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Pushing/taking devil's bargain is much better used on effect under this system, yeah. Although, benefits of pushing yourself for a card with 0D is immense -- it turns going down in cards to staying neutral. I suppose it's different from normal card game economy, where you probably don't have...

Oh wow I don't remember writing this post. Insomnia, huh.

There's an interesting GDC talk about "pink noise" randomness in boardgames where it's supposed that randomness where the result is mostly predictable, but sometimes generates very impactful outliers "feels" nice for the players, and that seems empirically true -- there's a reason people adore...

Sure. No model is going to be free of some weird cases. I debated whether to include the tangent on verisimilitude, because ultimately it's secondary to all the real-life logistic benefits of HP system.

What it says on the tin. The inherent issue I see with dicerolls is that they generate randomness after the fact, and, combined with consequences for failing the roll, it makes rolling low stats a bad idea. A Cutter with 3 Skirmish and 0 Consort is going to avoid ever rolling for Consort...

I just don't find magic industrial revolution to be appealing. I'd very much rather run a game in actual historical industrial revolution. "What if technology was magic" for me works as a strong visual aesthetics, but that's completely moot when there's no visuals. Like, say, in a tabletop RPG...

I find Dungeon World combat to be sleep-inducing. Just like I felt my eyes glaze over when listening to fight scenes in Corum audiobooks. They are just... not super fun? The only time I enjoy PbtA-style combat is when I'm playing with sword nerds and we can circlejerk about different techniques...

Yeah, 100%, it's great even beyond just logistics of tabletop play. David Sirlin puts it quite nicely: You can still secure a win at 1 HP, so combat is tense till the very end. Can't do that with ten billion debuffs from wounds, so combat is kind of over the moment a single hit lands.

I think it works for Masks (and the original Apocalypse World), as it has other stuff to do, and fight scenes tend to be brief (and not actually about fighting anyway) Like, the crux of the Masks is relationships: beefs, friendships, rivalries or romance between characters and their journey of...

As someone who made one (Swords under the Sun) and is playing/running Grimwild right now: I think they inherently suck. D&D benefits a lot from having a separate combat minigame, because combat is fun. Brewing encounters is fun. Bashing together enemy statblocks is fun. Figuring out a strong...

Hell yeah! Me too! I mean, D&D rapier can only thrust, while our world rapiers very much can cut, so it must be an estoc with beefed up hand protection Although for what it's worth, our modern taxonomy of swords is mostly anachronistic, and people would totally call a long thrusting sword with...

So after a few years of running a lot of games with different variations of wounds system, I can say only one thing: I hate them. Hate-hate-hate them. It doesn't matter how cool, interesting, engaging, realistic or flavorful your mechanic is, if it's annoying to actually use at the table, and...

Right! I know I was missing something! Sorcery points can be spent on casting a melee attack cantrip as a bonus action, with main action being freed for spells. And since you have virtually infinite spell slots, you both smite and cast. Yeah, now I remember. I don't think that's a splashing...

As a designer, I don't see a problem in splashing. Sorcadin is fun! Coffeelock is kind of neat, but whatever. I haven't played Lockadin (and am not sure how it works? Doesn't warlock already have access to smites? I must be missing something) but I imagine it's pretty fun too. Sure, they are...

I think multiclassing works mostly fine, the main issue is that non-casters don't have a uhhh bus to connect them. Paladin/Sorcerer, or Paladin/Warlock, or Warlock/Sorcerer work so nicely because they all rely on spell slots, and advancing in either of your classes benefits the other too. In...

Conceptually, I'm not a big fan of "HP as luck". It makes little sense to me, especially in games where randomness (Actual Luck) is already a big thing. Generally, I think a game should provide multiple orthogonal ways to represent the result of an attack, with bodily harm being just one of them.

Another self-defeating part of the game is... combat! There's so many options and so little restrictions in combat that it's practically impossible to deny both the monsters and the players actions. It feelsbad when you take your turn and nothing happens, and it's bad when it feelsbad, right...

Re: aesthetics Torches, just like ancient tombs full of traps, aren't aesthetics of fantasy. Corum Jhaslen Irsei didn't muck around forgotten tombs with a torch in his hand, looking out for pressure plates. You know who did? Indiana Jones. Lara Croft. Nathan Drake. Torches and dungeons aren't...

I quite like random encounters, and I find great joy in making tables to generate them. As an unsolicited advice: you should use different dice for different tables, say, d8 for a type of an undead warrior, d6 for its weapon and d4 for its armor -- that way you can roll them all at once to get...

Sure, but there is another team in basketball. There's no Team Monsters in D&D, so you can only feasibly compare players to each other. I guess parties can be compared, but that becomes a logistical nightmare. And without a clear definition of what victory means (be it beating another team, or...