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I'd say you have cause and effect backwards. Doing something that added to the GM overhead inherently has a price and that price is (sometimes among other things) that it adds to the GM overhead. But most things that got into the GM's budget section had a reason and therefore don't have zero...

Once something has become a clock then it is canon. Before it appears on the table it's still draft. Not actually canon but still your working notes that you shouldn't change without good reason. Then what's the point of the text? It won't cover everything but the point of the text is to try to...

No you don't need all the prep. It's just useful. If you look at actors preparing for a role in a TV series they don't get all (or even many) of the scripts before auditioning or shooting the first season and surprise reveals are a thing. This doesn't stop them preparing what they think is the...

One of the things people miss about Apocalypse World is just how good the pacing is. Vincent Baker's background is as a tabletop roleplayer - but Meguey Baker's is as a freeform roleplayer and has been (at least since Dogs in the Vineyard) his first and most important playtester when she's not...

The thing about hit points is that getting hit by something sharp or heavy moving fast is, in most ttrpg settings, the single most common event that in the real world would be likely to have long term consequences. Therefore how you take and recover from damage is one of the first two baseline...

A lot of it is a reaction to bad nineties adventure paths. There has always been a tendency for adventure paths to be read more than they have to be played. And in order to make sure the story was a good one and would actually work out in the game a lot of 90s adventure paths (from both TSR and...

I'm of the opinion firstly that all classes should have "Adventuring" added to their name; an academic wizard master of portals should have a very different casting profile to an adventuring wizard. I'm also in favour of non-mandatory racial classes as a world building conceit. An Elf class is...

This was what you wrote: There is no sense in which it is true. Playbook characters are every bit as free to attempt things not covered by their playbook but possible to ordinary or slightly extraordinary people as class based ones. And if you meant about trying to do not general things but...

I start with an inciting incident and about three long term threats of which at least two should be closely connected to the PCs. Am I talking about the campaign or the session? Both. And then improvise from a seeded start. For maps and especially dungeons I tend to like to use existing places...

Meanwhile the Playbook is who you are right now including your social situation. And some of the best climactic moments in Apocalypse World come from changing your playbook. One textbook example in this would be the Chopper (gang boss) settling down a little and becoming a Hardholder...

This lets me circle back to a previous claim on the thread. Agency is not a new argument or goal. It's simply that the post-Forge method to enable agency ("Play to find out what happens") is different to the trad one; the trad one was a sandbox rather than a railroad with a disinterested (but...

This is complete and utter nonsense to the point it undermines any credibility you have. As the iconic versions I'll compare D&D 5e and Apocalypse World here. Both a class based character and a playbook based character can accomplish a wide range of things under the generic rules of the game...

And playbooks are just the modern incarnation of classes.

Not even close. What you've got is basically GURPS with all it's glorious crunchy excesses. I refer you to this answer for what I consider the hallmarks

Indeed not every game tries to force players into a narrow theme - but literally every game there ever was or will be does have a set of themes it supports and it hinders many others outside that set. And in my experience a good modern game like Apocalypse World or Daggerheart by the time it...

I haven't played the modern Tomb Raider games so I'm going to switch to James Bond as I know that subject better. And if a James Bond game can only do James Bond things then so what? James Bond things include everything from stealth to seduction to sledding down a mountain on a cello case while...

This is what I see as a huge difference between the Forge games of the 2000s and the post-Forge games of the 2010s (I count both Fate and Burning Wheel as Forge-adjacent; they used the Forge as an indy RPG incubator and publisher as it was intended but as games were doing their own things and...

Spock was neither terribly spooky nor a psion. He wasn't all about the psionics with it being his primary thing. So it wasn't his class; he used his psionics what? Every ten episodes or so. That's at best feat level. Not even subclass level; he wasn't remotely on the psionic level of a...

This in no way means they aren't offshoots of the Quori. Or in any way out of line with an Aberrant Mind. You just need "an alien influence" and "rejects the corruptions of the Quori" doesn't mean it's not there.