important part, like The sky above Tsurugi Industries...

They all are artistic decisions, and I'm charging $50 per face per session for my artistic decisions. If a player doesn't want that, there's like ten other GMs in the same community, probably three times more in all others, and chances are, they'll have to deal with way less diva behaviour at...

Full post in question:

Soooo... GM, and by extension, the villain, made a mistake and players set out to rightfully punish this mistake, and that didn't work for... Reasons? Where's the game in this process?

Does it? Must I also seek council when picking the system, when introducing NPCs or when designing a new random table? Do players even want to concern themselves with design decisions, or do they want to just play the game?

I personally just make up rules and don't really consult with the players about the changes, merely inform them. I often have to modify them in the middle of a campaign because quite often it turns out that the initial idea conceived in a vacuum is... Bad. Who would've thought. And I can...

"What is and isn't Real Role-playing" sounds like an argument about semantics to me, and those tend to go nowhere. I don't find a single unbroken continuity to be a defining factor of roleplaying games.

Yes, but it's not only about story. Trying a difficult combat encounter several times until you win by the skin of your teeth is fun. If PCs just respawn as if nothing happened, it enables the GM to punch harder and challenge them more, and enables players to experiment with new strategies and...

I'm not a big fan of alignment specifically, but I think an evocative shorthand that players can latch onto is a good thing, and for the best effect, should be designed (or scavenged from the word of mouth online and offline) by the group (or, let's be realistic, the GM) to suit their wants and...

Sure. I'm operating under the presumption that the group actively likes their current situation and would rather continue playing, and thus "just start a new game" is a bummer outcome even outside the game. Does such immortality "devalue" death and reduces tension? Yes. There are no win-win...

People tend to avoid having to lose progress, so they tend to not want to die. What's even the alternative, really, presuming have a problem with TPKs? Stopping play altogether? Restarting from the beginning, undoing even more progress?

Re: TPKs I think the most straighforward solution is to just "reload" the game instead of ending it. There's no inherent virtue in always keep the narrative going in one smooth line, and people tend to already have an understanding of how it works and how to separate abstract game mechanics...

Does everything have to be a mystery? Yes, performing such a maneuver would be logistically harder. There are no win-win deals. In my opinion, the sacrifice of one specific (but interesting!) possibility is worth increased information bandwith, cutting on time for recapping and redescribing...

Yeah, I think I legitimately lost braincells reading it. There are some common design pitfalls, it's not uncommon to see mechanics that are there but do nothing, it's even less uncommon to see asinine layouting and organization of books (which are, frankly, more important factors than mechanics...

The party at large is taking a risk of having one of its members for the reward of the intel, and both the risk and the reward are present and meaningful regardless of whether characters have means of communication or not. Would scouting be meaningless if characters just had walkie-talkies or...

If you play videogames, I think there's a difference between: actively playing the game (equivalent of, well, being in the scene that is currently being played) passively watching a cutscene (not being in the scene and just watching other people play) And if a cutscene starts, and you only...

Most people do, and I think it's a big reason people at large aren't fond of splitting the party. At least to me, a longer break means that I can just disengage from the game completely, recharge and then return invigorated, but if I have to actively pay attention it's draining, and when...