Recent content by Celebrim

I strongly suspect that sensors and fire control are the dominant factor in space warfare. Can you see them before they see you? Can you calculate a firing solution? Can you predict how they will try to evade? If you are doing the Yamato vs. Iowa comparison and you are focusing on shell...

I have been mostly a forever DM. This past year we've had a lot of life disruptions - new kids, sick relatives, players getting in that point in life where they are their kids taxi, work, etc. So the normal story based games I run that depend on everyone being able to show up have been...

Pendragon, Traveler, Dogs in the Vinyard, and Dread Arguments could be made for Twilight: 2000, Fiasco, Toon, and My Life with Master

Which is why I prefer games with strong sim attitude towards play, because the moment in the middle of a game when I must suddenly rules smith is to me one of the worst moments you can have as a GM. But I think that there is more to sim attitude than just "We should have a rule for everything"...

I went deep into this about 25 years ago doing tons of reading in the college library and downloading all the then latest simulation software, and what I discovered is that realistic galaxies are depressing. It crushed my belief (alongside working in a bioinformatics lab) that there was life...

Well, the point is definitely not to make realistic planets. My understanding is the planets are really only a few dozens of kilometers in diameter, but this is big enough and people's sense of scale limited enough (as to what they can imagine) that the planets will generally feel planet sized...

Or maybe I've been the forever GM most of my life hearing horror stories like this about the abuse players have had to endure at other tables. I've sat in on other tables or been in campaigns that sometimes lasted years, but I never had a DM as bad as the one described. If our profession was...

Simulation is what we are trying to achieve. Abstraction is the thing like assuming we can simulate an airplane well enough for these purposes as a rigid body with a single point mass because we aren't trying to actually make it fly and it won't be a danger to lives if it crashes but we will...

I think that is fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of simulation and of heroism in the context of D&D. The big misunderstanding here is a 15th level Wizard in D&D can do a passable imitation of Dr. Strange, but DMs want to insist that 15th level fighters are still ordinary mooks and not...

I disbelieve that was the motive. And for that matter, equivalent falls have been survived in real life.

Simulation means to me that we take seriously the imagined fictional universe as a real place and we try to imagine and inform the narrative by those things in a consistent manner. We try to make the world feel lived in and the people in it feel like they have real motives and desires and are...

Finished Adventure #9 in the "Tales of the Dogfish" campaign (finally) Thought I'd collect all the 5 word summaries of the sessions in one place. Adventure #1: The Job Session #1: Canyon chase of Kobok pirates. Session #2: Lurrians welcome predators for study. Session #3: He's outside. Must...

Firefight during the fireworks display

This is not however a figure per trap, but a figure by career. Approximately 700 men served as Tunnel Rats. They explored 4500 tunnels, or about 6 tunnels per man. Since they generally went down in teams of 2-3, that's probably 12-18 tunnels each. Each tunnel would generally have multiple...

I have long held that the simple "search" check is the most complex thing in all of D&D and this doesn't really matter whether you are talking about "I check for traps' in 1e AD&D or "I search the 5x5 grid" in 3e D&D. The problem is we are trying to take something that is concrete and...