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As a D&D player in the first example, I'd be willing to entertain an explanation along the lines of "the intruder has a high intelligence, understood what the party was doing when they made camp, and knows the parameters of the spell." While it's still DM fiat, it sounds like there's enough...

We handwave it. When I was much younger, my group had just convinced my wife to start playing with us. One night we started a fight just as it was her turn to put the toddler to bed. Welp, the guy we thought we were fighting turned out to be a mind flayer, and let's just say my wife learned...

I'm afraid a postal service is one of those things, like vaccines and labor unions, that have worked for so long that people have forgotten how important they are.

A couple of points- Most contracts have happy endings. A lot of contractual language is an attempt to identify where things might go wrong because it has happened to one of the parties in the past. Word processing compounds this effect because it's easy to cut and paste. A lot of the flowery...

In the early days of the pandemic I commissioned a battlemap that I think cost $80. A few years ago I was quoted a figure of ~$200 for a map of 1960s Berlin with certain places I wanted noted. I don't think either estimate is too high.

Written by Hite & Ryder-Hanrahan according to this blurb - which should be another sign of my consternation. Stuff by either of them is an instabuy for me.

I've come round to approaching a game by asking "what do the PCs do in it?" which might get pretty close to your definition of "mode." Recent adds for a Terraforming Mars Kickstarter drive this home for me. I love the board game, but the things I picture a PC doing in the setting do not excite...

Dreaming Cities is rather old, but it had four sample settings in it.

We should be free to comment on the merits of a particular system, even if no one is going to be swayed by them.

There is also a recent nonfiction book called Cunning folk : life in the era of practical magic. It goes through the court records of England in this time for incidents involving magic. Ars Magica will also have stuff about hedge wizadry.

These are the most comprehensive build-a-character-with-points games for sure. Someone who wants a holistic look at game design should check one of them out.

That's relying on heavily on the hope that the designers are consistent! I'd say that, to reframe it a bit, more rules provide more predictability. They give players a better idea of what their characters are capable of, and how often they might succeed at it. Of course, that also depends on...

The ability to read a table and respond to what it needs at a given time.

Do you require knowing how to practice a martial art to be a monk? Ars Magica's rules are complex to allow you to propose any magical effect. A lot of that heavy lifting is done for you in games with spell lists (which AM also has).

Two youngsters in their 40s, 3 in their 50s, one who is 60.

I like the Luck mechanic. It's another dwindling resource like Sanity, but the player has more control over its use. However, the same reason it exists is the same reason the Push mechanic does: the more times you have to roll for a success, the more the game will derail when unlikely results...

I was in an adventure set there. It's torn down - to spite Nazis, always a good motive - but for several years Spandau prison had a single occupant, Rudolf Hess. It was probably just random chance, but the idea of a single inmate in a prison is always an interesting one. Plus, although it was...

Be warned, some of those annotations are small in the physical book. One anecdote after I had started my second run - the authors signed a GenCon program for one of my players. Gareth slipped in a new clue: look at the church scenes and count the number of parishioners.

I have a similar experience. I ran it twice, deliberately not repeating the same elements. Both games were great: ending in two different climaxes (another positive feature being a definite end to a campaign). I have even played in a campaign that was derailed by covid, and was not privy to any...

In Delta Green - which is a percentile blackjack system - criticals are any doubles. Successes if you roll under your skill, failures over. That's a bit of a wrinkle in a blackjack system, and requires buy in as to the frequency of them happening. But it is pretty simple and elegant.