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When we aren't testing Labyrinthian, we usually swap between DCC and Call of Cthulu, with one shots or two shots here and there if we want to try something new. I wouldn't say there's any real "unsatisfaction" with either one, even if partially despite the new game thats being worked on...

Yeah going back to the MCU reference, Civil War was chock full of cheap seat playing. But it can't really be denied that the individual performances and scriptwriting weren't superb beyond that. Chadwick Boseman was a class act, and the entire sequence with Plus its also a good thing to...

Especially given thats what Shakespeare basically was in his time. Incidentally the reason I think I appreciate ol' Willie more as a poet than I do as a playwright. Culture might have shifted and now we think of those plays as stuffy pretentious affairs but really Willie was playing to the...

Thats because unlike more classical art forms, we don't have centuries of extensive and exhaustive study behind it. Game design as a serious avenue of study is may be less than 50 years old, if that. And besides that, unlike say Music or Cooking, where there is a performative element inherent...

I suggest you read "Theory of Fun" by Raph Koster. It explains in detail why games are a form of art. It would be kind of silly in a very pedantic way to agree that games themselves are a form of art but to then say the process to create them isn't.

The whole thing is that there isn't that big of a distinction between design and art. Design is art.

Perhaps, but you can compel behaviors. This is the sort of thing I get at when I talk about making roleplaying and metagaming indistinguishable from each other. And its why I think its important to be explicit about the improv game and to teach it explicitly. If you want to compel a behavior...

The thing is, there's nuances involved. You can empathize a game into a bland experience, aka, make it appeal to everyone and thus it appeals to no one. The important thing about empathy as game design isn't that you're there to coddle or eliminate unpleasant things, but to understand what...

Sure, but my point was that its often that the issue has to do with trying to force a story out of the experience and less with whether or not player agency is being respected. The latter doesn't always mean the former.

If unpopular my perrenial advice on having fun in the hobby is to stop trying so hard to tell stories and just play.

Yeah I've read too much of Ron's thoughts to give him that big of a benefit of a doubt on the reasonable point. But yeah, he's really not that far off from the most basic advice ever to just stop railroading your players and be more collaborative. Like, yeah games can intrude, and I have a...

Whats interesting is that all those things are pretty core to my own philosophy and how I've been designing Labyrinthian. Particularly given those who most often differ to Ron have demonstrably rejected a lot of things I'm doing to accomodate that philosophy.

I can at least attest to why modularity in general is so common; its actually quite hard to convey how a game works when no single system works independently of the rest of the game.

Yeah out of all the big players that came out of the Forge I think Baker is the only one who never developed a terminal case of foot in mouth like Edwards or Crane did. And in regards to Edwards brain damage comment, the irony is that despite the thinking that those games in the 90s were...

Its daunting to learn, sure. After all, its rooted in 3.x. DND. BUT, the beauty of it is that all the non-mage stuff is pretty simple, and for mages we have Purple Sorcerer to do cleaner reference pages for the Spells, and then they become simple. Beyond that it runs as cleanly as any other...

I'd shout out DCC as well. Its big like the games his group are used to but its dramatically simpler to learn and run.

Yeah thats been a common criticism with DND and DND likes. But what you're pointing at isn't really exceptions. They're just abilities. Exceptions would be where a general rule works in X way, but then some obscure part of the rules says that rule now works in Y way. Eg, the Y exception is...

Yeah you're not wrong on the presentation. Where its at now is mostly just to get things down on paper in a way that isn't a convoluted mess of hand written notes and things ive forgotten. Like for example the fact that I still forgot to cover how Spell Materials work. Got dangit. Over time...

A nice clean update. I decided on splitting the difference, giving a default effect but still leaving the spells up to improvisational interpretation. Also returned the bespoke Elemental Welds, and expanded on the idea of Holding spells, which I used as a good vehicle to just include all of the...

Oh boy, here we go again!