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Yup, I'm in this boat also. The all-encompassing generic games -- Savage Worlds, d20, GURPS, Heroes, etc -- they contain too much that is not useful to my game or actively unhelpful. The only generic system I really run now is FATE -- mostly because it's so minimal you really need a world-book...

That is not the premise of this thread. If you re-read it, they specifically say that the GM gives up any hint of control including "using die rolls or negotiation to craft play"

Examples of GM's saying no to the player's request to sneak into the wizard's tower: "You are spotted. Roll initiative" "The wizard has an alarm spell. You fail to sneak in" "The wizard has a lookout familiar with the aspect watchful and so spots you" "Roll skill vs the lookout familiar's skill...

Since traditional games have the basic principle that if there is any doubt as to the result of an action, you roll dice, this doesn't seem much of a difference -- and because the GM sets the difficulty, the GM can use that effectively to say yes or no. So if rolls can override a player's...

I have run a few games of DramaSystem, in which most of the fun lies in the interactions between players. It occurs to me that for anything procedural, I have always just said yes, exactly the way this thread suggests. As a GM, I set up scenes, and there are rule for how the players interact and...

Current AIs are not good enough to do this in general. They could do a lot of the flavor text part of GMing, but since they have no concept of facts or truthfulness, they do a poor job at running even somewhat complex rules. You would need to add a rules-engine agent to make it all reasonable...

In retrospect, I think I was also too generous with letting players know the difficulty of tests. I ran Dracula Dossier (Night's Black Agents) after TOC ETERNAL LIES and was much more careful, only letting players know the difficulty of challenges in vague terms. It was definitely more...

I played in a fantastic 2-year Supernatural campaign, and although we never had issues with the actual rules, the book was terribly organized and it was very hard to work things out. Overall, I think the game was great becasue of the GM and players. I'd say the rules were OK, but unless you...

I've played and run a lot of horror, and it's been hard to dislodge Call of Cthulhu from the top of the list. Here are some other systems I've run horror in: D&D / 13th Age / Pathfinder: You need to add your own mechanics -- and the nature of high fantasy can make it hard to feel that your...

I have a feeling that by "traditional RPGs" you are defining it in terms of combat-focused games -- basically D&D and direct descendants. Would you include older games like Pendragon, Toon, Call of Cthulhu, Traveler, Runequest and Top Secret as "traditional games", or are you really just...

Agree. The way I would do this is to make the rewards for the "selfless act" a meta-reward. So when playing in-character, the character is being selfless. But the player can be selfish, looking for the cool meta reward. So the "rod of seven parts" is a problem because it's an in-character...

yeah, some tables can play slow - but an hour per round is way slower than most. My experience is that an average combat took about an hour; faster at low levels, maybe up to 75 minutes at epic. I would say we both have anecdotal experience, but if you read the LFR adventures, they are pretty...

Yeah. I've done a lot of stage direction and it can be hard when your mind goes meta when watching a film or a play and starts thinking "that scene could have been cut and the time better spent on character development" or thinking about how the pacing could be improved or wondering why the...

On the other hand, if you over-write, it can lead to you making something that is meant to be general feel specific; or focusing readers on particular cases rather than the general rule. Plus it just makes things hard to remember. I’d suggest that if a rule actually needs a lot of explanation...

I'm going to qualify your statement a bit -- but then mostly agree with you! There are a number of decision points that a journey allows: Before taking the journey, they may decide to search out for rumors on the journey that will aid them (but will take from their very limited set of potential...

Each group needs to work out what style of game they are playing; specifically are they playing a game where rules are more important than simulation and narrative or not. When discussing on the internet it’s very hard to have consensus if your priorities are different AND you don’t acknowledge...

It's not good for crypto, definitely. That application requires that you cannot predict future occurrences from reviewing previous ones. My back-of-envelope calculations say that if you observe 3000 d20 rolls from these functions, you could start predicting the future -- not as a human observer...

If we are talking about introducing modern firearms into medieval warfare, then sure it would have a huge impact, but historically, the early ones had very little impact. It took centuries for them to become ascendant: These early guns (about 1380) were slow to reload, had limited range, and...

Bit of an aside this, but the current evidence is that when AIs learn from data generated by AIs, they do not get better -- in fact, they get worse. It's a major concern for the big AI companies -- as more AI content leaks into the world, it is becoming harder and harder to learn from new data...

This is an important point. A lot of the discussion in this thread is assuming that if things are equal (equal access, equal stats, etc.) then the system is fair. But fairness is not the same as equality: I've run and played a lot of Living campaigns, where you get a mix of people and parties...