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Agreed. I'm not saying you should make it a 10-hour a week hobby or anything, but I'll break out Ironsworn in solo mode for 2-3 hours once a quarter or so on a random Sunday afternoon. And I'd bet anyone on this forum that a similar 2-3 hours of solo Ironsworn is guaranteed to put a smile on...

Like @Umbran above, my position on illusionism is that it's unavoidable. It is, as stated, literally impossible for a GM to place every possible known "thing" in its exact correct "frame of existence" in its exact "timeline of action". The very second a GM "extrapolates" something from...

You've just described the absolute heart of play in my experiences with Ironsworn. Though the GM does ultimately hold final say, the overall attitude is exceptionally collaborative, with the intent of including other players' inclusions/suggestions in the broader picture, and that if at all...

So the story now / narrativist play with which I am most familiar using Ironsworn, there is actually significant crossover between the improv / spontaneous authoring as you describe. There is a strong current of "instant discovery", or discovery in the moment, as fiction is authored through...

There's absolutely no reason D&D needs its core rules split across 3 books. The "core 3" paradigm could easily be compacted to the "core 1" with some decent editing and reduction of monsters and spells in the core. Especially since you're going to publish 4 or 5 new monster manuals and spell...

Literally the only RPG system that should be allowed to use "Alliterative noun 1 | Ampersand | Alliterative noun 2" as its title is D&D. All others are poseurs and worthy of disdain for unoriginal naming.

Whereas my equally unpopular opinion is the exact opposite --- fantasy settings had better have a clear, overwhelmingly salient "internal causal basis" to include anything BUT humans in the setting. Racial heritages are 1) a boring way for designers to move tedious trait bonuses around "for...

I am likewise interested in the link. It certainly resonates with my experience with trad/D&D+adjacent gaming. To a degree it's kind of pointing to another unpopular opinion percolating in my head, which is that narrativist games generally should do even more to separate themselves from...

There are perspectives on roleplaying generally that are nearly impossible to fully conceive without abandoning D&D as your primary game of choice. But it's less about abandoning the system as it is about abandoning the ethos/mindset. There's a reason that "players on a power fantasy trip" /...

I mean, I knew it would be an unpopular opinion.🙃 (points to signpost on first thread). I recognize now that the tone didn't come off quite in the flippant, tongue-in-cheek manner it was intended. (Was going for "two dudes in a coffee shop debating positions they don't really hold, but are...

-The RPG hobby generally would be better off if everything White Wolf ever published instantly vanished from existence and no one could remember that it had ever existed. (Except for that one guy in the movie Yesterday who was also the only one who could remember the Beatles) -As above, only...

QFT.

Absolutely correct. Life would be much better if everyone on planet earth understood that this method of date rendering 1) completely disambiguates dates across cultures (in Europe, most people represent DD/MM/YY, whereas in North America it's MM/DD/YY), and 2) writing dates this way...

- Of tabletop roleplaying games on the market in 2023 that have sold at least $10,000 worth of product in the last 12 months*, Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition is the absolute worst product in that market. (*have to caveat this so people don't throw things out like "But what about...

Why no love for Ironsworn: Starforged? It's one of the best RPG products released in the past 15 years, let alone the past 12 months.

Umm . . . I'm not sure I'd accept this claim at face value. More along the lines of, "D&D can possibly handle playstyles other than gamist dungeoncrawling if enough of the subsystems are revamped, and the GM is willing to train himself/herself in highly specific techniques and principles, but...

Thanks for this. This clarifies very much what I was trying to convey. It's not about avoiding "interesting" and "intriguing" content as a GM. Interesting and intriguing are better than the alternatives! It's about ensuring that introducing that content doesn't have the knock on effects...

Another thought --- in some regard, my idea above seems counter-intuitive to the goal of Story Now. "Wait, so you want the fiction to be transparent and relevant to player action declarations, but you're defining it as late as possible. How does that work?" By holding the point of "truth...

To follow along with @chaochou --- in Story Now play as a GM, it's generally best to only define something as "true" within the fiction as late as possible. It's totally okay to have ideas in your head of what could be true. Ideas, rumors, possibilities, fronts, NPC goals, etc. But it's...

Right? Which was the point of my response to Maxperson. "Trad" GM-ing sensibilities didn't magically disappear in 1991 when V:tM was published . . . and didn't disappear in 2000 when D&D 3.0 was published . . . and didn't disappear in 2003 when GURPS 4e was published . . . and didn't disappear...