Recent content by Thomas Shey

Its not a great parallel though, since there's an obvious visual difference there. With mutants, there isn't; Jean Grey doesn't look any different than a particularly good looking redheaded human. Some are, of course, but so are characters like Ben Grimm. Probably antisemitism is a better...

If both or either of those were even close to being easy for most people. I mean "talk to your fellow players like adults" makes a, shall we say, extremely generous assumption about how adults interact in the world all the time just by itself, let alone people agreeing on what "makes sense in...

I'll make a try (and keep in mind this is from someone who really, really normally wants a lot of game in his RPG). For some people all they really want is the minimal amount of game structure to resolve conflicts of intention within the story structure. I can kind of get that, as I played for...

I think it was relevant when we started the cycle, but honestly, I'd have to trace back the chain to know why.

Perhaps I'm not understanding your point, but that seem tautological.

If the game elements are properly designed, I don't think the distinction is nearly as strong as this implies; the gameplay should be reflecting things that are perfectly in character.

I've made the argument before that most forms of D&D are actually more complex than games that have a rep for being moreso because so much of it from day one has been exception based (i.e. there are a million little things to remember, especially if you need to play a spellcaster at either end...

My own feeling is "The amount that would probably be too much in a non-RPG." That is to say, my tolerance for a lot of game structure is high enough that to push it above what I might want (note the "might"; I don't insist on this in every RPG, but the less there is the more something else will...

Just went for the PDFs of the 13th Age 2e books myself.

But wasn't even a good generalization. CRPGs are notoriously longer than the vast majority of computer games. You have to hunt around to find ones that routinely approach the common lengths there, especially if you're looking in the AAA sphere.

This still requires me to accept that people I played with for decades had eidetic memory and could do advanced mechanics in their head. This is not a pair of assumption--especially the latter, which I've seen people, effectively, claim about doing basic addition, subtraction, multiplication...

It was challenging your generalization, which seemed a faulty one to continue the conversation--or any related one--on.

I'll just flat out say that doesn't fit my experiences. I know of some pretty short computer games (Looking at my currently installed ones, Weird Worlds - Return to Infinite Space), and even ignoring those, there's a massive difference between trying to play through pretty much any CRPG I've...

Depends how good they think the 5e implementation of the concept is, doesn't it? As I said, I saw several fail forward systems in different games before I saw one that I thought actually worked particularly well. Not all of them are created equal, and even if you otherwise appreciate a given...

I've heard a rather lot of people who think its the worst edition to date. Including people who disliked 4e and 5e.