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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 9332329" data-attributes="member: 7025508">Right. I am not saying that cautious play never occurs, just that I haven't personally encountered it much. I don't think I have ever played in the proper old school dungeon Vietnam mode. And I actually try to make attrition and resources matter (not boring ones like arrows and stuff, but HP and spells slots etc) in my D&D using gritty rests and stuff like that, but I still do not see people playing particularly cautiously. So yes, obviously if you come from culture where cautious play is very prevalent, and then get into a game that diminishes or prevents that, it feels like big shift. But if you didn't have the issue in the first place, then you really are not gonna notice the impact. Right. And that is something you could easily do. Look at Critical Role, huge chunks of the play revolves around personal stories and issues of the characters. My current D&D game is intentionally pretty episodic pulp adventures in style of Conan & co, so I wouldn't say characters are super deep nor most of the game revolve around their personal issues, but still we have still dealt with their family dramas, old enemies, difficult relationship with their culture and stuff like that. And of course the main direction of the game is mostly dictated by one character's obsession about ancient lost secrets. Granted, that is in certain sense an excuse to have pulpy fantasy adventures. But the basic structure of making the game to be about characters is super simple. Have players come up with concept themes and backstories for characters, then the GM mines those for content of the game. People have done this forever in one way or another. Usually it is just one ingredient among many, but of course one can easily make it the main ingredient if one wants. Personally I prefer a mix of more personal and more external stories. Like in a TV shows some episodes are more character centric and some more external issue centric. I know their background, and whilst interesting, their working class plight didn't much feature, as they were our antagonists from the get go, so we were not predisposition to be very sympathetic towards them. Though my character, who is of the lowest class of our team, was initially most positive towards them.So you made a huge deal about me getting the name wrong. And if you stop to consider it, there is very simple reason for this. For the same reason I might indeed call Crows Ravens and Red Sashes Red Scarves etc. I am a Finn, we don't play in English. And it would be weird to have English words pop up in a Finnish in-character speech. So every name with an obvious meaning, every concept we need to refer to in-character, we translated. Factions, districts, names of things. That's how casual about this game we were. So most of the time I'd call them Mustalamput, and so when I try to remember what it is in English, I just translate it back and such glitches may occur. I didn't say game becomes turtley and cautious. I said D&D characters are more eager to resolve things with violence, as getting hurt is less serious business in that game. In Blades we don't usually storm in guns blazing, we try to approach things with stealth and guile when possible. Though of course that's not always an option. And it actually is something I like about the game. Risks feel more real, like you were a normal human instead of an invincible superhero. And yeah, perhaps healing isn't super slow, but it is slower. It is serious resource sink that you must burn your precious downtime activities on and being hurt causes actual penalties. And bear in mind, we're pretty early stages of this game, so our gang doesn't have a lot of resources.</blockquote>

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