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Honestly it needs more content. There's Hope & Fear due next year but I wish they#d publish faster.

The GM who fails to fulfill player needs plays solo. Serve is only appropriate for paid DMs.

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It's better to end early and leave everyone wanting more than to outstay your welcome. And D&D IME errs on the other side. You're going slightly faster than I am (one level every three sessions or so) but not a lot; my plan is to end at level 8 so they are in tier 4 but not max level. And I've...

If Force Points aren't meta because The Force is a thing in the universe then Fate Points aren't meta in a whole lot of settings because fate is a thing.

Key word "Little". Not "huge sim setting". Computers (certainly pre-Chat GPT) can not do the tighter conversational games adapting to PC actions. What they can do is the giant old school systems and worlds that are all mapped out in detail. I'm saying that it's a specific style that's fading...

On the other hand you have a lot of expertise with RPG stuff - and I'm guessing from your username that you're in your late 40s. You've sunk a lot of time into one and not the other. I do not believe this to be the case on the generation that was able to make their own worlds in Minecraft and...

And what I'm pointing out is that the level filled out more or less doesn't matter. The PCs are going to be always poking at roughly the same level (individual character level) and there is no way for the source material to present enough for that unless you use an extremely constrained...

The vast majority of people don't play tabletop RPGs. So yes. In my experience close to half of players are interested in GMing and how many of those potential GMs make at least occasional GMs is down to a wide range of factors. You don't need a majority or even a majority of potential players -...

Gygaxian GMing is not low prep by modern standards. But dungeons are openly artificial and constrained environments where the PCs options are limited, but any sort of weirdness is fine. They can even be generated procedurally by the 1e DMG. It's a lot easier to do entertainingly than anything...

Apocalypse World is canonically aimed at a dozen sessions from memory. It plays fast and hard. Most PbtA games are similar length. I tend to break PbtA games into "classic player character Vs enemy or environment" and "player characters Vs themselves". Monster of the Week is classic PvE. You...

This isn't quite a contradiction. Publishing is something you do instead of playing at the tabletop - and game design isn't world building. Here I'd say responsibility isn't sole responsibility. The group, the game, and the current GM all have varying amounts of responsibility - and the...

And if "I only GM because no one else wants to" that reflects either selfishness or failure. Selfishness because you are either through accident or design hoarding all the fun GMing, or failure to develop other people as GMs. It is however easier to develop GMs in systems where the GM is not...

I think that it is a real phenomenon but also a fading one precisely because making video games and mods scratches that itch far better than making RPG settings. I don't think it was that uncommon among GMs in the 70s and 80s but I would be incredibly surprised to see it in one under 30

Absolutely. The game is what happens at the table with all the players (minus holidays, illness, etc.). Design and prep is strictly a support function. And if design & prep is really your thing this is the wrong hobby. Make a video game (in the broader sense including e.g. Skyrim mods). It will...

Interesting because to me BIG metaplot does arguably more to freeze a setting and thereby make it boring than merely having a lot of detail about the current present but less knowledge about the future. (That said I find the Realms not terribly dynamic compared to the actually snapshotted in...

Modern is not necessarily better. Modern is necessarily fresher and modern games come with subjects that haven't been chewed to death (and there's always someone willing to defend ideas that are IMO outright wrong like descending AC being as good as ascending). However older games generally...

Does the Daggerheart Ghost transformation card count? (I've two games where players have ended up as ghosts). For that matter does the BitD equivalent or Monsterhearts playbook?

This is where we run into something I'm pretty sure that WoD did that is more clearly seen with Paizo's adventure paths. I do not believe that the audience consuming WoD metaplot were playing them all any more than I believe that the subscribers to Paizo's APs are running or playing them all...

A lot of them are not. And when more than about three are not anyone like me needs to read the lot of them to know which aren't. "Don't have to be referenced that often" != never. They are a confusing mess that need referencing and their very obscureness and opacity leads me to feeling I don't...