Search results

Having played quite a lot of GURPS (although not for years) I'd strongly dispute that GURPS is neutral. First it's a toolkit rather than a complete system; you need to set an awful lot of toggles for any game. Second GURPS always has its grit and its heft; it will always be a bad system for...

I thought I'd quote these two just in order to question the very first statement "In these two statement chaos is by definition undesirable." Why? Why is chaos undesirable rather than something that should be constrained but some is wanted? Your "law of problem-solving" actually demonstrates...

This sounds like a petty critique, but I do not understand the names of your blights - and they seem like they are intended to be a big thing in your system if you list all four on the character sheet. The key point is none of them appear to me to have either associations or mouthfeel. If we...

I thought I'd start by checking the character sheet - and got a response of "No preview is available. File is in owner's trash"

I use orcs as the enemy in the mirror. "We are humans, they are orcs". The differences between humans and orcs are cultural - the orcs are your hereditary enemy either locally or on the other side of the border. Calling them orcs (rather than Hatfields or Spanish or whatever) and making them...

On a complete tangent, this is a misunderstanding. Papal Infallibility only applies under certain extremely limited conditions and is a matter of Catholic theology. It's not entirely certain how many infallible statements have been made - but in the entire history of the Roman Catholic Church...

Nonsense. A good subculture is both part of its parent culture and contrasts with it in ways that help both and prevent either from being a monoculture. For an example here I'm going to talk Warhammer and early Age of Sigmar - and the dawi/dwarfs in particular. Warhammer dwarfs are short...

They also talk like people that shared the most traumatic experience of Tolkien's life (the Battle of the Somme) with him. Negatively characterise but not dehumanise. You're not meant to like orcs - but Mordor and Isengard made the orcs what they were rather than the other way. I'm not arguing...

My alternative is to put orcs in a slightly different niche. Orcs are them. You know, the historical enemy we've been feuding with forever and we're not sure what started it but we're pretty sure it's their fault. And they're different to us - they are green. If the PCs are the McCoys, the orcs...

I've been thinking about why I find Dungeon World so unsatisfying (and about the "Does System Matter" thread), and I've realise that it gives me very little of what I want out of either Dungeons & Dragons or a game Powered By The Apocalypse. It doesn't even come close to either the exploration...

I'm sorry, but @Campbell isn't the one handwaving handwaving here. Knowing when not to use any rules at all is only an essential part of running any RPG where the underlying approach to game design is rules-as-physics-engine. Other paradigms are rules-as-user-interface and...

I brought in Aliens as a joke - intending to imply that the average D&D adventuring party would make good stand-ins for the xenomorphs.

Fair enough and my apologies. Here was mine, commenting on similarity of design intent and of solutions found.

A group of people trapped on a spaceship with murderhobos with magic powers? Reminds me of Aliens more than anything else.

Objection: that was me. And I merely described them as very similar because they come from similar places and do fairly similar things. There are three major differences that mean although similar adventures work it's going way too far to call them basically the same system: The character...

I'm going to only disagree on a technicality here. I'd call 5e intentionally pretty loosely tuned. It's intended to be a game that's driftable and intended to be a game that's never a bad one for anything you'd want to do something you'd use D&D for. The goal is breadth rather than focus.

Which is why I use three important ones. It lets me prioritise multiple important things without all the flaws you outline of narrowing it down to one axis. Yes. Which is why I need more than a simple single-axis scale for the game.

On the other hand I'm a relatively experienced GM who sometimes plays with randos off the internet and has run games for multiple groups because friends have asked me to. It doesn't all "just come down to what works for a given individual/table" so much as picking the right game for the right...

But the time you do that is emphatically not when discussing them on message boards. It's when you've taken the information available in to run this game in specific which includes what the timescale is and who the players will be. And no, your last sentence isn't correct. I, like many on this...

If I were to only use a single axis I would only bother to keep one game on my shelves. I do not. If I were to only use a single axis I would only play or run one game. I do not. And if in real life I were to only use a single axis I would only use one screwdriver in my toolbox and one kitchen...