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While it is pretty tongue-in-cheek, seriously: in a week between the previous session and this one, anything other than Super Important Details (tm) will just evaporate from memory, to be replaced with stuff like cat gifs, conversations with friends, work, art projects and anxiety over the...

I would probably say that worldbuilding is a fun pastime in of itself, that is largely separate from the actual process of play, because nothing would break if GM would just... not do it. Players don't have object permanence and forget what you were saying five minutes later anyway, and even if...

While, yeah, nominally you are up against the Dark Lord Of Evil Darkness, in reality you are interacting with his 10th in command. I don't dispute that there are workarounds the fact drastic power level progression necessitates characters "outgrowing" previous threats, this is what they are...

nevermind, I can't read

Competent With Little Change, but Zero to Zero.5, Always Powerful But No Progression and similar options work for me too. I just really dislike vast power level growth. It makes things that I like a lot (like, for example, actually having an antagonist), for all intents and purposes, completely...

Narrative mechanic is a mechanic that is primarily concerned with, well, narrative. Not world simulation, not game balance, narrative. That's, more or less, it.

I adore Fate. While there are many other games I would consider before it, Fate has a unique feature that no other system has: aspects can be anything. Including completely non-diegetic abstractions, that I find to be the best use of aspects by far. If you use aspects to describe who the...

I do think there's a lot of value in explicitly empowering the GM to create deliberately. Not as a reaction to whatever players are saying, not as a simulation of a world, but as a deliberate act of creation. Here's a cool story I want to tell, a combat gauntlet I've designed, whatever. It's not...

I bought myself a beer yesterday.

My first advice would be: there's only so much GM can do. Horror is everyone's job, and if the players don't actively want to be scared, they won't be.

I really enjoyed playing Witchcraft, but I must admit I played in the "GM handles all the rules and I've never even opened the rulebook" mode, so I can't exactly say if I enjoyed it because of the system or because of the GM.

Similarly to other labels like "roguelike" or "thrash metal" or, say, "PbtA", I'd say the best qualifier would be: does the author classify their game as OSR? If yes, it is. If not, it isn't. Otherwise, just like with Berlin Interpretation of roguelikes, you risk codifying extraneous bull###t...

Since I spotted vidyagame talk, here's a classic unpopular opinion: I want shorter games with worse graphics that are made by people who are paid more to work less. Aside from the working conditions, graphical fidelity is in itself, bad for videogames. From the obvious: now, because everything...

I mostly just decide. I tend to run short-ish campaigns, 4-8 sessions, so it's not that big of a commitment. That said, the decision is extra simple for me because I mostly run my own games, so there's not many options to pick.

I would go a step further and say that a heavy dose of metagaming is required for a decent game.

Cool! This "What is Fun?" is a question you have to answer! To yourself. I'd be glad to continue on your example, but I don't know enough about strategy games to not stumble into something I didn't mean on accident. For this, I apologize. Of FPS games, I know a lot. There are things that I (at...

Eh, there are rubicons that can't be crossed back. Characters aren't really people. They are vessels for emotions, first and foremost. Artificial constructs. Making them retread previous ground while retaining continuity cheapens the turning point (that is already cheapened by the lack of...

Another one: essence/cyberpsychosis/whatever are stupid ideas that don't make sense in Cyberpunk. Not even mentioning problematic implications (I have half of my body surgically constructed, am I less of a human?), it removes a ship of Theseus paradox that is important to cyberpunk as a genre...

My unpopular opinion would be: almost every game that features supernatural/sci-fi elements would be straight up better without them. Cowboys, spies, detectives or peaky blinders don't need magic to be interesting, and existence of supernatural only drives attention away from what makes them click.