Recent content by Thomas Shey

Well, you can set up your class system so it chokes off much skill access to everyone but the skill monkey, but that usually ends up creating its own problems (the difficulty with getting enough skill points for a 3e era fighter to be able to climb, jump and ride competently being the poster boy...

Out of curiosity, have you played Shadow of the Demon Lord in that range? If so how different (if at all) did the two games feel to you?

Its notable that as a fan of what's often called "50's SF movies" that the look-and-feel there doesn't quite start to trail off until 1964. On the other hand, Rocketship XM came out in 1950 proper, and likely has much more the feel of that than most movies of the prior half-decade I can find...

Trying to keep supplies coming in without interacting with computers at all would be a heck of a challenge.

Maybe some self-owned craft, but it'd be hard to market your services.

As a cancer survivor myself, and someone who lost a beloved dog to it sooner than he had to go, I'm entirely with you there.

The problem is once you've got skill separation, you don't necessarily need the whole package of thief skills, and a high-skill class can invest in the ones you do. Maybe all you need is the stealth or the trap handling.

Well, my own feeling is that if you are baking roles into your game system you're either doing so to do niche protection, or you're probably making your character construction system narrower than it necessarily needs to be anyway.

That's kind of my point, though. You have to almost actively patch things like class features onto a class for thieves as soon as the class system has an otherwise generally accessible skill system (note I'm using thief, not rogue quite carefully). That's because the core concept doesn't need...

At the very least you need to acknowledge there are games that land well in a muddy ground in between. Any class based game with a skill system may well have no useful niche for thieves since most of what defines a thief is just specific skills. Its notable that they had to carve out spots for...

You can make an argument that's also what almost all Patricia Briggs urban fantasy books are, too.

You seem to have assumed I was suggesting they were Westerns. I was not. I was noting this was a case of a crossover between the otherwise normally distinct Western and Victorian genres. And yet, action-horror is commonly listed as a horror subgenre. Not the first place subgenres tend to...

Two examples I had in mind, in fact, though the Resident Evil movies land there, too.

And yet things are called action-horror all the time. There's usually one of two things going on when that's the case: 1. The main protagonist is an exception to the general rule that the antagonists exceed the capability of the protagonists, sometimes because the power level of the...

In fact there's a fairly well known example of this (mixed with horror): Penny Dreadful. Though its mostly set in Victorian England, and important character is an American gunslinger. (Come to think of it, that was true in the novel Dracula, too).