I ran a game in near future New York and used Google maps and street view for guidance. Worked well. None of the other players lived here, so I think the visuals helped them.

I had one really good game of Vampire. Lasted a couple years. We still talk about it sometimes, and its best scenes. Like how one PC saved an NPC by jumping out a 10th story window with her. Or the time they had a huge in character fight because the job they’d tried to do went sideways.

But I’ve also had a couple really bad games. There was one where they just didn’t read and retain anything from the books. One of the players on like session 4 was like “wait. How do I get more blood? Do I like… Bite people?”. My friend what do you think was happening in the other scenes when people were hunting for blood? They also didn’t retain anything about the different factions, so they didn’t really understand anyone’s motivation. It was bad. Still feel bad about it.

When I play an RPG (or RPG-like game), I want to know upfront: is this a storytelling kind of game, or a problem-solving kind of game? The rulesets that try to blend both often feel like they pick up the worst of both worlds, demanding players switch between two very different sorts of minds or risk spoiling the whole affair.

This is an interesting point I’d thought about before but never articulated.

I think it was part of why I didn’t gel with one of my old DND groups. They’d sometimes be faffing around doing “funny” stuff, but I mostly was sticking to the “use your resources wisely or perish” mode of DND.

Probably a support character. I’d expect they are good at emotional and physical first aid, morale boosts, and diplomacy.

They probably aren’t good at physically fighting, but they’d be good at stopping fights non-violently.

I think I’d need to see more examples to understand this better.

If I’m a thoughtful (d6) wizard and I want to carefully open this portal, what do I roll? What if I’m trying to do so but the building is on fire?

It really does seem a lot like Fate Accelerated. You’ve both got four actions (though they theirs are more general purpose. create an advantage, overcome, attack. defend). Their approaches are (by default) careful, clever, flashy, forceful, quick, sneaky.

It sounds a lot like Fate Accelerated, except more complicated.

I’m not sure I understand the dice sizes. Looks like some types just are weaker?

I don’t know PBTA well but I believe so.

Basically, every scene and character can have ‘aspects’, which are things that are true about them. They’re free form. Sometimes they’re just there, like if you’re in a bar it might have “Bubbling with drunk banter” or “Loud Pop Punk Soundtrack”. Aspects can then affect what makes sense in the scene. “Loud Pop Punk” can make it easier to move without being heard, but harder to make a speech because no one can hear you, for example.

You can also explicitly create aspects. Turn off the jukebox and the aspect might change to “Weirdly Quiet Bar” or whatever. In a fight, you can use the “create an advantage” move. That’s for stuff that isn’t about taking them out of the conflict right now, but setting things up. Like pushing them off balance, disarming them, screaming “LOOK! A DISTRACTION!” whatever. If the roll comes out if your favor, you can create an aspect that’s true and can also be invoked for a numeric bonus on a dice roll. So if you pants the guy you’re fighting, he can’t run full speed to chase you because his pants are down. You can also invoke that if you want to kick his ass, for a bonus on the dice roll.

These are all free form and it’s up to the group to decide what it actually means. Most groups probably wouldn’t let you invoke “I’m literally on fire!!” as a bonus if you’re trying to sneak through a crowd.

Typically, as I understand it, you’re either trying to take them out of the fight or trying to create advantages for side of the conflict. On a dramatic success on trying to take someone out, you can also create a small advantage.

This is the best approach I’ve found.

Player says, “I make a sales pitch playing on Priscilla’s hatred of our common foe, and that’s why she should sell us these explosives for cheap” and doesn’t have to actually do a sales call. Roll the dice and decide if that means she buys in, makes a counter offer, or what.

Personally I find adding a lot of flavor that has no mechanical impact kind of distracting and tiresome in a different way. Like, sure, it sounds cool you slashed their ankles or whatever, but if it doesn’t do anything I need to discard that. I can’t, in most systems, then be like “ok he just got stabbed in the leg he’s off balance. I can take advantage of that!”. It’s just noise.

Some people have been like “You just don’t have any imagination!” but it’s not that. It’s that the flavor stuff is often actively not true, and it’s tiresome to hold two separate world states in mind at the same time. One where the fighter just stabbed the guy in the hand and threw sand in his eyes, and the other where he hit for 5 damage and his hand + eyes are fine.

(Contrast Fate, which explicitly encourages you to be creative about the scene, and lets you mechanically benefit as well.)

I think your text has what are supposed to be spoilers on some phrases, but they are fully revealed to me (lemmy, firefox browser)

I think the “I move and attack” stuff can get boring, especially if it’s slow. Like, if the players are speedy about it then you’re basically playing a board game, and that’s fine. I start to lose patience when you get the “can i move here? oh i can only move 30 feet. what about here? oh that will provoke. maybe if i cast misty step? oh i can’t cast two leveled spells in a round. Can I hide first? Oh that takes my action? Sorry I usually play rogue. Uhhh I guess I just shoot them.” mode.

I also kind of really want to spend more time in systems where the talky parts have rules, too. D&D tends to be just "wing it’ and “DM decides”. If you’re at the noble’s ball and try to make a big speech to convince the duke to flee before your army attacks, there’s not really a lot of structure there. It can be fine to just “talk it out, man”, but that runs into the problem where my character on paper has CHA 20 but me in real life rocks a solid 10 CHA. Or the other case, where the fighter with 8 CHA has a salesguy for a player, and he punches well above his on-paper skills using his real life personality, where I’m sidelined.

