The LotFP boxed set was my first exposure to the OSR and I'm very grateful for that. A lot of the philosophy behind it really clicked with me after years of avoiding fantasy, the Specialist rules were aces, much of the early and "mid-phase" material was A++, though eventually Raggi seemed to...
Rule 0 for promoting cool social interaction: Players are free to indulge in any and all of the tropes associated with RPG players, on the condition that they fight the GM (me) for 3x3 minute rounds every time they spoil a session. Crash a game and we fight with knives.
I liked the way social...
M&M 3e was a crunch too far for me and my guys, after something like 12 years of using 2nd edition. Shame.
We tried Champions Now and while it was enjoyable, no one else had any Hero/Champions experience so GMing it was like pulling double-duty and I was glad when Lockdown 2: Stay Indoors and...
I've come to realise over the long, long, long years of GMing that there's always going to be at least one player swimming against whatever current the GM and other players are surfing, so fuck it, cyborg-dragon-titty-elves all round, whatever you fuggin want.
This is not a new thing.
I'm not really trying to compare anything with anything, just stating that there are different approaches and by keeping up with your reading, writers and designers can learn from the "best" new approaches (YMMV of course, as per preference) new-school designers are up to. Outside of that, totes...
I have been quite deeply affected by the announcement of my favourite rapper MF DOOM's untimely death, and have been filling my Metal Boots of Supervillainy +2 with everything he ever recorded. A couple of my favourites:
Yeah, absolutely agree, and I guess I was speaking as a former creative writing tutor, so my advice would only apply to new writers/designers. You need to fill your bucket before you can empty it (unless you are some outsider genius, which guys, I'm sorry to say, most probably ain't).
I think...
Writers in general are/should be encouraged to read as widely as possible, for a range of reasons. I don't see why game authors should be any different. A famous and recent example of "bunker mentality" where designers created a game without looking at the wider market was the original version...
I can identify with this and feel for you, OP. My solution was fantasy with lots of undead, then fantasy with lots of politics, then DCC with lots of comedy, and superhero stuff without the sorts of villains that require the moral calculus of "should we kill this fecker for the good of...
My last supers setting was something along these lines, using the Public Domain Superheroes wiki to populate a "Magic Earth" and a "Science Earth". There's more material on that site than you could get through in a single campaign and I highly recommend it.
Sounds like a neat fit for the system I'm developing, which I'm calling 4d20. As a sneak peek, the initiative system looks like this:
1) Puff
2) Puff
3) Pass
The DCC Lankhmar set is one of the best RPG products I've picked up for many a long year, both as a big fan of Lieber, and for the alternative rules it gives that can be back-ported into DCC proper to tweak the tone (e.g. to tamp down the gonzo).
For a recent-ish DCC campaign I made a nice big ocean map and populated it with islands and a few coastlines, peppering it with the adventure sites from the modules. We went from level 0-5 using this model, including a couple of side adventures which were generated by the Divine Wrath tables as...
I'll be picking this up, Rob. I've been reading snippets of how you do things in your games for a few years, so it'll be great to see all that realised in book form.
Make the game about the players. Find out what they want and give it to them. Make them deal with the consequences of their actions and the fallout from their success.
Ignore rules that get in the way of fun. Learning a rule-set is a process of elimination.
Use a visual or audio cue every time...
After burning out a little bit on Overwatch, I recently discovered that the late, great City of Heroes/Villains is back up and running! So I'm still getting my supers-game fix, but at a more stately pace. It's amazing how the old girl ( CoH launched 2004, iirc) still holds up and looks great...
It seems that the games I enjoyed most back in the day got significantly worse after their early editions. For that reason, these days a new edition is more a red flag situation than a reason to get excited. But there are so many editions of so many games available that cherry-picking a Redux...
"Ok, take 2 damage as you parry his blows but are left with an aching sword-arm" is the sort of description I use for low damage hits. Otherwise you end up with fights that veer into "death by a thousand paper cuts" territory.
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