Recent content by pemerton

Here's another example from cards: One way to lose a hand of bridge or five hundred is to get unlucky in the deal. If I'm dealt four suits, with none greater than 3 or 4 length, and no card higher than a 10, I'm probably not going to win the hand. (And for the five hundred players out there...

We've had all sorts of town phases in my game. Some like what you describe, some more successful for the players (and PCs). Probably the thing the players feel the most is the constant pressure on their gear.

Here's a brief episode of RPG play: My PC arrived at the dungeon entrance, and went down the stairs. There were two Orc guards waiting at the bottom, and they attacked me! They drove me off, and I had to run back to the village to look for help. But all that happened was that the villagers...

It's certainly possible! The players in my game feel that it is absolutely brutal. Because of the way things have played out, they've had no loot for ages (a couple of 2D or so hauls in the past 6 or so sessions), so they're paying for everything on their raw Resources. The two Elves have no...

Shopping; healing; nandies; levitating; climbing.

We played a session of Torchbearer 2e yesterday afternoon. In attendance were 3 players, and so we had 3 PCs: Telemere the Elven Ranger, Fea-bella the Elven Dreamwalker, and Golin the Dwaren Outcast. Fea-bella's player gave us a prologue, and so Fea-bella recovered from Exhaustion. Golin's...

Gygax has an example of it in his DMG (in the discussion of PCs constructing strongholds). So I would say not all that radical.

"Mechanic" is cognate with "machine". Something being mechanical means it happens via a process that doesn't require discretion or intermediating decision-making. So when I think of a mechanic, in a RPG, I think of a process for making decisions in the game that is machine like, or is mediated...

This is the "vanilla narrativist" hypothesis. I am (or at least have been) an instance of the type, as I've often posted about including earlier this morning in another thread: Based on my own experience, and on the assumption that I'm probably not unique, I used to assume that there must be a...

No worries, and thanks! Well, what you described was more specific than "adding to the setting" - you said " the GM said: 'It is a two-day trip underground to the petrified forest. Describe to me what the journey is like and what you encounter.'" This is the players describing setting, and...

Yes, exactly this.

I'm not sure if by "older D&D" you mean AD&D 2nd ed, or classic D&D of the KotB/WPM/beat-the-dungeon type play. The reason that I ask is because I often see AD&D 2nd ed (and all the other RPGs that are played in more-or-less the same sort of way, which includes a lot of 5e D&D as best I can...

Burning Wheel assumes that the players and GM will work together establishing setting context, starting situation and unfolding situation. The players have a number of tools for doing this - as part of PC build they have Beliefs, Relationships, Affiliations, their actual lifepath choices, etc...

This is why, upthread, I posted that "I find the use of "PbtA" as if it were an informative label pretty hopeless too. . . . I don't know why "PbtA" gets treated as if it's a meaningful umbrella." If someone tells me that a system is PbtA, I don't know if it supports player-driven or GM-driven...

Unless "the conversation" means simply working within a shared fiction, then I don't think I agree with this. The last time I played classic-esque D&D, it was a session of White Plume Mountain, using my own AD&D variant for the PC building rules. This wasn't a game in which the setting was...