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So I'm running an organized play. Season One ended with an epic three-table game where PCs barely clutched a bitter victory. The town is in ruins, hundreds are dead, even more are wounded, and winter is approaching. How would you approach making long-term town-wide survival rules? What systems...

I think the biggest impact of 3 actions/reactions per turn doesn't really have anything to do with the shape of a turn itself: it's the fact that being outnumbered becomes much, much worse than it'd otherwise be. In Elder Scrolls it's just mathematically impossible to defend against more than...

Not really. There are plenty of situations where it's beneficial to use all your actions, and plenty of situations where leaving two or even three reactions is a good idea.

Another nice thing to do is to shift all the character personal quest (if you even have them) tracking and progression onto the players -- there's 50+ players in our campaign with 20 of them playing more than once a week, so it's just not feasible for the GMs to keep track of them all. The way...

Elder Scrolls RPG has a really cool three action point system, where any unused actions turn into reactions Spent all of your actions during your turn? No attacks of opportunity (or, more importantly, defense) for you!

I'm almost exclusively running games in our local RPG club. I enjoy having a big pool of players, and I obviously ain't going to anyone's house or inviting anyone in mine. Structuring the game in a way to make it possible for characters to switch is a must -- whether it's by making each session...

For more comparisons, I think the following two scenarios are mostly the same in essence, just achieved through different means Blades in the Dark Player: I want to Tinker with this lock to open it GM: sure, there's no one around so it's Controlled position; you'll get it open and nothing...

I'm so so so tired of people on the internet parroting about how you shouldn't prepare absolutely anything in AW. That's not supported by the text, hell, the game even explicitly tells you to exploit your prep! But maybe we both are crazy.

Sure, but there are ways to take a lot of control out of GMs hands when it comes to fights. Random encounters is a bit one. I rolled 2d6 goblins and I'm going to use them to the fullest extent. Another important thing is making it possible to lose but not die. Objectives beyond "kill everyone"...

Sure. I don't mind part of the process being an asymmetrical board game. If anything, "whole lot of talking and exploration, and half an hour bombastic combat encounter" seems to be pretty much the default way to structure a session — and I don't see why the bombastic combat encounter can't be...

I'm not terribly familiar with Shadowrun (I've played some 5th edition and the computer games), but yes, this sounds about right. It doesn't strike me as if subsequent entries intended the players to familiarize themselves with the previous ones, which I think is the main criterion.

Right! It completely slipped my mind, but yes it fills the bill 100%

I'd want at least some pre-memorization. If not tying specific slots to specific spells, then at least to magic schools.

I think a big enjoyment of generic or generic-ish systems is tuning them with a filer and finding your own meaning, and it being half a game and unplayable out of the box is half the point. Kind of like how they sell Warhammer minis in grey plastic parts, because half the fun is solitary painting.

Re: wizards Ideally-ideally, I think wizards are aesthetically at their best as complete non-combatants, relying on rituals and strong magicks to do stuff from their towers, but that's for obvious reasons a pipe dream in dnd.

I too want to cast spells. Big, flashy, reality bending spells that have a capacity to turn the tides and completely reshape the dire situation. Not to sling a lot of weak spells all day long.

75k words written to be read by people other than the author is a serious task. 75k words worth of disparate notes not intended for anyone other than the writer, often describing spurious things that would be edited out from a published text, is pretty trivial to write, especially over several...

Well, I spent a couple years doing other stuff, trying other things and most importantly tempering the authoritative way I talk. Turns out being in a position of unquestionable authority for a decade messes with one's ability to communicate in other contexts, who would've thought

I do believe there is a lot of improvement in the play process to be had with clear wincons and resource limits, both for the players and the GM. GM should be out to get ya! Exploit every weakness, punish every blunder, that makes the game eleftryfing! If she can't actively try to obliterate...

I don't plan much (and when I do, rarely stick to it), but I do enjoy preparing for games: doing research, designing monsters, figuring out special environment rules that would mesh well with the system, making random tables, painting landscapes and npc portraits, etc