Honestly, just removing all the social skills from D&D would normalize the system.

But there’s also games like Fate, that handle social conflict and sword conflict with the same rules. Stab someone? Roll fight vs whatever they defend with. Stab someone with your words? Roll Cruelty vs their Composure. In either case, if your dice come out on top enough then they don’t get to go on.

I think some peopel who want more RP would hate this, since it gamifies it. But I’d rather have it than the aforementioned “real life sales guy hogs the spotlight” problem.

Maybe was thinking of https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ ?

i am inclined to agree. the final fantasy 7 remake was surprisingly gentle about not having stupid missables. You could miss stuff, but it was recoverable without starting the whole thing over.

i had a whole argument with someone on here a while ago where they insisted i just had “fomo” because i didn’t like this sort of surprise consequences. Foreshadowing is cool. Unpredictable is, to me, unsatisfying.

I highly recommend using a guide if you’re not extremely chill about missing stuff.

I also realized partway through I really dislike pathfinder 1e, so i just started cheating, and then lost interest.

True. Kingmaker, if I recall, had a lot of weird “aha! You didn’t return to this particular forest on this particular day, so now you don’t ever get to meet this key character! No, there wasn’t any foreshadowing!”

That was kind of annoying.

Foreshadowing helps a lot.

yeah, but in those players’ defense that is the norm in video games. Most people hate timed quests!

Sometimes it’s funny when tabletop RPG players expect the game to behave like a video game.

GM: “The nearby town sent a message that a swarm of zombies is coming down the haunted mountain for them! They need help!”

PCs: “Cool. But let’s finish that mushroom side quest first, and then we gotta help our wizard buddy get his new broom tuned up.”

GM: “…okay.”

<two in-game days later>

PCs: “Ok, what do we see when we get to that town?”

GM: “Seems like everyone’s dead. Looks a swarm of zombies or something came down from the mountain and ate everyone alive or something, maybe a day or two ago.”

PCs: <confused, shocked>

I just noticed this has a range of 1 mile

High level wizard can chill in his tower and just nuke that little village down the road.

Unknown Armies will live on forever in my head. It was such a cool setting and the book had such great writing. There’s a third edition, but I only really read 2nd.

Sadly, I could never get anyone to play it. I’ve been cursed with “everyone only wants to play D&D” most of my life. I still remember trying to sell Mage to a college friend and he was like “You can just cast spells whenever? That sounds totally broken”

…yeah so if you’re the kind of player who argues and fights at the table. Maybe stick to structured games with clearly defined rules.

You ignored the “or play a game I don’t like” part. That is what this process is extremely likely to create. Go look at the blog post again. Go look at those rules.

Furthermore, the process described in the blog post is

When a rule is needed, everyone at the table quickly discusses what the gameplay should feel like and what rule(s) would support that. If a majority of players agree on the rule (voting is necessary only if there is dissent)

Arguing is built right into the process! Someone proposes a rule, and you talk about it. And you know what I don’t want to do? Discuss the merits of rules mid-session. Especially large systems like “how does magic work?” or “can you change someone’s mind?”. That sounds awful. It’s one thing to do a quick “Do you think Alex can climb a ladder with this ‘Broken Arm’ consequence?” discussion in Fate. It’s a whole other thing to invent aspects whole cloth, and then try to integrate them with whatever else people came up with this week.

Or, if I pass on discussing why (for example) dropping your sword on a low roll is going to have weird effects, then I end up playing a game with rules I don’t like. Why would I want that? What don’t you get about this? Do I need to make you a flow chart?

System doesnt know how to handle something
|
|-- Propose a new rule
    |- is the rule good?  --> yes --> oh that is surprising. carry on
         | no
         |
      discuss  <-- the void of wasted time
         |
         | - were they convinced? --> yes --> go back to 'propose a new rule'
                      |
                      |-- no --> keep discussing? -- yes --> well this sucks
                                             |-- no --> give up --------^

Ironically, the game I mentioned as an example of what I do like (Fate) is very light weight. But not so light weight that it doesn’t exist, and I have to deal with Brian trying to introduce hit locations mid session, again.

You seem to be imagining this like perfectly spherical frictionless group of players that are all super chill, on the same page about everything, and happy to just do whatever. I’m imagining what has been more typical in my experience, which is not that.

Again…this isn’t your scenario. I don’t know what to tell you. You’re conflating taking game systems and adding other mechanics to it and just goofing around and making it up as you go.

The blog post is about building a game system! Look at all the weird rules they made up! This whole blog post is about taking game systems (ie: rules people know from other games) and smushing them together! Anyone doing this process is going to start with some baseline system(s) in their head. Even if it’s just “let’s rock paper scissors for it” or “flip a coin”. It is in fact taking game game systems and adding other mechanics to it.

They certainly had fun, but as I said that sounds like my personal hell.

It’s okay to say “I need a game with explicit structure and rules”. That’s fine too, but maybe don’t argue with your players though.

Arguing is built into the process described into the blog post. Unless you’re splitting hairs and saying “argue” isn’t the same as “discuss”.