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There are many different types of games. There are also many ways to define difficulty. If characters can achieve any reasonable goal and the question is not if they will succeed, but is they are willing to accept the cost and consequences - is the game difficult, or not? Or if a well build...

There are several playstyles that I like. I usually try to mix - like, playing a campaign in one mode, and sometimes one-shots in other. One style is character-driven, exploratory and intense: BBCBBACAC6 6 - Game should be driven by players' ideas and their characters' backgrounds, not by a...

I recently finished a Mistborn Adventure Game campaign. After that, we played a little Star Wars (using Fate Core), Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and Exalted (using Cortex Plus). I'm preparing to run a mini-campaign (8-10 sessions) in Exalted and later a fantasy campaign with strong focus on myth...

My preferences are not strong and I can live with any approach other than avoiding pronouns (it makes the text quite unnatural and grating). In things I write I alternate between male and female pronouns. In some cases, I treat the GM as a female and players as males. In others, especially when...

I agree with Style, Complexity and Character Mechanics classifications. They are a little simplified, but each classification system is. Your categories here are clear and, I think, useful for people trying to choose a game. But the Realism axis is something that will only bring confusion...

I play Fate quite a lot, but have never seen compels used in a railroady fashion. There are two main reasons, in my experience: 1. Compels can be refused. Unless they are out of FP, players may just not accept the compel. Because of this, it's a perfect tool to model various emotional and...

I voted "Very serious", but I'm not completely sure if that's what I am. I've been a player and a game master for about 18 years. RPGs are definitely my favorite hobby, but there are some more important things in my life nowadays. I play about once every two weeks, when I can - in practice...

It's not about "dealbreakers" for me. It's just that buying a new edition of D&D is not the default option for me. Has never been, honestly. It's on the game and its authors to sell me on it. So it is the other way around. It's not that Next has something I find unacceptable. It just doesn't...

Probably not. There are too many fun games available for $10-$20 to spend money on a game where the core books cost several times that - and we already know that some important parts of 5e will only come later in splats. So, unless Next gets overwhelmingly good reviews after it's released...

Nothing against psionics by itself. The flavor of inherent mind powers is ok, and the system it used in 3.x and 4e was fun and balanced. But it's jarring for me when it exists together with magic and aven more jarring is described as something significantly different. If a setting had...

I'm nearly sure I won't buy Next. It's too rules-heavy for a narrative, fiction-driven play (and Fate Core or MHR are much better for that). It's too unbalanced for a gamist, challenge-focused play (and D&D4 is much better for that). And it keeps too many D&D sacred cows that disrupt setting...

One of the best and most emotionally intensive sessions I played was a Vampire: the Masquerade game. While it had parts that can be classified as "adventure", they really only served to frame the important part: our interactions with a girl we abducted and with our prince who wanted her changed...

I'm not sure what the OP really asks about. Is it how the D&D should change to achieve some abstract perfection? To be played by more people? Or how it should change for me to consider spending money on it? I'm nearly sure that to get me to but the game (at the price level I expect for...

I played and ran many player-driven games. Currently I rarely if ever run pre-plotted games. Some tools that support this playstyle are: 1. Collaborative setting creation, used in several games based on Fate or Apocalypse World. By basing various NPCs and setting elements on players' ideas...

Fate Core is definitely at the top of my list. Among games that can be used for campaigns, I also really like Nobilis, Mistborn Adventure Game and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. There are also games that I love but that I never used for a campaign and I'm not going to. Dogs in the Vineyard, Dungeon...

haakon1: You see, I also believe that real-world morality is absolute. And I don't agree with something you listed as obvious. I think it shows perfectly why bringing real-world morality into a game is not a good idea. If one of us ran a game and based the in-setting absolute morality on their...

You can't force anybody to respect their alignment. There is no way to make your players behave as they should without ruining the fun of the game for everybody involved. Punishing them won't change anything, other than possibly ruining some friendships. But for some reason the players chose...

I just don't, in most of games I run, arbitrarily decide what is good and what is evil. I determine what my NPCs think about it, players are free to decide what they think. There are consequences of choices, but no external, absolute judgement on who's right and who's wrong. Because of that...

The way I understand these terms, they describe two separate things that sometimes coincide, but definitely don't have to. Powergaming is mostly about motivation. It's about getting satisfaction from the feeling of being invincible, of steamrolling the opposition, of always getting your way. Of...

I love exploring different value and belief systems. Playing characters with moral systems significantly different from my own is, for me, one of the biggest sources of fun in RPGs. That's why I really like games such as Dogs in the Vineyard. In general, I'm not that interested in history and I...