Recent content by Thomas Shey

I've been doing XCOM1 with the Long War mod for a while now. Lot of nice things about it (though I'm literally playing the easiest version of the eight levels) but it drags out the end game which has always been an issue with those in general.

I dunno, I still say in terms of management, it wasn't that it was high level it was that everything had to be represented with separate, individualized class features or feats. I know of games that play in the same power levels as 4e or 3e D&D that are much easier to manage than those were...

Even when they do, there was a lot of room for decision paralysis there.

Oh, if you want to say that 4e characters were too busy (especially toward the upper end) I'd absolutely agree with you; I had a heck of a time managing the cleric I played up to around 20th because there were so many bits and bobs (this is, IMO, a chronic problem with games in the D20 sphere...

Absolutely reasonable. Just don't expect to not see more of it from others.

Yeah, I've seen that a lot lately. Sometimes it is AI generated. Sometime someone is just having stylistic quirks that a lot of AI art does because, say it now, its popular. Either way, I'm starting to find the people complaining about AI far more annoying than most AI art.

Yeah. Masterbook is a descendent of TORG and uses the same kind of mechanical constructs as TORG without those in-setting elements justifying them, but TORG was very much its own thing in this regard, and from what I understand of your position, your acceptance of it. (One advantage I have in...

Yup. That's the cause of a lot of problems people have in the hobby, one way or another.

I think this underestimates how some people deal with frustration. Over time, for some people, that's allit needs (and its easy to underestimate how much the game means to some people).

You have to look at other features of the "spaces available to them" to understand why they use them I've explained why I'm here when I'm not a big D20 fan, and I don't think I'm a troll, so I can understand with people with a higher level of frustration can end up in places that aren't ideal...

I'm not talking about excuses; I'm talking about reasons. Frustrated people behave badly; news at 11.

Because the point value of a disadvantage is to represent the problem it causes. If it doesn't cause as much problem because you've papered across it with other abilities (which, after all, are still providing the benefit they always provide), its simply not the same degree of problem...

I'm not entirely sure its really narrative weight the way you usually use it; as I said, it a set of worlds some of which overtly work by genre conventions and the like that people who travel across them are well aware of. Probably a good comparison is some of the baked in horror rules...

Its actually a bad example for what we're talking about though, because the mechanical oddities in TORG are simulations in the sense Micah is using it; though not everyone understands it, people who understand how the Cosms work know that possibility energy is a thing (and thus, Possibilites...

Yeah, but I think the point is, none of that theoretical availability matters if other games or styles have elbowed out the ones you like where you are willing or capable of finding them.