Search results

Isekai just means portal fantasy essentially (most literal translation is "a different world") and includes reincarnation, planar travel, alternate realities, time travel that actually changes stuff, as well as "trapped in a video game" and so on. It's not inherently bad, it's just like...

Technology limits this a bit, implying electronics or at least mechanical devices. I have a whole bunch of kitchen stuff that's 40+ years old and still in use, but I wouldn't call any of it technology (plates, cutlery, etc.). I think actual technology, it's pretty much going to be the Stanley...

I've played loads of RPGs RAW (certainly no knowing omissions obviously there are known omissions and unknown omissions). I'm surprised that you don't think this happens. Though not as surprised as I was by the title I admit... Will we still be playing 100% un-altered rules 20+ sessions into...

I'd agree with this, though I think one can easily overstate how different that story is for each person. I mean, I don't think that's necessarily true. Because I don't think there's the hard contradiction between player agency and story-like elements in all cases, especially because, as you...

I haven't run it but one of the main reasons I haven't is that I felt like the core rulebook was extremely bare-bones (even as someone familiar with 40K since literally the 1980s). Like, it technically provides you with what you need to start a campaign, but it didn't feel to me like it gave you...

I built a Mass Effect RPG from Cortex - it's an excellent system - quite abstract in some ways but the output felt really on-point, and the players seemed to grasp it instantly (faster than I expected - it's always interesting when that happens). We didn't keep playing past a few sessions...

Maybe, but if you're making sweeping statements about a game and how it went and referring to how others experience the game (which that post did, explicitly), you should definitely say if you were playing a quickstart rather than the full rules.

Keeping it short because off-topic - I think it's always been a major issue but the way the press operated before 24 hour news and the internet, it was generally in their interests to play it off as "funny eccentricity" or euphemise the hell out of it - i.e. "He's a ladies man" (meaning "he...

Yes this. I'm not going to name names but there are a couple of FitD and PtbA games that have really cool concepts and a some good rules but are just also missing rules for stuff that naturally comes up a ton due to the setting/themes, and it's particularly problematic because of the...

I feel like the Marvel and DC takes on this kind of thing have been really, really bad and frankly lazy examples of what you could do here, because pretty much all of them relentlessly and I do mean utterly relentlessly focus on making the heroes/villains very similar to what they are in the...

Yeah exactly. There are so many games which have complexity in completely the wrong places. Often it's not even subjectively wrong as in "I don't want complexity there", it's kind of objectively wrong because the game says "This game is about X" but then they've put a ton of complexity into Y...

Not all dungeon crawlers are alike, though - this one has a lot of NSR-specific conceits. Like, if you baseline say dungeon crawler to anyone but the most NSR/OSR-pilled serious TTRPGhead, they think of something where a party of HEROES (not merely "gimme the money" merc/adventurers) goes into a...

That would totally work, and indeed there are dungeon crawling videogames which have some similar mechanics, but they explicitly called out that they weren't using that approach so I suspect they won't. Which is hard-incompatible with "extract with the treasure whilst avoiding combat" and the...

I definitely think subsystems for very specific situations, ones which can produce interesting and story/setting-relevant results are a fine thing to have. Unfortunately I think a lot of more complex games , including every edition of D&D (4E least) have subsystems which are not at all...

For me, complexity isn't inherently a problem or good thing, it's whether that complexity is justified by creating interesting and engaging results, or whether it just leads to lots of calculation and/or rolling and/or analysis paralysis. In far too many older (pre-2015) RPGs, there's tons of...

That's a very strange account of DH that makes it sound like something pretty weird was going on, where people only got anything done by spending Hope (???), and constantly ran out. Also where the DM spending Fear made the game miserable, which sounds like straightforward bad DMing (the more...

LOL those dice man. I love it and also hate it. How much is that going to cost? It ain't going to be a small amount.

I mean, at least some of these books are heavy and sturdy enough for you to suitably chastise me for my opinions with them!

I think if Haeck saw it that way, he'd have said so. And I don't it was really true, in practice, either - I only played a little in the 1980s, but looking at older dungeon design, people's accounts of adventures from that era, and so on, I don't like "loot half the dungeon, skip any big...

I played three sessions of Achtung! Cthulhu recently, and the headline would be that we didn't think the juice was worth the squeeze. It's a fiddly and rather meta system which has unexciting mechanics, and doesn't have the "cinematic action" it proposes that it is about. That's not to say the...