Recent content by Pedantic

It's this fundamental attitude toward what the rules are for that I miss most, and I think is basically gone from modern TTRPGs. It was just expected that you'd want the rules to model whatever idea you had in your head about the setting and situation worked, and if you wanted something to be...

I take the precise opposite lesson; the Fighter concept itself is the poisoned well, so leaving it in will inevitably cause problems, but you can avoid much of that baggage by simply not having it. I think maybe there's a modular solution in there somewhere with class groups that might work...

Yeah, I think a plain text reading pretty clearly goes the other way, but I wouldn't have a problem allowing it.

See I thought I was being conservative. If you really want to engage with market forces, start with Iberian Gauge, work up to City of the Big Shoulders, play an intro 18XX like 18Chesapeake, then take the 12 hours to play 1817. Ooh, actually how about Bear Market, that's actually a short and...

Hegemony is a great call out. There's some really interesting historically niche board games, I'd call your attention to Pax Pamir as something relatively approachable.

This is excellent news! I'm honestly always so excited to hear about your new work, and SftFV is perhaps my favorite book you've produced. I use it regularly.

That, and it's really hard to evaluate how much you're enjoying something relative to a hypothetical experience you didn't have. A player may quite truthfully claim they're having a great time, and still be having a less good time than they would under other conditions.

That's not orthogonal! You're flattening the class of "games" to all be the same thing. This is asserting that the depth some games are buying with complexity isn't an essential component of the experience. Accessibility can't be measured without reference to the core experience it's tied to...

There's a big difference between descending AC as a norm and full on coin flipping as your resolution mechanic. Look at other mediums: you can't get to say Wingspan if you don't allow any more mechanical complexity than tic-tac-toe, but that game has an accessibility consultant on hand who...

Eh. I'm a big proponent of accessibility, but there's real design costs to simplicity that start to be very constraining. You get the impression the issue for some people is having any rules more complicated than "roll high."

Having played a lot of 3e and now 5e, I've found the level of incompetence weirdly static. The player who can't figure out how to add their proficiency to their skill check results is the same player who couldn't remember whether Power Attack was x1, x2 or x1.5, but did know how to roll their...

This is the problem I was talking about earlier with the mundanity trap though. The 4e fighter's lesson is that theme (particularly in the fighter's case) is fairly tightly bound to mechanics, and that the more generic your martial character's theme is, the less space you have to add mechanics...

I quite liked the book, and need to spend a little more time digging at it. The only issue I really had was was the suggestion that faction progression can be handled on arbitrary timelines, which veers too far into illusionism for me. In general, I find this kind of systemic advice very...

I've said it elsewhere, but if you're running Zeitgeist, it's a really good idea to skip/heavily modify the introductory skill challenge, which essentially forces the players to engage in profiling and is about the worst thing they'll be asked to do as constables. Really crushes the "fantasy...

Yeah, and I'm not precisely thrilled that 4e has been (by both proponents and detractors) reified as the inevitable endpoint of trying to make a balanced D&D game. It's led to both "balance is bad, look it gave us 4e, stop trying" and "clearly you object to game balance on principle, because you...