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    Hot take: get rid of the "balanced party" paradigm

    I think it's important if all you're really doing in your game is dungeon SWAT team stuff, then yeah it needs to be kinda optimal for that. But I think, there's a lot of kinds of balance that are important especially in other kinds of games. For example, i do think it's important that...
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    Possum Creek Joins Steve Jackson Games as New RPG Imprint

    I really don't think the details of how templates and attributes are used in NPCs and templates are really what drives the sales and attention to GURPS, as a big deal thing, as most people don't even know the details of that stuff- it's inside baseball for enthusiasts.
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    Possum Creek Joins Steve Jackson Games as New RPG Imprint

    Honestly, I see GURPS as something that has a lot of potential if it's marketed correctly, as unlike most other games put out today, it actually does the work to try to be both 'universal' and 'sim' in its sensibilities, which runs against almost everything else in the market. It's not pretty...
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    Darkvision Ruins Dungeon-Crawling

    I can sometimes see how this plays out, but my experience has taught me players can only track so much, so either a logistically-inclined player trivializes it, or the group forgets it and the GM acquiesces because it would feel like a gotcha to people who don't have such a player. It's a lot...
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    Darkvision Ruins Dungeon-Crawling

    For what it's worth, i kinda find the torch management to be more of a pain than it's worth- one logistically inclined player can basically make it no big deal, same as rations, water, etc. I've heard a pretty good argument that the best way to keep people from dallying in a dungeon in OSR type...
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    Polygon: Indie TTRPG Companies are "sitting in their own little corners of the internet and wringing their hands"

    I think the problem of algorithms basically means that every article creator has to make headlines that present its material as provocatively as possible, so it ends up being some rousing attack on D&D(and current indie creators) while also being about the biggest thing in the room. It's sad-...
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    It's been so long since the last GURPS edition, that the present day is now in the "future" tech level

    One thing to note about gun skills in GURPS is that most gun based small arms default to each other in a very friendly way- it's usually best to just crank one gun skill up as high as you want and then let the others be -2 from that. Though i generally don't play with familiarity(i think it's a...
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    Free League forcing Alchemy VTT to remove PDFs - Anti-consumer behaviour?

    I imagine FL didn't quite understand what they were getting into with the contract with Alchemy and decided to discontinue the license after that. The Fantasy Grounds modules for Traveller contain full PDFs, too, but they never get discounted all that much probably because there's some...
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    Running games for pay as another income stream for TTRPG companies

    I'm not sure how StartPlaying makes money itself, yeah, but i'm not sure being the middleman here would be that lucrative, and I don't see WotC being able to actually pay professional GMs to handle the mass of business they'd need to do- SP relies on people doing it as a side hustle for the most...
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    Extensive Character Sheets Are GM Oppression

    If it was GURPS i'd just look up the skill "wainwright", see what the defaults allowed (some skills cannot default off of IQ or DX), and go from there, i wouldn't feel bad about it. If i let someone with that high an IQ stat into the campaign i'd know that's what i'd be getting into.
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    Blades in the Dark Advice Please?

    I really think you need to play through a Forged in the Dark game as it is before you start trying to hack it, you'll learn a lot more about the structure. When I played through a Band of Blades campaign, i learned a lot about how to do things differently next time and what i thought needed to...
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    Ben Riggs: 'The Golden Age of TTRPGs is Dead'

    I think the article is more Riggs talking about how it was more interesting to talk about D&D as a hegemon in TTRPGs and kind of being nervous about trying to write about TTRPGs if it ended up being different- sort of a lament about having to write for a more fractionalized media.
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    MCDM's New Tactical TTRPG Hits $1M Crowdfunding On First Day!

    They don't necessarily have to be, but i've found in general that almost every campaign i've been in that starts with that ditches it pretty quickly because it's a fairly trivial challenge if you have a player who's good at planning things, and a massive annoyance if you don't. I get the...
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    MCDM's New Tactical TTRPG Hits $1M Crowdfunding On First Day!

    Yeah, I mean, if your game is going to feature a lot of attacks, having the hit roll and damage roll isn't 100% necessary, especially when the damage roll is already abstracting so much. I look forward to seeing how it pans out in play- a lot of effects that affect the hit roll are effectively...
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    Grade the GURPS System

    GURPS really needs a guided character generation from the GM based on the specifics of the game- just getting the books out and telling people to go hog wild will not give good results. It's a good system, but it doesn't work out of the box, you really have a lot of work as the GM to do the...
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    Unpopular opinions go here

    Yeah, i've found that generally having the conversation and session 0 tends to obviate the need to use them, but you need them to have this conversation. I also generally use session 0 to go over more administrative aspects of the game- how many players is a quorum to continue the session, what...
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    Sell me on Traveller

    That'll happen a lot- people will sign up on a lark and forget about it because it costs nothing and is totally online.
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    Sell me on Traveller

    I will say, while you can play traveller in a lot of different kinds of scenarios, the char gen is the one made for the rag tag team with a tramp steamer going different places on the map. If you want to play traveller on a military warship, or as a group of badass soldiers, you'll probably...
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    Unpopular opinions go here

    I find the DM advice not to put mook NPCs with players to be fundamentally misguided- having people in the group you can kill who aren't the PCs is just great. I don't know how people end up playing such simple characters so slowly in combat.
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    Unpopular opinions go here

    Honestly i find European Medieval-ish fantasy to be pretty good because there's a lot less explanation i have to do to the players about basic facts of the world.
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