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Any forged in the dark game. Combat isn’t its own “thing,” but you can escalate to violence (or have violence as a consequence of your actions) that often resolves in a fictional framing and single dice roll. Wanderhome is a game that explicitly contains no violence, apart from one of the most...

I also wish that the "beast form druid" wasn't baked in as much tbh, it actually makes that class a lot harder to reflavor. A bit of a limitation of how closely tied the game is to current D&D tropes I guess. Does make you wonder if it would cause any balance issues to swap Splendor for Sage on...

Right, so what I think DH has done that's pretty clever here is figure out a way to distill down what PBTA's would call "custom moves" into something straightforward to construct for GMs. Like this is just a collection of pretty simply mechanics you could cut down even further, but putting them...

Think of Environments as three things: prep to give you permission and reminders to do thematic stuff that gives life to a scenario, an extra spotlight target to juice fights up (especially solos) and spend fear, and a container for focused rules. If you haven’t yet, go look at the Void playtest...

Look at the Environments in the Void, they’ve got good stuff. The heist in particular for this. Also if you want to escalate just spend a fear and say something cool. spend a fear “You turn around and bump into somebody, and it’s your ex! What flashes through your head in that instant before...

Players highlighted the Negotiation rules tonight, I love that they give a victory; they got really creative with free-form skills; and went ahead and cut their wins at 4 Interest. Also the Radenwights are a lot of fun to run, so mobile compared to the Goblins we were facing in the Tomb. Plus...

Trophy: Dark plays off horror game rules where if you try and face off against monsters it’s a losing proposition.

Ah, same way they reused most of the Crystal Shard stuff in Rime of the Frostmaiden. Edit: I'm sure there will be some shout outs to BG3 events in the book, for those that matters to.

The Murder in Baldur’s Gate module has a lot of excellent city stuff for the 5e historical transition.

This looks a lot like the daggerheart collector's edition style, love that sort of big bold color contrast and stylized tapestry-like / in-world mosaic type shapes. I have enough weird nostalgic fondness for the realms of my childhood I'll probably grab em to use with some other system, haha.

As an aside, I think you might say that urban fantasy a la Peter Grant etc romanticizes the idea of a time when (western?) humanity believed more widely in mystical things. They’re literally about taking the rational everyday mundane modern life and injecting magic back into it.

And also has some fascinating ideas about magic and demons that I’m totally tearing off for my Tuesday urban fantasy game.

We had a player duck out due to a medical issue last night, but one guy who has a ~50m drive was already on his way. Thankfully this game scales just fine down to 2 players, and we had a great session of reaching the Big City and starting to make inquiries towards the cult-activity they'd...

Empathy is the ability to perceive and understand the feelings of others. Empathic-altruism is the act of helping others because you understand that they're suffering. Empathy is correlated with pro-social behaviors because one part of that is understanding how others are affected by what you...

Actually, that tends not to be true? Empathy is about understanding somebody else's internal state and tends to be correlated with pro-social behavior; some studies suggest that the more power and status somebody has the less empathetic they are while those from lower social strata have...

Doesnt the 2024 DMG have verbiage literally about this and similar stupid BS? Just crib from that as a general "Power Recovery abilities trigger when facing a foe while in initiative. Don't be stupid."

Guess I'll just keep using Owlbear Rodeo for now then!

How'd you find that? That's fascinating, I was expecting you to go with the design or combat here and not scene framing! To me, the "continuous way" is far more gamey then scene framing techniques that narrative games have been emphasizing for a while; continuous style play is a very D&D-ism...

I definitely see most canon Settings of Despair as per OP not having a ton of space for PCs to fundamentally alter the path the place is on. At best you might hope to escape back to somewhere better or a temporary improvement of the status quo. Some examples that come to mind are Blade's Doskvol...

Whoa, definitely missed this when I was running a game of it haha. I don't think the context is quite the same as the latter which is more about how you want to cheer for characters by giving them opportunities to struggle? One interesting bit we'll get to later regarding characters is that...