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Thanks for this recommendation. I've looked at it several times but never actually run it as written. That sounds like a worthwhile exercise.

Definitely, RPGs are a weak point of his system. Do you mean "Getting Lucky" from Game Developer, November 2006? I wasn't familiar with it. I've read that and your essay, but want to take another look at Caillois and reflect a bit further before I respond.

There are a lot of good thoughts in this post. I am intrigued by the idea, if I may rephrase, that "RPGs cannot replicate experiences which are primarily about vertigo". (I like the term vertigo because it fits into Caillois' classification). That seems right to me. There are games that combine...

Tempting. But suppose they are traveling along a river with abundant fresh water. Does it make sense to count water weight? Having a clause like "rations take up 1/5th weight when along fresh water" means division, which I think should be avoided.

Also this was my source for water. It says 2 - 12 L, which works out to 4.4 - 26.4 lb. This was mine for food, which gives about 60-80 lb per month per individual for the Roman army. It is nice to see the numbers you came to worked out to be rather similar.

My impression is that we're past the peak of the AI hype cycle. I don't see as many people trying to use it everywhere and there is a better understanding of the limits and the use cases.

I agree that is the starting point. My question is--how do we do that mechanically? Are the players tracking lbs of food/water, and food/water quality, and activity level, and weather effects? The Wilderness Survival Guide tried to do some of this and ended up being too complex for most players...

For a traditional dungeon crawling system, I feel like the format is basically 'solved' in that there are a set of rules that the majority of systems use with minor adaptation. I mean concepts like: -Characters have classes and levels -Characters have hit points and HD determined by their...

Nice list, which has some I hadn't thought of. My work in progress below. I conceived of it as some kind of 2d4 or 2d5 table but the numbers are off so I'm rethinking that. 1 - Find a person 1: Eliminate (Apocalypse Now) 2: To ask for help (The Force Awakens) 3: To bring them home...

I'm increasingly drawn to that idea. It matches much of the history. The New World explorers were bankrolled by governments. There's Nero's expedition up the Nile. In a more modern context, many shipwrecks were found with funding from Paul Allen. There's room for a d12 table of patrons. The...

Source of the Nile (1978, Ross Maker & David Wesley) is a board game where you play explorers on Africa. Much of the game is about revealing new territory, and you score points for discoveries...but only if you return to port and publish first. If someone makes the same discovery and gets back...

This also worries me and I think it is incumbent on anyone who presents such a system to provide some good examples of other ways to frame expeditions. The easiest way is the Indiana Jones/National Treasure route...some bad people are on expedition to do a bad thing, so the PCs have to do the...

As part of my research into the system I've been looking into Lewis & Clark. They're a recent enough expedition to have good notes and the size (~30-40 people) I'm looking for. There are also reasonable records for the time period which means there is a lot to learn about the economics. I'm...

I'm glad you made this thread, because I've been working on a OSR system that is exactly this. It's been on my mind for a while. I don't have anything final to share but I can share some general thoughts. I think the idea, first of all, is just killer. The literary history of adventure gaming...

Sometimes the state of knowledge is pretty good and they just aren't packaged as drugs for scientific or economic (can't patent natural products) reasons. You can find willow bark, for example, marketed as a pain reliever. It most probably works--it has salicin. Pure salicin passed the trials...

Maybe I'm wrong that it's odd. I've not been to Gencon. I thought about GHC, but didn't for unrelated reasons, and I thought it was weird to charge for both. And some folks in the local area I talked to about it also said it was weird. That's why I have that perception.

Paying for both the ticket and the games is not that common ime and one of the oddities of gameholecon. Glad to hear you had a good time. I have only attended cons in the past few years but have not yet encountered CPM.

How fast? I am learning this right now.

The game has been banned from discussion on several of the big RPG subreddits and so the community has moved elsewhere. It has had a recent, somewhat successful (I think $150k?) Kickstarter for an expansion book. I do wonder if the split around that game contributed to the decline in...