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I ran a long campaign for my face to face group. It was a great campaign with a lot of surprises and interesting things that happened. One of the things that most surprised me was how invested in the NPCs my players became. There were several times where NPCs were at great risk and when that...

And nothing else about the game matters in your assessment? Yeah… we’ll just have to agree to disagree here.

Because this: Isn’t how reality works. I understand that you have a preference, and that’s cool… you can enjoy whatever you like. You can also feel free to describe why you have your preference. This thing where you’re insisting that one method of pretending is more like reality than the...

Sure! How something feels likely plays a big part in how much they like it. I just think mistaking that feeling for some kind of objective truth is an issue. It attempts to grant authenticity when it’s not really warranted.

I don’t think it does. A mystery show? A mystery novel? Sure. But I know how you also don’t like the idea of a story, so I don’t know how that sits so well with you. Why I don’t think it has much in common with a “real life mystery” is because real life mysteries are not authored. They’re not...

Sure. And I can tell you which feels more like it to me personally. That’s my point. It’s a matter of preference. Neither has more in common with real life investigations.

For me, I just object to the elevation of one gaming approach as being “closer” to the real thing. It’s just silly. In both cases, people are pretending to be investigators solving a mystery. In neither case is a mystery actually being solved. Perhaps that implication is not intended… but...

So a couple thoughts in this. First, and simply, describing the process of Brindlewood Bay as “a random check” is way off. It’s like saying that a CoC game comes down to a “random guess” by the players. It ignores so much of what is happening in play. More importantly… as far as addressing...

Actual investigations don’t have a DM. I do, too. In one, I’m playing through the GM’s predetermined story and in the other I’m not. But this applies to any investigation based game. In Call of Cthulhu, the players are not solving a mystery, but are playing characters who do.

Very cool, @pemerton! This game is on my short list. Hoping to get to it this year, likely after my DIE campaign ends.

Nice! How did that go?

Games I played in: Scum & Villainy Daggerheart Call of Cthulhu Delta Green Dungeon World Games I ran: Stonetop Band of Blades Mothership False Kingdom Blades in the Dark DIE Overall, a good year of gaming across three groups. We literally just began DIE with session zero, and the first full...

Agreed about the Storm-Marked Heavy. That was a playbook/background combo that was in the game I played in, and then also in the game I GMed when we made a second group of PCs. The character in both cases was devastating in combat. The Heavy and the Judge in the game I played in was a...

Yeah, the 4e influences are obvious in the lore of the setting. That doesn't mean the game plays like 4e in any way. I like the playbooks. They are a bit more "class-like" than other PbtA takes... but they themes of most seem far more specific than we typically think of when we think of classes.

So, a lot of them are game dependent. Stonetop, for instance, has a series of questions that are asked about the town and the people in it. The group answers these together and comes up with NPCs to fill the major roles in the town (blacksmith, publican, midwife, etc.). Then each playbook has...

Yeah, I got the impression that more time is meant to pass between major excursions and the like… but that seems to assume that threats either really bide their time, or that they’re generally resolved quickly. Many of the threats that came to face the town in our game were persistent and tended...

Yeah, the game I GMed went for probably about that number of sessions. It was every other week for just over two years. We wound up adding a second group of PCs when the first group spent a good deal of time away from town. We had two PC deaths… one that took the Thrall playbook and another...

This issue you have is based on what? Some games, as has already been pointed out, don’t have “holes in the lineup” because they don’t require role specialization. They talk it out like friends. Or at the very least, like adults. What if someone shows up at your game and doesn’t want to...

I’d say play resources. Like reference sheets and the like that can be used at the table. Some games do this and it’s very helpful. Other than that… I just want to keep seeing new games.

Most of the games I’ve played over the last few years have some element of collaborative PC creation. It works so well that I don’t really expect I’ll ever run a game in the future where we don’t do that. Some games have very formalized rules or procedures for it, others are pretty loose. My...