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I have this campaign I'm running--we play most Saturdays at 12 pm Eastern time for two hours--that started out as classic Traveller during the pandemic but eventually morphed into its own thing: What had happened was the players found this artifact that could create a wormhole, and they used it...

I like the idea of "megacorps" being treated as Imperial chartered companies owned by the nobility. When you see Gov Code 1, you know the planet is the property of some cabal of aristocrats empowered by the Imperium to take it for all they can get.

I like the Zhodani as transhuman cyborg types also. A hivemind without the psionics. Very nice!

I am running a workshop at Gen Con this year called "GM 101" that's aimed exactly there, on behalf of a company that is developing a GM campaign management software. We've essentially gamified game-running so novice GMs can explore the art of the GM with "GM coaches" on hand to give feedback and...

Mortal Coil from Galileo Games had an interesting diceless system that involved tokens representing Power, Passion, Magic, and Action currencies. The designer, Brennan Taylor, is working on something in a similar space now called Art of Power, which has a very Game of Thrones vibe.

In a class about games that I teach, I ran a game of Diplomacy virtually using the course management system to submit orders and so forth. It was hard, with a lot of confusion and attrition, but the students who dug it, really dug it.

I would play, happily.

Yes, that's right. The general RAW principle is that something that's essential to getting to the end of the adventure doesn't cost anything, while something that's not essential but might be useful costs resources. If it's a total tangent it might not cost anything either, but still work. Or it...

I recently saw a designer for whom I have a lot of admiration say something like, "Oh, I very strongly dislike 'GM-sets-a-difficulty' as a technique in play. Let's get rid of it." My reaction was, geez, that's kind of my go-to technique. What's the alternative? I guess maybe something like...

This is really interesting, because I can see using it as a tool in an otherwise player-facing system to signal something important to players. "When I use the same rules for NPCs as for PCs, all bets are off. I can't fudge to save my guy, and I won't fudge to save yours." Things just got real...

So a player tries to sweet talk an NPC into letting them through the gate into the secured area. They role-play it out, and it's pretty good. As the GM, your job is to say, "Great! Do you have Flattery?" If yes (Flattery rating 1 or more, even if they have no points in the pool), then it works...

Gumshoe's central game design conceit is this idea that "you always find the clue you need to do the next thing." It's a way of dealing with the problem of whiffing the investigation roll and not finding a clue you need. So it solves that problem by saying, okay, if you have Skill X, and you are...

The GM using player-facing mechanics who's all of a sudden in the situation where, "The boat is sinking, NPCs are trying to make it to shore, PCs clearly have to roll to succeed to get there, how do I figure out what happened to the NPCs?" has a number of options. A GM who put dramatic logic...

A General skill like Driving on the other hand is used to take action. With zero points left, you can roll but you have ability to improve your odds by adding to the roll. The designer imagines the system to be a way of managing player spotlight time.

If you have a rating in an Investigative skill but have spent all your points, you can still use the skill. If there’s a "core clue" to be gained in that way, you receive that information. But a "bonus clue" or other benefit that would require a spend would be out of reach.

The hardest thing for GMs who are used to non-player-facing mechanics (call them what, symmetrical systems?) to get a handle on seems to be the idea that you can just decide whether an NPC succeeds or fails. We're so used to thinking about probabilities!

I think this is a really interesting take. Can you elaborate? What do you mean, "should have known better"?

I think that Laycock's neutrality is a point in his favor. I mention his book in the first chapter of my book about the "indie TRPG scene" of the early 21st century, where I find it useful in tracing out the "discourse of TRPGs" that leads up to the formation of the Forge. I thought that was a...

Mortal Coil by Brennan Taylor of Galileo Games does urban fantasy with a diceless mechanic involving devoting tokens representing different sources of strength to various efforts. It allows characters with different power levels to interact on a more or less level playing field.

As promised, I'm letting you know that the e-book of Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001-2012: Designs & Discussions is on sale from the publisher Palgrave Macmillan for $12. A steal! You may need this coupon code: CYBER20PAL.