Search results

I think the lore "actually matters" when the participants can engage with it outside of the game. It might be through setting the game in an established IP with pages upon pages of wikis, be it Elder Scrolls or Warhammer or Magic, it might be through running the same world for a long time and...

This is actually great, I always wondered why the hell only so few posts are displayed per page!

I'm not gonna read 45 pages of this thread, but: I think the hardest part of GMing is that GM is assumed to also take on all the managerial duties and play mommy to players. You are the only one who read the book, you are the one to help players create characters, you are the one having to...

I think player skill at navigating fiction (like, say, doing things that sensibly can help to find a trap) runs into a fundamental issue: only one party can ever be punished for making a mistake. A player makes a mistake and misjudges a situation => player gets screwed GM makes a mistake and...

Speaking of RPGs, tend to be greatly improved by explicit win conditions and scoring. Like, the same game with an explicit way to win flows like ten billion times better and there's not much reason not to have them.

I do disagree heavily with "aren't really games but activities" idea, and especially with the tone it's often presented. It is, frankly, puzzling to me. Of course they are games! And all games are activities! What's funnier is that even that sort of inflated sense of uniqueness isn't unique to...

I used to be a big proponent of tight focused design of every part of the experience: from rules to setting to presentation to curating the play group (you would be amazed at benefits being a cult leader provides wrt running games) Running a 50 player game changed my perspective a lot. There's...

Balance would certainly shift, but I doubt it would be broken beyond repair. I would expect to have to buff healing and other protection effects a lot to enable surviving into late game as a viable strategy. ...and find a way to speed up combat significantly in IRL time.

Flavor-wise, it works pretty nicely: the cleric gets invigorated by lasting divine connection; a sorcerer draws more and more power from the latent magic around them; a wizard plans ahead and assembles the bigger spells piece by piece. It is a different flavor from what currently exists in D&D...

The thing I'm workshopping right now is to give additional effects for slots already spent, so like Dimension door You teleport to a location within range. You arrive at exactly the spot desired. It can be a place you can see, one you can visualize, or one you can describe by stating distance...

I apologize for not reading 18 pages of discussion, but: I think the most straightforward approach is to use ship as the "base" characters resupply and talk to NPCs on, while most events of the session happen on various islands they can visit. Generally, having some sort of a hub location with...

So. In card games, there's this Aggro vs Control contrast. It is omnipresent: even between two most aggressive monored decks, one of them is gonna be faster, and even if they are equal, one of them is gonna have first turn advantage. In basic terms, one side wants to drag the fight out, while...

Tends to happen even sooner if you are a woman...

(I apologize, I accidentally clicked "Post reply" before I finished my though lmao) I'm running a big 50+ player organized play (not D&D, but D&D-esque, soo I think it's relevant here), so the subject of many different players with wildly varying preferences finding their place in the same...

I don't really enjoy dnd and don't play it much haha, basically only when one of my friends' campaigns is several players down and they need a ringer But the situation where I don't really have anything worthwhile to do is a reasonably common scenario in all games, I just learned how to live...

Sure, but circumstantial bonuses are a pretty bad and clumsy way to handle the situation in most cases. It generally does very little to make the experience deeper. A good rule of thumb, I think, is: implicit > explicit. Like, "you gain +2 to hit when attacking an enemy together with an ally"...

As someone who doesn't enjoy D&D combat (I'm more than fine with tactical minigames in general, I just find dnd combat loop to be sleep-inducing), I'm perfectly fine with just going for a smoke break during a combat scene. I think rather than building experience around engaging everyone, it's...