Search results

  1. Thomas Shey

    D&D General Mapping: How Do You Do It?

    The simple answer to that is "No, it appears something odd happened along the way." Being coy there only matters if you consider mapping itself part of the gameplay loop. I have two answers to this. 1. In many cases, I just don't care. Since the players getting lost or disoriented isn't an...
  2. Thomas Shey

    What makes setting lore "actually matter" to the players?

    Bluntly? Inform the mechanics in some fashion. Nothing else will matter to some of them, and even for those who it can matter to, on the whole if it doesn't impact the mechanics, its prone to losing. That's the point, here. As I've noted before, some people are here just to fight things...
  3. Thomas Shey

    D&D General Mapping: How Do You Do It?

    The problem, again, is the ambiguity of "mapping" here. I think the GM having a map is part of that, but I don't see why the players doing so manually rather than just being assumed to have have a pretty good idea as the GM reveals it has to be important.
  4. Thomas Shey

    What was your 1st RPG and what was your favourite campaign about or best memory?

    My first was definitely OD&D; a lot of really good early games I was involved in were in Champions or RuneQuest, but my memory is such that specifics are long gone (these were likely 40 or more years ago). The favority campaign I ran was a hybrid Mekton II/Cyberpunk 2020 game that was a...
  5. Thomas Shey

    What makes setting lore "actually matter" to the players?

    I'd say there's no general answer for that. What will catch one person's attention will be of no concern to another. And there are some people who aren't going to really care about the setting lore in general.
  6. Thomas Shey

    General video game discussion

    That was more or less what happened with most of the ones I acquired recently. I had them on my wishlist, but I just couldn't justify buying them with my backlog. And then their prices dropped (in at least one case, to a quarter of its normal value, one a game of at least moderate price), and...
  7. Thomas Shey

    What gets me playing Draw Steel and not Pathfinder 2e?

    There's a few that do more odd things (there's more than six after all), but they do at least have the advantage there's standardization so you don't have the "What one-off penalty does this particular spell effect/monster special ability do?"
  8. Thomas Shey

    Twitter Alternatives and Social Media Changes

    There were some virtues to be found there at one time, but not enough to convince me to make the jump in, and then, well, what happened happened.
  9. Thomas Shey

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    If you don't think what the game does here matters as much to many people as what the world avowedly says should happen, I'm afraid I have to disabuse you. There's a constant refrain in many places how out of sync a set of game elements is to the game fiction for the world involved. I have...
  10. Thomas Shey

    D&D General Mapping: How Do You Do It?

    Only reason I mentioned it was that at least some of the people who mandate it seem to think it should be done universally.
  11. Thomas Shey

    General video game discussion

    In my case its a case of my not liking accumulating more backlog. I know this is a piker compared to some, but I've got something like ten games that I've not done more than go "That looks cool! I have to get to that."
  12. Thomas Shey

    What gets me playing Draw Steel and not Pathfinder 2e?

    Sure. I'm in a PF2e game right now, and no one would expect the GM to do all the bookkeeping. Admittedly, we're using Hero Lab Online which provides relatively easy management, but there's nothing in Conditions that a note pad couldn't handle. And for those who suggest that's too onerous...
  13. Thomas Shey

    Twitter Alternatives and Social Media Changes

    Looking at the new version of the poll, I was never a Twitter user in the first place.
  14. Thomas Shey

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    I agree starting with the higher levels. As to the other--that works okay for a character or two, but when it applies to a whole six character group it looks--odd--usually.
  15. Thomas Shey

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    And it would help if that then doesn't seem at odds with the default advancement rate.
  16. Thomas Shey

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    Which was particularly funny since once you read the game and looked at the various racial groups, an awful lot of them looked like variant elves.
  17. Thomas Shey

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    Yes, but it still looks odd when all the "veterans of the recent war" in the PC party are level 1 when your game has a range of levels from 1 to 20 and the experience system doesn't take forever to level. You could pull this off to a limited degree in OD&D because no one mostly took levels...
  18. Thomas Shey

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    Of course the usual problem regarding that concept in D&D is the resistance to starting characters above first level. You can potentially make it work in systems or varients with slow and compressed advancement, but in most D&D-alikes it looks odd that those veterans would all still be first level.
  19. Thomas Shey

    What gets me playing Draw Steel and not Pathfinder 2e?

    I've got to say I'd find the expectation I track all conditions at both ends something I'd not want to do. If players want to play in a game with some crunch, handling the parts applying to their characters is their job, not mine. This, of course, is a common thing now, but I've never taken...
  20. Thomas Shey

    D&D General Mapping: How Do You Do It?

    It can properly emulate the potential confusion and mistakes in position that can happen in-game, but I'm not sure that's such a universal benefit to justify it.
Top