Recent content by pemerton

Right. Conan doesn't resort to combat as a last resort. Having fighter PCs begin at 1st level, rather than as Heroes, is already a departure from the source material.

I think I'm not as sure that the original game pieces needed a particular trope or exemplar to work. Heroes and Superheroes can be Aragorn, Eomer, Conan, Lancelot, etc without worrying too much about details beyond that. And all we need to know about Wizards, exemplar wise, is that they use...

To follow on a bit from my post just upthread, I don't think that these are "siloed roles". I mean, Conan is a ranger (say, Beyond the Black River) and a burglar (say, Tower of the Elephant) and a warrior (in most of REH's stories) all in one might-thewed package! At best I would say that these...

Upthread, I posted quite a bit about some sorts of approaches to the setting-oriented RPGing that you describe: These posts advance a few theses: *Rules for representing elements of a shared fiction don't, in themselves, yield a playable RPG; *There also need to be rules for working out...

Not to disagree - but the first thought I had, reading your post, is that maybe there is always a degree of risk that what one participant finds compelling, another will find either (in one direction) a bit flat, or (in the other direction) a bit over the top? The second thing I thought of...

Is that meant to be Mythic Bastionlands? If so, and if you have play experience - or other ideas about the game - feel free to post in this thread: Mythic Bastionland - initial impressions, and making a Realm

I guess, having just gone in to bat for Prince Valiant over Pendragon, that I can hardly quibble with someone else taking a position at odds with the received wisdom . . .

I think I'm the odd one out - not just between us, but across the whole RPGing community - in ranking Prince Valiant above Pendragon. But I am (reasonably) serious about it. And as I continue to cultivate my interest in Mythic Bastionland, I think the likelihood of me ever spending time with...

Ahem . . . perhaps you meant Prince Valiant?

Yeah, someone can be revolutionary (as in, upending or transforming their field) without being a revolutionary. I think Baker is a pretty perceptive designer. You can see this in the Anyway blogs from 15 to 20 years ago, where he is working through his satisfactions and dissatisfactions with...

I ran a session of In A Wicked Age for a couple of kids and a parent, who I think would all count as "casual" players. It worked fine. The kids in particular tended to use the compromise mechanic for resolving conflicts in ways that de-escalated a bit, and made things a bit more "comfortable"...

The art and layout for Agon 2e played a role in my decision to buy the book: <AGON - An Epic TTRPG by Evil Hat Productions>. I didn't know I was going to buy it until I saw it in the shop.

It depends on the game. Eg in our Traveller game, the character are all part of a ship's crew, and so are all "there" where the ship is. I quite like the Torchbearer 2e rule for this (from the Scholar's Guide, p 25): If your group plays an ongoing game and a player misses a session, they get a...

They're like a gibbering mouther, except some of them find gibbering to be too much effort! (Or something like that . . .)

Agreed. A lot of RPG design and play also inclines towards something other than rising conflict across a moral line. White Plume Mountain (as an example of the dungeon crawl paradigm) is an example; so are the CoC-esque mysteries that I have on my shelf. An interesting example is something...