Recent content by Gorgon Zee

I think this is simply an artifact of the fact that most games are designed to focus on combat. D&D, obviously, but honestly we still tend to play that way in man genres. But I do feel that it's just a design decision about how what you want to focus on. So in a standard d20 fantasy game you...

Yep — I would paraphrase your thought by saying that you consider only the ability to change the fiction a meaningful decision, not the mechanics by which that is achieved. Trying to tie this sidebar back to the main thread, it would be good design then to allow a trap to be overcome by multiple...

Agreed. But your statement was "there is no player agency, no decision-making", which I disagreed with. I do agree that the type of decision is different and I agree it could be a lot better. I personally fix with the simple statement that if you can think of a better skill to use, I'll...

Well, this is a standard skill check so there are actually a number of choices to be made, and some RP also. Additionally there are occasional other choices Obviously, there is the often tricky choice of whether or not to spend hope to improve your chances. Classic RPG decision on balancing...

As a general design principle, I like to have any game effect have at least two ways to interact with it, one which is mostly player-focused -- being able to intuit and apply cleverness, and one being character-focused -- mostly making tests. So my typical trap would have signposts well ahead...

My resolutions are: Catch up on write-ups of the last 6-8 sessions of my Great Pendragon Campaign, and stay up-to-date as I finish it off sometime around March/April Run a one shot of Ten Candles (and stop trying to make that happen around Hallowe'en. After 3 years of trying, just run it...

I feel that people should not celebrate anything without acknowledging that what you are celebrating may be a source of pain and harm to others. For me, Thanksgiving is a celebration of things to be thankful for, and a time to remind myself to be thankful. It is emphatically not a celebration of...

If you say "System X is good for genre Y", I'd assume that you are talking about the genre in the general sense. If you want to specifically restrict to OSR-style gaming, then you really need to state it. To be abundantly clear, I'll restate my position: If you want to run a sci-fi TTRPG game...

I don't have much experience, or honestly strong interest with OSR outside a fair amount of AD&D play back in the day. I own Traveller, but like you, would prefer Aliens to it. For a gritty, tech-y feel Aliens (with fixed stress rules) is a reasonable option. I was really zeroing in on the...

Well, that might be overstating it. Without the aliens, it's hard to see what would recommend it as a space opera game over other choices. The skills are pretty focused on combat and can often be hard to match to player intentions; there aren't a ton of options for use of vehicles, space battles...

Hmmm. This is very far rom my experience of CoC modules. There are a lot of CoC source books that have this style of presentation, but the ones that are actually modules have seemed pretty good to me, almost always starting with a "ways in which the investigators get involved" section, then...

Yes, definitely. It will indeed spit out outlines looking just like this. And it can be made to produce a dozen or so outlines and they will all feel just a bit same-y. If you add enough prompts, it will produce something different, but it will still be trying to do it in the generic way it has...

My experience has been that the maps are unusably bad. Bullet points are often OK but pretty generic. It's usable, but it's nowhere near as good as human-created content. I'm in the "will pay for decent content" camp.

@Jfdlsjfd -- as a data professional with several decades of experience in this area, here are some suggestions on how to make your arguments more helpful. The large wall of info you produced above will be -- and I'd argue should be -- ignored by most people. Here are some ways to make it more...

Well ... not quite. The transition from hunters-gatherer to farmer meant that land became valuable, so the optimal strategy for a culture was to use the excess people not needed for food creation as a means to own more food-producing land. The first big revolution was not from hunter-gatherers...