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There are other FRPGs that use a "fade away"-style rule. For instance, ere is the Torchbearer 2e rule for an absent player (from the Scholar's Guide, p 25): If your group plays an ongoing game and a player misses a session, they get a little boost to help them catch up when they come back...

Have you been reading my old posts?

I've got the Dragon Archive - I think I know where the CDs are, but all the PDFs are on a hard drive too. But Dragon had the most influence on me in the mid 80s (issues from around about 90 to about 110 or thereabouts). I remember the Gygax article on demi-human level limits; Tables and Tables...

To add a bit to what's been posted: I see Dark Sun as D&D's version of sword-and-planet fantasy. The overall vibe is S&S, but the substantial foregrounding of psionics adds a sci-fi twist. Sorcerer-Kings, their Templar servitors, etc can (in my view) be portrayed as if they just stepped out of...

There can also be more to it than the quality of performance. When watching a film or a theatrical performance, I don't have the opportunity to intervene and diffuse whatever tension might be rising. The performance may generate pathos, or may incline towards bathos, but either way I have to...

Agreed! One technique that I use as GM - and it's hardly revolutionary - is to ask each player how their PC came to be in <the situation>. I'll work with them to help, if useful/necessary. This can help establish a bit more backstory, and also connections between the PCs.

Crooks gather in back rooms, sure. But they're generally already known to one another.

To me, it seems that a lot of RPGers identify resemblances based on features like names, appearances, and the like, rather than by reference to theme, the way events are framed and resolved, etc.

I don't know sci-fi literature well enough to know how many sci-fi stories start with the PCs as mercenary-types who are hired in a starport dive. I don't think I've ever seen it in a sci-fi film, but maybe I've forgotten some example of it. I don't know how important inns are to the...

Keep on the Borderlands is an example of a module where the intended play is pawn stance, and the starting point is low(ish) stakes. But the players are still given the full set-up from the outset: they know that they are at the Keep to defeat the humanoids of the Caves. Acquiring further...

The only meeting in an inn, in LotR, is Strider meeting the Hobbits. And that is not a "quest-giver" looking for doughty adventurers. The Hobbits are already well-known to one another, and friends/relatives/staff. Gandalf is well-known to them. And they meet Gimli, Legolas and Boromir at the...

This seems like a description of what I called "pantomime play", and/or what @TwoSix has called "thespian play: everyone knows where it's heading - namely, to the players having their PCs take up the GM's proffered opportunity for adventure - but it is played out, rather than everyone just...

When I started a Traveller game in 2017, I took the advice of one of the early White Dwarf Traveller authors - I think Andy Slack - and had each player roll up two PCs. For some of the players this lead to a main/secondary approach, although for one or two of them both PCs have been "mains"...

Another thought on the low-stakes start. There is a certain interpretation of/approach to the idea that "the player controls the PC, the GM controls everything else" according to which the GM deciding to start things at the adventure site or in situ is the GM improperly playing the PC. I mean...

My observation is that there is a widespread preference (though not universal - see eg @TwoSix above!) to start play in a low stakes environment - like a tavern or the city gates in D&D, or a starport in Traveller - and then have a situation with actual stakes emerge "organically" from there, by...

Why not just start the session with the PCs at the home of the wizard? Or even have them start at or near the entrance to the caves, and tell them what they've been told (perhaps by a wizard!) about what's in the caves. Yes, having "quest-givers" turn up and recruit the PCs as they sit in a...

Book 1 (1981), p 10: Survival: Each term of service involves some danger; during the term, a character must successfully throw his service's survival number to avoid death in the line of duty. Each service also has DMs which may apply. Failure to successfully achieve the survival throw results...

I think that's the 1981 version, rather than the 1977 version.

Yes, the speculative trade system is pretty efficient. But there's also the rolls to determine available cargoes (from Book 2 (1977), p 7): The referee should determine all worlds accessible to the starship (depending on jump number), and roll (for each such world) a number of dice equal to...

There's a lot I enjoy about RPGing. Most of all, I think it's the situations in the fiction.