Search results

I get it, but just like back in the 1980s, I find that "well, what makes sense" in practice involves playing to the referee or the table or the meta rather than to the fiction. I had no problem whatsoever with scary dungeon crawls in 3e D&D and while I have famously or infamously got a lot of...

Nostalgia. I love capturing the vibe of the game back when I was a kid and everything about RPGs felt magical and cool. That's why I often find myself designing OSR style house rules and revisions and even scenarios for 1e AD&D... even though I have absolutely no intention of ever running a...

Yeah, I don't if I'm weird or not, but my goal is always something like, "If this was a television show, would people be entertained by it?" Or insert "novel" or "movie" or whatever media you think that your game is adaptable too. One of the things that has always bugged me is that while...

The draw steel negotiation model is a formalization of how I've often conduct a negotiation over the years going back till at least the early 1990s. I like that model of encounter design and it's nice even from my perspective to see that encounter design laid out in a formal manner because it...

I would think that wanting PvP to happen is the more uncommon preference, in that probably one of the most common table agreements is no PvP and it almost never has come up for me post high school (and when it did it was with a young guy fresh out of college who thought it would be funny to...

I don't think I denied such a scene was gameable, or that it couldn't exist in an RPG framework. What I argued is a good deal more subtle than that. First, that the heavier the rules structure for that scene was, the less likely it was to actually produce gripping and exciting dialogue because...

Aspects are actually one of my favorite things about it. Also the discussion of Fronts and how to organize and plan for long term play is pretty good. The fundamental problem is the core mechanics don't fit with its desire to be a game that produces a series of dramatic situations that are...

FATE is my favorite whipping boy when I want to talk about badly designed systems that fail to achieve their declared objective. It goes up there next to GURPS and the VtM Storyteller system.

The latest 'cool thing' is games that you can play solo, which I think very much fits with the antithesis of the sort of preferences I've been describing.

I do think it is the current "hotness", the thing all the "cool kids" and all the designers admire the most at the moment. It is hard to have a conversation about game design where it doesn't come up some. I'm not even sure I like the game but I do admire the design and the innovations and...

The topic is why we have separate systems for social, exploration, combat, and other pillars of play, and why also we prefer (or do not prefer) separate systems. I have asserted that the design decision to use separate systems is not arbitrary because the things being simulated have different...

It's hard. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I frequently find myself sympathizing with B.A. from "Knights of the Dinner Table". I want to run cinematic, highly literary, RP heavy, emotionally affecting games. I want to run games that are high art. My ideal table would...

No, it's not. It's some objective observations combined with one actual preference. And the fact that it is in fact not just a pile of feelings and preferences is I think also demonstrated by the fact you make no attempt to demonstrate that the claims I made were erroneous or subjective. The...

This is the received wisdom of modern gaming that I've been listening to now for like 25 years. And all the attempts to actually act on those two statements have completely failed. And just like how "hit points are bad" was the talk of the 1980s, and I eventually realized just how a wrong that...

I like them. Cramming all the different rules into a single unified system often just ignores that the things being simulated are wildly different in character. Applying your combat rules to social interactions is a big sign the designer is more into formalism and rules as read, rather than...

Clear the bridge with flamethrower.

I don't know. Since GURPS is intended to be a pick your own toolbox sort of game, the most you could say is that you were playing with a certain set of books. But even then you'd probably having to specify which optional rules from those books you were playing. I gave up at GURPS after a...

I don't see how that follows. A few definitions to understand what I am thinking. a) All tables that are playing by the RAW will in the ideal be using the same procedures of play. b) If a person familiar with one procedure of play goes to a different table where a different procedure of play...

Often the problem with a rule doesn't show up until you've tried to apply it in several situations. But sometimes the problem with a rule is completely obvious. For me one of the obvious ones I could bring up was RAW CoC character creation. The core rules don't allow you to create every...

There is a difference, but deliberately excluding or choosing not to use certain rules is itself a house rule. Similarly, if the system provides a large number of optional rules, specifying the list of which optional rules are in force is also a house rule.