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Unpopular cell phone opinion: 95% of all Seinfeld episode premises become ridiculous and fall apart if you retcon that key scene participants had a cell phone in their pocket.

Absolutely agree about Ironsworn. Ironsworn has fantastic advice, visuals, and charts for considering how to run a game. I'd say probably 70% of that advice is portable across systems, and the "Oracles" in Ironsworn are AWESOME for generating ideas as a GM. And seriously, the original...

10 minutes of playing GURPS in a superhero setting would end the appeal instantly, trust me. Modeling super powers through a numeric input/output structure like the GURPS engine will give you the least superhero like gameplay possible. It will not resemble anything remotely like an actual...

If by "more people" you mean "literally no one," then I would agree with you. 😉

QFT. It wouldn't be such a problem if the rest of a player "action turn" could resolve faster such that 1-second rounds weren't so punitive for, you know, actually having fun. It's a design decision that has MASSIVE downstream effects on basically everything combat related (so, you know, like...

I could never quite figure out if it was the group / GMs who ran GURPS or the system itself, but my experience was identical. It's the only system where I broke my own rule of not looking on my phone / surfing the internet while playing, because the GMs could never figure out what the hell they...

So I'm one of the few in the "hate" category. GURPS to me is a weird amalgamation of 97 individual design choices that, when looked at discretely seem to make sense, and even appear to be superior to alternatives in the same RPG design space (trad / discrete action resolution / emphasis on...

It helped a great deal that I had been exposed to Dungeon World and especially Ironsworn before getting into it. I was much more easily able to come at the FFG narrative dice system from a more open minded place and accept it on its own merits. It was instantly apparent that FFG has a similar...

The greatest missed opportunity of eps. 7-9 was to not explore themes relating to the idea of, "Okay great, we've created the New Republic. Now how do we avoid becoming the thing we had to destroy to get here?"

Media-related unpopular opinion: Inception is without question the most overrated movie released since the turn of the millennium. The exceptional quality of the actors involved and the overall "coolness" of the general concept greatly cloud the fact that the last 40% of the film is basically...

Which does beg the question . . . . Which is the cooler time travel device + mentor? DeLorean + Christopher Lloyd / Doc Brown, or Phone Booth + George Carlin / Rufus?

Here's a classic "narrative" mechanic embedded right within a fairly solidly "trad" / discrete action resolution mechanical framework system. From Savage Worlds Adventurer Edition, page 52: Edge Name: Scavenger Requirements: Novice tier (can be taken at character creation), must also have...

That's a pretty good summary, actually.

@Bill Zebub , think of it this way --- "Story Now" means that the system supports ENUM mechanics in such a way as to allow players to focus and purposefully inject character-centric concerns into the flow of play, in some cases while specifically limiting GM veto to do so.

Roleplaying games whose main rules / mechanics typically involve a player proposing and then resolving a single, discrete character action and the immediate result of that action. "Discrete Action Resolution Mechanics", or DARM for short. As opposed to External Narrative Universe Mechanics, or...

The thing that makes it work is to remember that it's not just "improv", i.e., not just trying to come up with weird edge case-y stuff ("Oh, uh, I guess your gun jams . . . again. Or, err, um, you trip over your feet . . . again") that applies to a discrete, individual action. That would get...

100%. I resisted going to FFG Star Wars for 6 or 7 years because of just how irksome the model was of putting 40% identical content in all 3 "core" rules for EotE, AoE, and FaD. Like, "Why am I paying a premium for the same rules???? This is ridiculous!" But I liked the idea enough of the...

So I have to disagree with the premise that FFG Star Wars just "doesn't capture the right feel for Star Wars." This may not be true for everything, but the combat side of things is quite well done for a "Star Wars" feel. In the past, I believe @pemerton once described D&D 4e combat as having a...

I've generally found your takes in the past to be interesting and generally reasoned. But I gotta say, this statement, especially in regards to Story Now games not actually generating a story and validating GM railroading, rings false at every experiential level I've had with these systems...

So umm . . . you haven't checked out Interface Zero 2.0 for Savage Worlds yet? I'm not exaggerating when I say it's easily one of the top 5, possibly top 3 RPG hardcovers I've ever owned. I freaking LOVE IZ 2.0. It's an amazing sourcebook for Savage Worlds. And it's absolutely gorgeous cover...