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I own Mothership but haven't played it yet. Looks good. A lot of people seem to like it. Someone gifted me a copy of Death in Space and it seems... Fine? Looks like it's trying to be Mörk Borg but with spaceships. Not sure how it plays. Alien is one I expected to like but it didn't do much for...

You make yourself sound like a stage performer, not a participant. I think (and know, based on decades of experience) that roleplaying is fundamentally a game of imagination and the interplay between multiple people at the table. The rest is just set dressing. That doesn't mean that you don't...

It's more about what this signifies culturally.

Huh? If you want to read a book, read a book. Bluntly: you're doing it wrong. There's no way you should be doing so much prep. Roleplaying isn't 'improv' in the theatrical sense, but if everyone is just following a script, you're just doing amateur theatre. Play requires intersecting actors and...

Another one of these threads, huh? I guess if you don't find existing D&D adventures, art, and adventure-generating tools dull and generic enough, then sure, run them through an LLM until any unique and interesting qualities have been sanded away. The thing about artificial intelligence, is...

Yeah, that's a really good blog series.

I completely reject this analogy. In my experience, this attitude leads to exhaustion for the DM and boredom for everyone else. Players have, at the very least, responsibility for playing their characters. This gets back to my original complaint: either the DM runs everything, or the players...

Huh? Don't players also have an interest in having fun? Don't they have opinions about what is desirable? Don't they have any desire for agency, challenge, or creative input? I think the problem here is that you see 'the fun' as a thing that the DM delivers to the players, like giving a sermon...

Since this has turned into a general design advice thread: follow these dicta exactly. (1) Ignore what randos on the internet tell you. 90% of advice is unhelpful (mine is in that other 10%, obviously). (2) Get to a scrappy playable prototype as quickly as possible, and play it. Don't just...

There are two different occasions for fudging that we need to disentangle. The first, which you've mentioned, is papering over cracks in the rules. The better solution is for the group to change the rules to something that suits them. I'd also suggest that discretionary rules like random...

Wait, there are people who roleplay without talking to each other? Or even writing messages?

I'd use that as an example of what not to do! Likewise wikipedia. Yes yes yes to reading Apocalypse World for inspiration. Get a load of this: AW is often presented as this new and weird species of game, but in a lot of ways, it's just training wheels for roleplaying in general.

What if I want my character to fail or die, even when the GM wants them to live or succeed? What if I want failure to sting? Conversely, what if I try to do something that will throw the game off the rails (e.g. kill the DM's favourite NPC), and they fudge the dice to prevent it? My concern...

It's a fair call. Personally, I don't care whether D&D caters to my preferences. I don't like the kind of influence stuff like the (frankly, toxic) advice in the new DMG will have on RPG culture in general, though. It's also sad to see people who keep going back to WotC even though D&D clearly...

This is going to sound cynical, but: writing summaries like this (or like Umbran suggests above) requires understanding of, and honesty about, how different playstyles work, plus a willingness to support them. For example: 2024 is really doubling down on pre-written story arcs and railroading...

[screaming incoherently]

I've actually seen that film, and I enjoyed that fight. One big scary weapon and one mean stabby weapon seems like the way to go.

Reject swords. Return to polearms. And, for a backup weapon, take a shortsword -- very popular with the sort of people who carried polearms IRL, and probably for good reason.

If a game doesn't work for you aesthetically, it doesn't work for you aesthetically. I'm still not really seeing fundamental differences in how agency works among these games, aside from small cases like go aggro (AW, as a rule, gives agency to the character who is the victim of whatever is...

OK, now I get it. I'm not sure that I follow this. If you look at D&D, the way things are supposed to go is: player says what their character does -> DM calls for a roll -> DM narrates what happens. In AW, it's something like: player says what their character does -> someone (probably the MC)...