Recent content by kenada

It’s treated like its own character with its own playbook and stats. Improvements have prerequisites you need to complete to acquire them and benefits once you do. The stats are used with steading and homefront moves. It reminds me a bit of your crew in Blades in the Dark, but the upgrades are...

Stonetop is still a work in progress, so the page count is in flux. There are two books (both 5.5″ by 8.5″). The first book, which is the game stuff, is 400+ pages in one of the recent drafts. The second book has setting information. It’s almost 300 pages. There is space for you to define...

I ended up being our fulltime GM for a while (when the group reformed with some different players after an aborted 4e campaign). We eventually switched to alternating between my game and someone else’s, but that stopped several years ago when one of the players had to drop out. We only have...

Thanks for the link. Maybe some rules have changed because I was able to read the thread, and I’m not a member. That’s a really interesting session described in the Washington Post article. It sounds like I was on the right track with my reply in post #862 (postulating that factions could be...

Maybe, but that’s why I’m interested in his thinking. In a sense, classic games deal with the issue of neutrality through the use of sufficient prep and mechanics (e.g., reaction and morale rolls). But if you don’t want to do that extra work, then there’s an issue. I think this is neat...

This occurred to me after I posted as one possible constraint. If you separate the duties, then the referee can focus on arbitration while the players responsible for the opposition would play that as hard as possible. I say players assuming different factions should be handled by different...

I’ve been thinking about this a bit. I’m curious what Dave’s reasoning is here. The implication to me seems to be that once you become a participant (running the monsters and fighting against the players) that your neutral status is compromised. That would suggest the referees need some kind of...

I don’t know what’s worse: that WotC could afford to pay artists but chose to put out this shit, or that they didn’t give a fuck how it looked and put it out anyway.

Torchbearer 2e has been available since at least February 2022 (according to my purchase history). I thought Burning Wheel was as well, but I was only interested in buying the TB2 books for the game we were starting, so I don’t remember whether BW also was or not at the time.

We wrapped up a BitD campaign a few months back that went over half a year. I can’t remember how many sessions it lasted, but we counted 60+ scores due to the number of split scores we did. Things definitely started breaking down a bit once the crew got to tiers 4 and 5. We were running out of...

Building it off PF2 makes sense. It’s basically the same style of game in a different milieu. Now you can port things easily between the systems since they’re using the same rules and designed to be compatible.

Somehow I mostly missed the hobby despite growing up in the ’80s. My first D&D was 3e when I went to college. Our group mostly did its own thing, so I managed to avoid most of that stuff. The closest we came was when I ran some Pathfinder APs, but I still tended to modify then quite heavily...

I’m interested in it to the extent it’s necessary to push back on default assumptions that RPGs are about creating/telling stories because of how those assumptions can be (and are) wielded against games and styles of play not sharing them.

I wouldn’t go quite that far, though I think the audience for whom it does do something is limited (to designers and those doing design work, which admittedly often includes GMs). Some theory is more useful than others though, definitely. I think it’s neat that Edwards makes arguments about...

I really like the art in Old-School Essentials, especially the covers. The books in general are lovely artifacts to hold. I’ll be backing Dolmenwood pretty much entirely because of that.